We recently connected with Alison Friedman and have shared our conversation below.
Alison, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?
Let’s start with the idea that not everyone defines success the same way. My Baby Boomer parents define success by wealth, career, and a pension. For a long time, that was my definition as well. I was hyper focused on growing my corporate career as a chef and climbing the ladder faster than anyone else around me. Part of my ambition was fueled by my husbands seemingly relaxed approach to the corporate grind. He was quite quitting before it was even a meme. As long as he could fish on weekends and have groceries in the fridge he was a success. After being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and pushing even harder to climb the ladder with such gusto I burned out. Then my point of view shifted more towards my husbands definition of success. If one day I could loose total control of my body I was going to make the days I have count doing the things I love. The ability to live the life I wanted outside of work as well as within the work place. I found myself creating a business that existed on my terms and crossed my fingers it would be accepted in a way that would allow to to make just enough profit to live the life i wanted outside of work. It definitely has and its amazing.
I have one employee and our business model is shaped around the idea that if anything happens to me (“if I go down”), she could keep everything afloat. Five years in we have shifted our goals back to the original plan. A business that would allow both of us to have a paycheck, create a product that brings us joy, and live a full life outside of work.
During the pandemic (two years) I wasn’t able to make a paycheck AT ALL, but success shifted to being able to keep my one employee employed. We did it without financial assistance but rather the stability provided by my husband and family. It sounds a little hippy dippy and maybe it is. But part of my definition of success is always knowing everyone is on board with the trajectory of the shop. We are at all times proud of our product, how we interact with people and that everyone gets to know us as people.
Alls to say, success is and should always be defined fluidly. My dads advice is always “Price is so the tears are worth it” and that has been our motto on hard days. Even thought it’s not a great day we are doing the things we need to keep the machine running. I don’t always want to be making 300 decorated cookies, but its pretty exciting that the client agreed with the monetary value I placed on our product and work.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I have a definition I follow at all time so i’ll put it first.
Clean ingredients. Sustainable. Good Food.
I have always wanted to be a chef. I went to culinary school right out of high school, a my first job out of school was as a Pastry Chef at a bakery, a job that typically takes years to climb too. I have always been career driven, success driven, and insanely aware that a 5 foot woman with a baby face would never be taken seriously.
To back track a bit, I barely passed high school, had no idea I had dyslexia, and spent much of my younger years in at doctors for an undiagnosed auto immune disease. I was that sickly child you knew in school who was never actually in school.
But culinary school was something different. it was a place I could express myself, excel above my peers, and no one else knew how to spell either because most chefs are illiterate and care more about their knife skills then grammar.
At culinary school I learned I could determine my own trajectory and I could decide to be the best at everything I did.
Some time after taking my first management job I decided to go back to school for a masters in the psychology of management. I love learning and using knowledge about what makes people happy to better manage or even just engage others. Ironically I sought out this degree to fit better in with the corporate food world and learned they didn’t want anything to do with the “person aspect” of being a manager or employee.
Eventually I found a restaurant group that wanted to amplify my point of view as a pastry chef, and offered to let me “take over and grow” their existing bakery. I was able to ignite my dream with corporate funding. It was a pivotal moment to have heavy hitters saying my vision was valid and would bring value to their business. We can all assume where this went, after a year of four men digging their heels into the fear of change I burned out trying to make them happy and left.
Thus the birth of Liberty Baking Co. Liberty is the same vision but starting on pennies and faith in our product. It’s a dream I never knew I wanted.
But here is the best part. Before taking the restaurant group job I met Kim. I had just been laid off from my previous job for bankruptcy reasons. I like people to know it was NOT because of me, and ran into a young woman on the street of my neighborhood asking if I was Chef Friedman. I told her I wasn’t a chef anymore and cried my eyes out. After that we realized we had vaguely met before in similar pastry circles in the DMV area. Kim was also a pastry chef and lived four houses down from me. We quickly became friends despite our 10 year age difference and when I took the restaurant group job I asked her to join me as my sous chef. We think nothing alike but have the same moral compass, and ideas about good food being just that and not needing to be something fussy. When I left the job to start Liberty I asked her to take a leap and join me on a potentially unsuccessful and definitely low income journey. The girl I met on the street while crying less than to years earlier didn’t even hesitate.
Together we crafted a wedding cake brand that values clean ingredients, southern roots and a fuss less approach to design. Food should be food and not the preservatives or artificial ingredients overwhelmingly used in the pastry bakery world. We crafted our menu with nostalgia in mind for flavor profiles and high fat low sweetness in the collectiveness of our ingredients so that all the natural flavors we used like fresh squeezed lemons and vanilla bean could be fully enjoyed. Nothing is so sugary sweet it hurts your teeth but rather everything tastes like being a kid in 1980. Not a common base line for a wedding cake business especially in the D.C. metro area.. We crossed our finger that we would be accepted in the wedding community and launched. With overwhelming acceptance we took off and doubled our revenue each year until covid hit. Our people existed and we were able to push back on the outlandish standards created by shows like Cake Boss and Charm City Cakes.
We are proud of the editorial style design we are able to create from our minimalist/clean line aesthetic and are 90% of the time able to do it with all natural elements like fresh or pressed flowers, wafer paper and rice paper.
As time and a pandemic have gone on we have branched out to special occasion cake and desserts. All keeping in line with out clean ingredient motto and southern flair. It can be difficult to educate a population fueled by instagram and unrealistic cake shows to just keep it simple and let the cake be cake but we work hard at every day and are grateful to have a community of clients that agree.
Now we have just opened our first brick and mortar coop that we share with two other businesses. This is our first store front after working in a caterers kitchen. We are excited for a higher level of visibility and the opportunity to share more of what it means to eat “good for you dessert”.
We still operate in a way that ensures we can keep afloat if I get sick and luckily that model has only been tested twice in Liberty’s life time. But the systems working is part of our identity and success story and it’s important that people know we work as a team to make both our dreams happen. It’s still insane to me that Kim and I are still neighbors, friends, and business partners all because she found me on the curb crying over a job and instantly said yes to building a risky dream.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
Asking for help is a weakness.
The food community is build on self resilience and making yourself so important an operation cant exist without you.
This is of course a ruse.
Great leadership is built on training people so well they become better than you and are appreciative of your desire to help them grow. I needed to operate a business that could exist without me. Therefore I needed my employee to be a complete equal to me. Neither of us are greater than the sum of us together. Delegating and asking for help are the actions of a self assured person who posses so much self awareness they can seek out guidance or assistance before it is an emergency.
An example. I know I am a chef, an artist, and a managerial figure that is at times considered illiterate. I am also aware I have no technology skills and need a fully functioning e-commerce platform with words and grammar that are correct. It was difficult for me but I fully delegated the e-commerce and website to a person I vetted and know could be my voice in a place I would not excel. This sounds common sense, but it is not a common thought process for someone in the chef community to allow someone to take over without total micromanagement.
Similarly, In the kitchen we are at a place where Kim is now able to recreate my designs better than I can. Where as in the past I would keep recipes or skills to myself to ensure my value, I now relish in the idea that she can take over, and do better, at any time!
Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?
Pride will always get in the way of success.
I had considered not sharing this because it felt more messy and less inspirational and then I realized the point is to learn.
When covid hit and grants and loans were being handed out like candy I dug my heels into the idea that we didn’t need help and we could do things on our own. I had the idea that help was a sign of weakness and we were too proud and too capable. Months into my family floating us and my husband essentially being the only income we were crashing hard. Everyone around us was applying for grants getting their employees on PPP or unemployment and I began to fight even harder to prove we didn’t need outside help and that we were going to make it work. We began shipping dessert bar boxes all over the US to help keep us afloat. which in the beginning kept us alive and accomplished keeping us breaking even with a paycheck to Kim. It was a move that we would later figure out what was hastily priced incorrectly and would prevent us from receiving PPP later right when we burnt out. Later in the pandemic grants and financial aid didn’t care about PROFIT they only looked at revenue and our revenue was matching the year before (our third real year in business ever becasue everyone knows the first year doesn’t actually count) with zero profit. Any intelligent business owner know just because money is coming in does not mean money is being made and we were making NONE.
Because of this decision to be proud my parents began offering to buy my families groceries, helping to pay bills, and even assist in floating the business to pay Kims wages. It was humiliating. We later discovered huge multi million dollar companies we taking millions in aid and never even touching it. Resourceful businesses were putting their employees on unemployment and allowing them to work part time. I just sat back and cried about so many missteps that were fueled by ignorance and pride.
A year later from being denied from tens of aid applications we are still recovering, I still owe my family thousands. And because we decided to keep pushing forward we haven’t taken time to sit back and recoup our loses in place of growth.
Just now as I am writing this we are finally done building our new shop and able to just spend a couple years financially recovering. It is a double edged sward to have so many people believe in you and offer to help you while you actively disappoint them. But I will not let this define me or my business. I learned a lesson and I am taking it with me as we move forward.
Contact Info:
- Website: libertybaking.com
- Instagram: @libertybakingco
- Facebook: Liberty Baking Co.
- Twitter: @libertybakingco