How Did I Get Here? Part 3

So the bakery opens to much fanfare!

Just kidding. We had a great opening day and then reality set in. I owned a bakery. People were going to expect me to give them perfect baked goods. I had to tell employees what to do too. I had to make sure employees were happy and showed up on time. I had to hire people, and fire people, and deal with angry customers, and pay taxes, and make bank deposits, and be a baker, a janitor, a decorator, a mentor, a hated boss, a beloved boss, a friend, and 1000 other things. It was a lot. But I dove right in.

Frankly, mistakes were made. Duh.

Everyone makes mistakes all the time and business owners make even more. We make more because we just increased our decision making by 100 times what it was when we were employees for someone else. Now we have to make every decision. What do I say if an employee is late every day? When do I hire a new person? How do I fire someone? How do I handle a disgruntled customer? What should I spend on advertising? When should optimal store hours be? What if I can't get an ingredient this week? The list is basically infinity.

So the years went by, and I figured it out. Mostly. Some hirings were great, some were not. Some firings were smooth and mutual, some were not. Ingredients were found. Taxes were paid. Overhead was killer, but I still loved the process. I loved baking. I didn't love decorating (thanks to all my decorators over the years- I would rather scrub toilets). Weddings were insanely stressful, and my car has taken a beating with all of those off-road deliveries (the woods and old barns were big venues during this time). Wholesale was routine and boring, but it increased our customer base and gave the bakery a steadier income.

For the most part, I was having a great time. Most of the interactions at bakeries are positive. People get excited to eat cookies, and cakes, and cinnamon rolls. Because it was a gluten free bakery, they also asked tons of questions to me and to my front staff. Some questions were a little inappropriate like, “What happens to you when you eat gluten?” Um, let’s maybe not talk about that in front of the food and the people eating. But for the most part, people loved to come in to a bakery and leave with a treat. At the end of the day, that makes for a fun day at your job.

Things were chugging along, and my brother noticed. My older brother, who I always admired. He thought I was doing a great job and he wanted to open another bakery as a licensed shop. Now, a parent saying you’re doing a great job feels wonderful, but a sibling saying that feels even better. Your siblings are much more honest friends who don’t try and sugarcoat their interactions. So it was awesome to hear this from my older brother who had started his own businesses.

But he lived near Boston, MA, so we weren't opening a second shop close to me, and that proved to be the fatal blow during the “unprecedented times” we were about to experience.

This whole process started in 2017, six years after I started the retail bakery. The second location, the planning, the research, the ALL OF IT….took up the next two years of my life. I had to hire more people for the bakery. But I did the job of four, because I started it and I loved it, and wanted it to succeed. I worked mostly 12 hours a day, six days a week. Very few employees feel the same way about YOUR business, so they don't always do the work of four. Your best employee does the work of two people and your worst employee pretends to work all day until everyone figures out they are just dead weight. I had to hire so many people to cover me that the budget was stretched too thin to pay my salary. So I was working for free for months, again. That's always fun and stressful.

But in November 2019, two years after the plans started, the second location opened. I had been in Boston for an entire month, trusting my staff back home to run the Louisville location. It was so exciting and so stressful. And almost so stressful that I couldn't enjoy it. I worked every single day for a month while I was there and they were really starting to get in to their groove when I flew back home to help out at the Louisville shop.

As you know, 2020 was no one’s year, and we were not the exception. The pandemic took its hold on the world less than five months after the second location opened and everything fell apart…

Being myself at the Taste of Derby event, 2019.

The sign was up and the opening date set. June 15, 2011