Possible start to a bakery?

[Joyius]

I was wondering if I could get some advice on possibly starting a bakery. I'd start small and from home, and since I live on a base I'd have to get a drivers license and a car to deliver the baked goods. I was considering calling it a Gay Pride Baked goods bakery, with everything rainbow themed. I was just wondering about any advice you can give me to start this up. I'll have to talk to my mother about all of it. But I believe I can do it.

[AccountingDrone]

Base as in military base? US military base? CONUS or otherwise?

Firstly, many bases have problems with people running businesses out of housing units - and that is just something like Avon or Tupperware. Running a bakery is a whole 'nother can of worms - that tends to require a health and safety inspection with much more stringent rules than just turning out a batch of muffins or brownies for a bake sale. You need to first check with the housing office. But I can pretty much say with impunity that it will not be allowed.

[Joyius]

Well I looked into the whole Bakery thing a bit more, and am now considering a shop not on base of course.

[houdini]

Random thoughts on a physical shop: what's your location? How many people (and be honest with yourself) would want to buy what you're selling? Are there any other similar shops in the same location? If not, why not? If yes, how much competition would they be to you? What are the rent rates etc like in your chosen area? What licenses and health&safety certificates would you need? What would your start-up costs be? Would you be able (physically, mentally, financially) be able to take on the work of running a shop full- or part-time? How are you planning to advertise?

Throwing an idea out: how about posting baked goods? If you're thinking of gay-pride-themed items (awesome idea, btw!) then I wonder if your customer base would be more wide-spread than one town. Could you set up an internet shop with a variety of options, and baked to order then sent by next-day mail? That could help with the amount and type of space you'd need to rent - you would only need a kitchen rather than a full shop. It would also allow you to start small, and then you could potentially grow later on if the internet business was successful.

It sounds an amazing idea though, and kudos to you for trying to follow your dreams!

[Aislin]

See if you library has any business start up workshops. I am going to one at my library right now. We are a sister class to one on base and they have some great grants for military folks wanting to start small businesses. They are doing a 6 part series and I have learned so much.

[sms001]

As always, my total endorsement for the SBA.

I realize you are probably not going to be exclusionary, and I say to hell with people who wouldn't buy from a gay oriented bake shop (or any shop) for that reason, but... there may be a good percentage of potential customers who won't consider you because they will think you ARE gay only. Have you thought of ways to overcome that perception?

[CoffeeMonkey]

Look into cottage food laws for your state. Where I am (Michigan) a household can earn up to 15k per year selling baked goods and certain other foodstuffs produced in a home kitchen, as long as certain rules are followed. It eliminates what is a major obstacle in keeping small business people from getting going: the cost of buying or renting commercial kitchen space.

Consider your product, and your customer base. I like what someone said about online stuff (though beware, if you're going the home baked route, our cottage food laws say no internet sales,) because you might find yourself with the bulk of your business in connection with Pride events, and you're not gonna find one of those locally every day.

How are you going to appeal to a wider audience? I have to say, that as much as I heart me some gay pride, I have never in my life said "damn! if ONLY there were a gay pride themed bakery nearby for my confectionary needs!" If I really needed rainbow frosted cookies, I could get them cheaply at a grocery store. If I want fine pastries, I do not want rainbow food colored things. (I would make them myself, as I am a pastry student and can do so, but that's neither here nor there.) So you have to decide if you're going to sell simple, cutesy stuff, or if you want to sell the sort of product that's going to get you $30-50 for a 9" cake. If you're going cheap, you have to make it up in volume. You have to get enough people in the door to buy it all, and you have to account for the (infuriating) portion of the population who won't have anything to do with anything that says "Gay," and the not-malicious-but-ignorant portion of the population who will think "It's a gay bakery and I'm not gay, so there's nothing for me in there cuz they only make stuff for gay things."

the one thing I would definitely suggest to you or anyone thinking of starting a food based business is getting yourself Servsafe certified (servsafe.com.) It will teach you about food safety and sanitation, and give you a certification that's good for five years and looks good on any food service person's resume. It also means that seeing unsafe practices when eating out will make you crazy, but we all have to make sacrifices for our dreams.

[Raveni]

How good at you with administrative stuff? Accounting, paperwork, permits, licensing, etc? Starting your own business requires a good deal of that, and continuing RUNNING your own business requires a lot more! If you can quickly take care of that stuff, you'll have plenty of time left over to do what you want to be doing - baking and selling!

[42_42_42]

As someone who loves to bake and is quite good at it I seriously thought about it myself. I decided against it for many reasons, but chief among them is that it takes a lot of money to get started up and most food businesses fail within 1 year. Bakeries are that much harder because you're competing with grocery stores, Walmart, and people selling out of their homes (legally or illegally). On top of that, most people just aren't willing to pay the prices that you have to charge in order to be a viable business.

Do some serious research. Check and see if there are any other non-grocery store bakeries in the area. If there are any, your area is probably already market saturated.