HATTIE: (Voiceover) This is not a fine dinner drink or an expensive bottle of perfume. This is Maine Gold, one of Maine's most delicious exports, pure maple syrup made by Deborah Meehan and Perry Gates.

PERRY GATES (Maine Gold): Maine Gold is a commodity gift business. (Voiceover) The commodity is first prize-winning, blue-ribbon maple syrup from the state of Maine sold around the world as gifts.

DEBORAH MEEHAN (Maine Gold): There's an annual contest put on by the state's Department of Agriculture, and it rates the quality of maple syrup: taste, density, color. And consistently, for about five years running, we won the state's first prize.

(Voiceover) And that's actually when we decided, I think we need to do something and have a business here.

PERRY: We know where all the sweet trees are. We've been doing this for 30 years. We know where the highest sugar content is since we measure it each year in the sap, and that's the sap that we harvest, and those are the samples that we sent to the state department show.

(Voiceover) As a consequence of that show, and we were packaging in tin cans at the time, then we realized that we had to do something else to really make it a product. You couldn't just put high-quality syrup in a tin can because you can't see it. That's why we developed the products that we have now and created the name, Maine Gold.

DEBORAH: (Voiceover) You know, we've elevated maple syrup, I think, to a gift product. It's not just syrup in bottles or syrup in cans. And we have a wonderful gift service that also accompanies our product.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) With smart marketing, this husband and wife turn their passion for sugar making into profits.

DEBORAH: (Voiceover) We do direct marketing. We do have a brochure, so we have a mailing list of about 13,000 right now. We've never bought a name. So it's all people who've either purchased from us or received gifts. We convert the gift recipients into buyers, and it's kind of a ripple effect, an exponential effect of growing.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) I asked Deborah and Perry why they think so many small companies don't grow.

DEBORAH: I think they're very product-focused and they forget that a business is all about relationships, and I think what we've really worked on in our business is developing the relationship between the customer and our staff or between the customer and the person who's receiving their gift, and making sure that they feel great about what they're giving and the person who's receiving it feels great. And we get copies of thank you notes that gift recipients send to the buyer, and they send us to say, `Look how great I feel about having given this gift.'

PERRY: It's the connectedness, really. It's maintaining a sense, a feeling of family, of community, of connectedness, and that's also part of Maine. I think that's part of Maine's goal, if you will, is the connectedness that we relate to and maintain with people outside our state, and that's what brings people into the state and gets us outside the state.