To hear actress and mom, Mary Beth Evans, talk about her commercial mail order pie business, success can be traced to two key and not-so-secret ingredients:  trial and error.

In 2005, Evans launched her mail order business to rave reviews in her local area.  For the first time this holiday season, over 12,000 of her mini pies are available through Williams Sonoma.

Evans, best known for her long-running role as Kayla Brady on the soap opera, Days of Our Lives, decided to launch a business after some coaxing from her husband that her pies, already popular among family and friends, were good enough to sell.  Evans recalls saying to her husband "But what if someone actually ORDERS one?"  Evans' husband responded "Well, that would be a good problem to have."

Evans' individually hand-made pies are sold frozen so that, according to Evans, you can still get that fresh-from-the-oven smell in your home without baking from scratch.  A great idea, but  Evans reports that at times she has had problems with the dry ice in the shipments and has had to experiment to get it right.  Since first starting out, she has had to replace pies at a loss for reasons ranging from shipping problems to just not following baking instructions properly!

The launch of Evans' business has not been without stops and starts.  One year, while her family was in New York - where they spend most Thanksgivings - Evans drove to the QVC studios in Pennsylvania and sold her pies on-air. She sold about 3,000 in less than 10 minutes. But her next time on QVC she "only" sold a few hundred and so ended her short lived QVC run.

After her QVC appearances, Evans appeared on the "Today Show" and sold several hundred pies as a result. But she had priced them wrong (her shipping company no longer offered her the discount she was counting on) and so she lost thousands on those "Today Show" sales.

Following the "Today Show", a bakery that Evans had been using for years started to become less reliable, and failed to deliver some orders.  Her business then went on hiatus for a few months until she secured the Williams Sonoma deal.  And what a deal it was.  They asked for 12,000 apple and pumpkin pies.

Yet, even the deal with Williams Sonoma has not gone entirely smoothly.  The baker that Evans had secured to make the requested 12,000 pies backed out at the last minute, and the new baker who stepped in at the 11th hour agreed to bake the pies, although he could not make the "leaf" cut-outs that decorate the mini pies.  So Evans agreed to make the leaves herself. All 12,000 of them. (She used the new Williams Sonoma piecrust cutters, and says they are still going after over 12,000 uses!)

In the early years of the launch of her business, Evans was still working her "day job" as Kayla Brady on Days of Our Lives.  Says Evans, "I'm at my best when things are rev'ed up.  I thrive on chaos."  "Actually," she laughed, "that's why I had three kids.  I just like things to be busy and crazy."

(Fans of Evans' TV roles will be relieved to know she is certainly not giving up acting. Our interview was conducted on her way home from an audition, and in fact, Evans recently taped episodes for two award-winning series: Nip/Tuck and Monk.)

In addition to running her successful pie company, Evans has been writing and blogging for Hybrid Mom, a magazine and on-line resource for modern moms, founded by New York working mom, Stacey Smith. 

Evans has blogged about family vacations, motherhood and even blogged honestly about the ups and downs of her entrepreneurial endeavor.  Evans does not make the road sound easy, but she does make it sound possible.  In that way, she provides inspiration and comfort to momtrepreneurs everywhere.

As for the mini pies, order from Williams Sonoma by 5 pm Sunday (PST), November 22 to receive them in time for Thanksgiving.