There's a line Zakiya Ellick says almost in passing, the kind of line that could get lost in a longer answer if you weren't listening for it: eventually, somebody still needs breakfast. When you have the pressure of being the breadwinner of your family there is only but a few hours to wallow in your self pity. Shed your tears, scream as loud as you need, work out, do whatever makes you feel like you've reached a moment of pure peace to regulate your mind and then get back to the grind. The hustle of being a solo mother that bears the weight of everything lives in a duality of being your pride and joy and a fear that fuels your success.
It all began on a Saturday morning and an urgency to produce a dessert for a vending booth at the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles, California. Since 7 years old Zakiyah has been perfecting her cookie dough recipe and because it was deemed as an old faithful in her household she didn’t give it a second thought to package it for the festival. It was an absolute smash. “The response was immediate. People weren’t just tasting it—they wanted to know where they could buy it, if I had more flavors, and where I’d be next, ” she says.
What actually built The Cookie Dip Company wasn't the one good day at Playboy Jazz. It was every pop-up after it, each one an unpaid focus group, each one teaching her a little more about who her customer was and what she was actually selling. Because somewhere in that stretch, she noticed something the applause hadn't told her outright: "I realized I wasn't just selling Cookie Dip," she says. "I was creating moments." Everything that came after — Sip & Dip (pop up event), her luxury wine and cookie dip pairing experience; a brand built as much on how something feels to open as on how it tastes — is just that sentence, worked out in practice. The word “luxury” is thrown around very loosely in this day and age but the Cookie Dip is actually proof of concept. "Luxury isn't just about charging more," she says now. "Luxury is about making someone feel like they experienced something special."
It would be easy to read that instinct as pure creative intuition, but Zakiya's résumé tells a more disciplined story. Before Cookie Dip, Zakiya dabbled in a few professional arenas. There was accounting, human resources, retail buying, and catering. On paper it looks like restlessness. In practice, she says, it was assembly — each job handing her a piece of the founder she'd eventually need to become. "Accounting probably saves me the most," she admits, and she doesn't mean it as a flourish. She means it as the plain, unglamorous truth of keeping a self-funded company alive. "Entrepreneurship is exciting until it's time to look at your profit and loss statement. Then reality shows up." Retail taught her that people shop with their eyes first. HR taught her to lead a room, not just manage one. Even the use of a photography skill she learned in high school as an elective resurfaced years later in her product packaging. If there's one thing corporate life taught her that she's had to consciously unlearn, though, it's the reflex to wait. "Corporate America teaches you to wait for approval," she says. "Entrepreneurship teaches you to trust yourself and keep moving." That ain’t nothing but a word!
That trust gets tested daily, because Zakiya's life doesn't have the clean partitions most business advice assumes exist. She homeschools her son, and there is no border between mothering and building — just one long day, cut into fragments that don't respect each other's edges. "One minute I'm teaching math. The next minute I'm answering customer emails and then I'm making another Cookie Dip recipe. Then I'm packaging orders. Then I'm planning an event. Then I'm helping with school assignments. It's all blended together," she says. Can a balance really co-exist? That is a question most are trying to answer and grasp as they mature the never ending growth of motherhood and providing financially for the household. "I don't think balance exists," she says. "I think priorities exist. My son is always my first priority. Everything else gets built around that." It's a small distinction with enormous consequences, and it's the reason none of what follows in her story reads as sacrifice, exactly. It reads as arithmetic — a woman deciding, over and over, what the math has to protect.
The math gets harder before it gets easier. There's a specific exhaustion that comes from being financially stretched and mentally maxed out all the while being the only adult in the house, and Zakiya doesn't dress that exhaustion up as an inspirational montage. It's simply the terrain. What gets her upright the next morning isn't grit in the abstract, it's specificity. A reason with a face attached to it. "I know why I am building," she says. "I am trying to create stability, opportunity, and a legacy that gives him choices. Even on the hardest days, that purpose is bigger than my exhaustion." And underneath that purpose runs a quieter, unresolved math she's honest about never fully solving: every dollar reinvested in the company is a dollar that could have gone somewhere else, toward him. The dilemma of betting on yourself to be able to not only provide a life for you and your family but to actually live life to its fullest helps reframe the mind of many entrepreneurs and Zakiya understands the risk, "I was building something for him. I'm not building a side hustle. I'm building a legacy."
