We were lucky to catch up with Ben Neumann recently and have shared our conversation below.
Ben, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love for you to start by sharing your thoughts about the pros and cons of family businesses.
The main reason I quit my job teaching martial arts and fighting to go full time with my home bakery (I renovated my garage into a licensed bakery) was so I could spend more time with my daughter. My wife and I just adopted a baby girl this year and I am now able to have her with me in the bakery on the days my wife is at work. I may not get quite as much work done on those days but it allows me to spend much more time with my daughter than if I was working a normal 9-5 job and or if I had her in daycare. As she gets older, we’ll be able to homeschool her during the day and eventually she’ll be able to help in the bakery and learn the value of hard work. I grew up on a beef farm and spent a lot of time with my dad doing chores outside. That’s where I learned my work ethic and I look back fondly on the time I spent with my dad, even if I didn’t always enjoy it at the time. I see a lot of younger people who struggle with motivating themselves to work and I don’t want my daughter to struggle with that in the same way. Family businesses allow parents to spend a lot of time with their children while teaching them their values. I think stronger bonds between parents and children make for stronger communities, and our government should have zoning and other regulations that encourage small and home businesses whenever possible. We have had to overcome quite a few hurdles at the city and county level with our home bakery that I think might have stopped other well meaning people from doing the same thing we did.
Ben, 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?
A few of my varied interests have overlapped in surprising ways over the years. When I got back from Iraq with the MN Army National Guard in 2007 I began training pretty seriously in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts (MMA)., and within two years I had my first pro MMA fight. At the time I was also starting to bake a lot so I thought it would be funny to have a fight name of Ben The Baker and walk out to the cage wearing a chef hat and carrying a whisk, a little different than other fighters with intimidating fight names. In 2017 I renovated my garage into a licensed pie bakery and started selling pies as a side business. I mainly just sold pies over the holidays while still teaching martial arts and fighting full time. In 2020 my wife and I got licensed for foster care, but since we were both working nights I chose to quit my job and retire from fighting to focus on growing the bakery and being a parent. A year later we switched to private adoption and were finally able to adopt our little girl in July of this year, so we stay pretty busy together in the bakery. I offer over 30 flavors of pie and ice cream in White Bear Lake, mostly “Take & Bake” or “Thaw & Serve” pies that people order through my website. I think it can be very difficult to find a well-made pie these days so I get a lot of repeat customers once they try one of my pies.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
I had been baking for many years as a hobby and had started to sell a bit of our garden produce to friends, but hadn’t considered selling pies. In 2016 I was talking with the captain from my Iraq deployment and he said I should try selling pies for Thanksgiving. I told him I would have to charge $25 per pie to cover the ingredients and even part of my time and that no one would pay that much for a pie. He encouraged me to just try it and see what happens, so I made a Facebook post in the morning and by the time I was able to check back that evening I had over 100 orders! I quickly cut off the orders and had my mom and aunts help me make 100 pies in the next few weeks before Thanksgiving. Shortly after that someone mentioned to me that it was technically illegal to sell pies out of my home, so I spent the next year working with my county and city to legitimately renovate my garage into a licensed bakery. For the next couple of holiday seasons I would get home from teaching martial arts around 10pm, make pies in the bakery until 4am or so, get some sleep and get back to teaching the next morning. My sales roughly doubled every year after that which gave me the confidence in my business model to quit my job in 2020 and go full time with the bakery. This year was my first year having an employee to help make all the pies, and I expect that within a year or two I will have more demand than one employee and I can meet. Since White Bear Lake only allows one employee for a home business, we’ll most likely be moving out of the home bakery into a commercial building.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
I have been baking as a hobby since I was 21, but I found out that it takes a bit of trial & error to scale up recipes to larger batches. My processes have changed a lot over the years as production has grown. At first I was rolling out all my pie crusts by hand with a rolling pin, but soon I switched to a dough sheeter that would roll out a 15-foot long sheet of dough so I could stamp out circles of pie crust to then form by hand in the pie plates. Last year I discovered a specialized hydraulic pie press that forms the pie crust directly in the pan, making an even higher quality crust because it handles the dough less and forms less gluten. I’m constantly searching for ways to improve efficiency at each step of pie production, as I think that is the only way to keep pie prices realistic and still have some revenue left over to keep or reinvest in the bakery. I track how long it takes to do every step of my recipes, so it just takes a little math to calculate how long a new machine will take to pay for itself in labor savings. This all seems pretty basic but I think often in bakeries we get busy just trying to keep up with orders and don’t set aside the time to develop new methods of production that can pay off over time.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.BenTheBaker.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_benthebaker_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BenTheBakerLLC
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenTheBakerNeumann