'Why Not?' and Other Lessons from the Bagel Shop
On outgrowing comfortable spaces
A few notes for SLC Locals:
I’ll have a full menu of Christmas treats available for purchase on December 24th 10-2pm at The Dough Lady at 3362 S 2300 E in Millcreek. Come get cakes and pies and Dough Lady cinnamon rolls!
Books for January are now open! There’s a new menu involving funfetti, carrot cake, and black sesame. It’s a fun one.
'Why Not?' and Other Lessons from the Bagel Shop
It feels like I graduated from something.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, a year and a half after taking the first leap into a professional kitchen, I moved the Lady Flour operation out of Baby’s Bagels and into a new commissary kitchen. It’s been bittersweet - I miss my Baby’s crew and the energy of working in a busy bagel shop, but I’m able to do a lot more with significantly more space.
Baby’s Bagels was the perfect place for me to incubate this little business. It gave me the opportunity to grow at my own pace, inch by inch. And when the boys finally converted the space into a proper bagel shop, I learned so much about running a business, just by working alongside them.
It was such a gift. I got to witness Baby’s growth and observe Eric, Cyrus, and Koby’s decision making process for almost everything. (Though right now I’m imagining them reading this with raised eyebrows, as if I’ve ever just observed any of their moves without offering my unsolicited opinions.) It felt like being part of a growing business, without any of the stakes or potential consequences. I watched a business grow from a bagel stand to a bagel shop in real time: just me, making my little cakes, while these guys turned the space around me into a bagel empire.
I consider my time at Baby’s my formal education. Not only in how to grow a business, but in how to operate at a scale that wasn’t possible for me in a home kitchen. I learned how to bake 20 cake layers at once because I had the space to bake 20 cake layers at once. On the one hand, it is as simple as multiplying a recipe by 20. On the other hand, there are a lot of other questions to consider: what is my mixer’s capacity? How will I store the cakes? Will they take longer to bake at this quantity? Where will I cool them?
But despite how revolutionary it was to have access to the three humungous deck ovens and a walk-in fridge, it’s wild how quickly things begin to feel small. Give people room to expand and expand they will. In order to grow, we all needed more space.
So in August, the four of us sat down to talk about the future. The slowness of summer was starting to ease up and sales were getting back to regular numbers. My customers were finally providing me with a consistent level of orders that made me feel financially stable enough. I was grounded in routine and consistency. And then, in a meeting with the Heads of Bagels, we decided that when my lease ends in January, I’d need to find a new kitchen. We all* cried, and I remembered that when you own a business, there’s no such thing as sitting comfortably.
Despite being someone who loves change, it’s uncomfortable to hang in limbo. If you rent a home, you know the feeling - the pending dread of knowing your lease is ending mixed with the pressure of finding a new one. So the months that followed that initial conversation were stressful. And it’s not quite like moving homes, where you can easily look for listings and when you find the right one, the process moves quickly. I began asking everyone I knew in the food industry if they knew of any viable kitchens. Enter Amy, owner of The Dough Lady.
I don’t remember exactly when I met Amy, but since meeting her a few years ago, she’s someone I always turn to for bakery advice. She’s had a path similar to mine, but is a few steps ahead: she started a cinnamon roll business out of her home, which has since grown to be a beloved community staple. I asked Amy for advice when I was ready to buy a commercial mixer. When I took on my first wholesale customer, she gave me insight on how I should price my product. So naturally, when I began to look for a new kitchen, I reached out and asked if she had any leads.
Call it fate or luck or simply the magic of excellent timing, but when I reached out, Amy had just begun looking at a new space for her business. She was making plans to move out of the commissary kitchen she was in and open her own storefront. There would be lots of details to work out, but the general idea was - if we could make the timing work, I could move into her former kitchen space.
You’d be wise to notice the lesson here: surround yourself with people smarter than you. You don’t even need to ask them to actively teach you anything. Simply being in their presence will help their expertise rub off on you.
There were many times in the Baby’s Bagels kitchen where I’d turn to Cyrus Bagels (that is how his contact information will remain saved in my phone for eternity) to help me solve a baking problem. Usually it went something like: “I can’t make that many pie crusts by hand” or “That won’t work.” Every single time, he would reply “Why not?” At first I found this annoying, because he would say it so casually, like it was a game to taunt me into thinking bigger. But then I’d really sit with his simple question and start down the path of “Well, I guess I could try…”
Similarly, Eric Bagels would respond to a challenge with “Why don’t we sit down and problem-solve it?” If an issue persisted, we just hadn’t found the solution yet. Usually, it was a challenge of limited space. Koby Bagels and I were constantly dreaming up our ideal restaurant or bakery concepts while he did dishes and I decorated cakes. I often found myself envious that the three of them had each other to work with. Once you get to know them, you can understand how they’ve grown something so successful so quickly.
Amy is the same way - I’ve never met anyone with that kind of sheer willpower to grow. She envisions something and then just does it. Her wheels are constantly turning. During the window of time that we were planning our simultaneous moves (her into the new space, me into her old one), there were hurdles like inspections and the general slowness of moving, but I never once believed that she’d have to push her timeline. In the short months that she’d been preparing for the grand opening of her new bakery, I have many all-caps texts from her along the lines of “WE’RE DOING IT HAHAHAHA THIS IS CRAZY.” This woman makes things happen. It’s impossible to feel limited when standing next to her.
These are mindsets that take practice. It’s like building muscle memory in your brain - to look at a challenge not as a blockade but as something you can work through. I believe the term we’re looking for here is growing pains - the state of discomfort when you’re too big for the space you’re currently occupying, but don’t feel ready for the next thing yet. It’s the feeling of being forced to the next stage when the previous one had just started to feel so cozy. But like any challenge, the other side is there, you just have to take the steps. And now that I’m sitting on the other side of this move, preparing to make your Christmas cakes, I can see that the next step always feels scary until you’re just doing it.
*This is a lie. I’m the only one that cried.