That reframe is why her son isn't shielded from the business; he's being groomed into it by proximity. Shown through her action that another way of attaining and living their lifestyle is possible and doing by your own merit makes it worth it. Zakiya has immersed her son in pop-ups, production days, brainstorms, and the unglamorous meetings that never make it onto Instagram. "I want him to learn by doing," she says: work ethic, ownership, resilience, problem-solving, taught the only way those things are ever really taught, which is by proximity. He's neurodivergent, and that fact sits closer to the center of her second venture than almost anything else she says in conversation. "I want him to know he isn't limited," she says. "I want him to know he's capable." It's worth noting that even her blind spots become curriculum in a house with no one else to model them differently. She's candid, almost self-deprecating, about the one lesson she's still learning herself. "I struggle with asking for help," she admits. "I'm hyper-independent, and I don't take disappointment well... I joke that my toxic trait is saying, 'It's okay, I'll do it,' when I'm already carrying fifteen things." What she's coming to understand — slowly, in real time, in front of her son — is that independence and isolation only look identical from a distance. Asking for help doesn't diminish oneself, It's what finally lets her focus on the parts of the business only she can do.
Eventually, her body issued a memo her calendar had been ignoring for years. "My body eventually made a decision that my schedule refused to make," she says. Homeschooling didn't stop. The bills didn't stop. The business didn't stop. So the slowdown, when it finally came, couldn't be about doing less — it had to be about doing differently: documenting processes, automating what could be automated, quietly retiring the belief that exhaustion is proof of momentum. "Health forced me to stop glorifying hustle," she says. "That's the difference between surviving and scaling." It's a sentence that could only be earned, not borrowed — and it's the hinge on which the rest of her story turns, because it's at this moment she stopped building a business that needed her and started building one that could survive without her constant presence in every corner of it.
That shift is also what made room for a second organization. By most instincts, the two shouldn't coexist peacefully. "The Cookie Dip Company runs on exclusivity — limited batches, elevated pricing, an experience you have to seek out rather than stumble into." Dipping Into Change, the nonprofit growing up alongside it, trades in the opposite: access, information, doors propped open rather than guarded. In Zakiya's telling, they share a single pulse, and the reason is less about strategy than about who's setting the tone in both rooms. "There's no workplace drama in either organization because I'm the leader. I set the tone. I am love. And the tone is love, " she says.
The two entities remain financially and structurally separate, a choice she made deliberately, in the name of accountability. "The Cookie Dip Company demonstrates what's possible through entrepreneurship," she says. "Dipping Into Change helps more people discover what's possible for themselves." The nonprofit's origin, in fact, is its own small grievance, aged into purpose: the memory of trying to start her business and finding the real information locked behind consultants. Some of whom, she notes, were only reselling what a free video online already said for nothing. "People don't always need motivation," she says. "Sometimes they need bullet points. Step one. Step two. Step three." She'd already been doing this work for years, unofficially and unpaid — walking friends, relatives, and strangers through licensing and pricing and the hundred invisible decisions nobody warns you about. Dipping Into Change doesn't start something new, in other words. It formalizes something she never stopped doing.
Which is why, when she's asked what she'd tell a woman standing exactly where she once stood — no capital, no partner, an idea, and a kid asleep down the hall — she skips the mindset shift and goes straight to the instruction. "Sell one thing," she says. "Stay focused on that one thing until you've mastered it before chasing five other ideas... Your customer doesn't care about any of that. Solve a problem. Create something valuable. Sell it. Then do it again." Underneath that is a second, quieter instruction, the one she seems to consider the real one: "Remember that you are your brand. People buy into you before they buy your product." Entrepreneurship, in her telling, doesn't always start from inspiration. Sometimes it starts from survival — and if that's the starting line, the first job isn't a logo. It's getting to the money. The CEO mindset can wait. It has to wait, until there's enough stability underneath it to build on.
Zakiya has scaled her business by needing to measure success in numbers now, not feelings — a discipline that traces, unmistakably, back to the accounting desk. For The Cookie Dip Company, the marker is a million dollars in annual revenue, chased not for its own sake but for what it unlocks: jobs, national reach, manufacturing capacity, systems sturdy enough not to require her hands in every corner at once. For Dipping Into Change, the metric is different — lives changed, businesses launched, families who leave more capable than they arrived.
She once worried the business would pull her away from her son and it has proven to do the opposite. He's watched all of it from the inside — the pop-ups, the late nights, the brainstorms that ran long — and he's never once had to wonder where he stands. "He's my why," she says. "Always has been. Always will be." Asked for a closing line, she doesn't have to reach for one. It's already there, waiting, like she's said it to herself before: "The Cookie Dip Company gave me a seat at the table. Dipping Into Change is how I plan to pull up more chairs."
Which brings the story back to that morning line — somebody still needs breakfast — and what it actually means, once you've heard the rest of it. It isn't a resignation. It's the quietest kind of resolve there is: the decision, made every single day, to keep a promise to your baby asleep in the next room. And then, because one promise apparently wasn't enough, to make the same one to everybody else's kids, too.
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For more information on The Cookie Dip, see below:
The Cookie Dip Company
Website: thecookiedipcompany.com
Email: cookiedip@thecookiedipcompany.
Instagram: @_thecookiedipcompany