We recently connected with Betsy and Tripp Sauls and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Betsy and Tripp thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump right into the heart of things. Outsiders often think businesses or industries have much larger profit margins than they actually do – the reason is that outsiders are often unaware of the biggest challenges to profitability in various industries – what’s the biggest challenge to profitability in your industry?
The biggest challenege when it comes to profitability in this industry is trying to explain to customer why scratch baked, homemade, made fresh products are more expensive then the cakes they can get in the grocery store deli. We care about every single item that goes out of our bakery – and we put our time, our efforts, our skills into each item that goes out. And we bake from scratch – which isn’t always easy to do. So it’s tough when you’re competing with grocery store deli products that are much cheaper than what you can offer. We do our best to give our customers a quality product that tastes amazing so they can see how the price is justified and keep coming back!
Betsy and Tripp, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Around the Table is a certified home bakery that operates out of a certified commercial kitchen we built into our garage. We are a husband and wife team and we both do this as our ful times jobs. We do custom cakes, desserts, wedding cakes, dessert bars, etc. We absolutely love the wedding industry and getting to do some really fun cakes and dessert bars. We have been doing Around the Table for about 2 years now and have poured everything we have into our business. We sacrificed so much in the beginning in order to grow our business and focus on getting sales and gaining customers. I really think our work ethic and ability to put our heads down and work is one of the best qualities that we both have. We understand the long hours, the hard days, the sacrifice because we can look to the future and see where our business can go from here! We pride ourselves with working with each and every customer to provide exactly what they are looking for – and if it is something that we aren’t able to do we always provide a list of local references that can do exactly what they are looking for.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
Baking cakes was a side job for me back in 2018 when I was a teacher. I would bake in the summer and on holidays and maybe a cake or two during the week but teaching was my full time job. During Covid, I was working from home while my husband continued to work his job. I was bored during the day so I just started baking and doing these big giveaways where people would tag essential workers that were working during the pandemic and I would pick a winner. The winner and the person that tagged got a free dozen cupcakes. And I did this for probably 3 months and my business just took off. I was doing so many orders I could barely keep up. The summer was ending and school was going to be starting back and I was honestly sad at the thought of not being able to bake like I had been. I had a meeting with my principal and she explained to me that I would have to move departments and take a different teaching role if I chose to stay at the school and I really didn’t even have to think about my decision – I told her I wasn’t coming back and I walked out of her office and decided then and there I was going to bake and see how far it would get me. Within the next 3 months we sold our house, moved in with my parents, bought a new house, renovated the garage into a commercial kitchen and then got it certified by the Department of Agriculture and went to work. The first few months were TOUGH! Lot’s of late late nights and early mornings but the work paid off. 8 months later we decided my husband could leave his job and we could do this full time together and the rest is history!
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
In the beginning I was basically working 20 hour work days. Very little sleep, very very little time off. I was work work work work, sleep for a few hours and get right back to it. My husband was working a full time job from 6am – 2pm, getting off work and helping me in the bakery until the wee hours in the morning to get up and go right back to work and then do it all over again. We were exhausted, we cried a lot, we went without seeing friends, family, without getting sunlight, without getting physical activity. We literally poured every thing we had into our business. And overnight it seemed to just take off – we couldn’t keep up with orders, we were turning orders down. And every time we had the thought of “I just can’t do this anymore” someone would send us a message telling us how much their child loved the cake, or how perfect something was for their party, and those enoucraging messages kept us going for months and months!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.aroundthetablebakery.com/
- Instagram: @aroundthetable_
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AroundTheTableBakery
Image Credits
@Dylan Cook Photography @Carol Williams Photography