As of February 2*, I'm an independent businessman. I'm the owner and sole operator of Red Guitar Bread; I make a small number of handcrafted breads that I sell wholesale to independent restaurants around town.
The idea of this thread is to give me a sounding board of trusted people with a wide variety of experience, both in life and in business. And someplace to put my thoughts down and vent, without whistling into the wind like I'd be doing on a normal blog. Hopefully, you all won't mind a little navel-gazing on my part, and maybe I can be of some help/inspiration to anybody who's thinking about working for themselves. Certainly, if I can do this (which, granted, at four days in remains to be seen), anybody can.
Without getting too long winded, here's the Cliff's Notes version of my background: about 10 years ago now I was finishing one very unsuccessful first year of college and staring down the barrel of what would turn out to be another. I'm one of those people for whom college was just not right; whether it was timing or personality, I can't really say. Anyway, I somehow stumbled into culinary school and found it to be a good fit. And in the process of establishing my culinary career, I stumbled into bread baking early and never could shake it loose. Over the years it has turned out to be an ideal match for the way my mind works: it takes organization and a methodical approach, but requires a lot of critical thinking and educated creativity to carry out well. As an added bonus, my field of speciality is also looked upon as sorcery by most of my colleagues, so I occupy a lonely niche in the industry.
My first dedicated baking job was in Wisconsin, working with a wood-fired brick oven, and using a lot of wheat grown only miles from the shop, which I'd stone grind myself. All very crunchy and hippie, but it was an eye opening experience to be so closely tied to the origins of my product. I haven't been able to get that damned oven out of my mind, and I know I'll be building one for myself sometime soon.
But now I'm baking out of a regular commercial kitchen with almost no dedicated equipment. It's less than ideal from that standpoint, but it does have a couple advantages. Until this month, I was en employee of this restaurant, and I was able to use their reputation as a jumping off point to get my product out into the market. And, I'm trading bread for rent, so in terms of overhead for a startup, it's hard to complain.
The lack of dedicated equipment is a constant challenge. Bread baking is a matter of manipulating time and temperature, and I don't have the means to do much of either. (The time machine's on back order.) Improvisation is the name of the game, and every day brings a weird new set of circumstances to deal with. Most of the time I can roll with the punches, sometimes it bites me in the ass. Now that I'm working without a safety net and I rely on my product for income, I have to get to the point that I'm always on top of my game. Play time is over.
The process of officially starting up, which I'll get to in a later post (gotta go shovel the sidewalk), is a daunting one. For obvious reasons I have to do everything above-board, so I'm spending a lot of time shuffling paperwork for permits, licenses, taxes, LLCs and all that fun stuff. I can supply boring details if anyone is interested, but the stuff is a mind-numbing necessary evil to me. I've never been a paperwork guy, I've never been good at record keeping. That has to change, now, too.
I'll leave with one last item: an early version of my logo, which a very talented friend of mine is working on. One thing I'm coming to really appreciate is talented friends and family who are willing to help out. This would be so much more difficult without them.
So, if anybody's interested, I'll pick this up at a later date, with updates on how I'm starting out and what my immediate future holds.
In the mean time, check this out.
