We were lucky to catch up with Tessa Arias recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Tessa, thanks for joining us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.

At Handle the Heat we fully believe that baking is a science. For this reason, we’ve created a rigorous recipe development process unlike most other independent recipe publishers, bloggers, or influencers. Each of our recipes is not only tested multiple times before publishing. Each is tested by different people in different kitchens across the country. Our top priority is to create trusted recipes that actually work for anyone who follows the directions. We go to great lengths to ensure that our recipes work AND that our recipes are easy to follow.

We’ve had to greatly reduce the volume of recipes we publish in order to honor our increasingly scrupulous standards. This has been challenging both internally as a team to manage the moving parts especially in such a fast paced trend-drive media landscape.

Despite those challenges, we’ve seen that our community spends more time on our site than on other baking blogs. We have a strong conversion rate on cookbook and other merchandise sales. This has created a loyal community of bakers that we hope will continue to grow as we pursue exciting new projects.

Tessa, 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?

My name is Tessa Arias and I’m the founder of Handletheheat.com, a baking resource with over 1,000 published recipes, articles, and videos.

I founded Handle the Heat in 2009 when I was just 18 years old. Armed with a neon blue point-and-shoot camera and a $10 domain name, I began documenting my kitchen adventures as a hobby and creative outlet. Slowly the website grew until I decided to pursue culinary school and was given the opportunity to write my first cookbook.

In 2013 after completing both a bachelor’s degree and culinary school degree, I decided to pursue the website as a full time business. I haven’t looked back since!

We’ve grown from a website into a brand and amassed hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of monthly pageviews. The team grew from just me in my kitchen to three full time employees and half a dozen contractors.

The best part of our business is that we get to share the love and joy of baking with so many people. Our recipes are a part of countless birthdays, holidays, and special occasions across the world. We believe that baking is a science, an act of self care, and an expression of love.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I honestly can’t count how many times I’ve had to pivot in business and in life. As a recovering perfectionist this was not a skill that came easily. I had a consistent desire to create a perfect master plan to simply follow it to the land of goals achieved and dreams accomplished. It’s never worked out that way.

Business has been an intense crucible of personal development. Each step of the way I’m not only faced with my own limitations and opportunities for growth, but with constant decisions to make. Stay the course or adapt to the changing environment? Stay the course or adapt to the realization that what I thought I wanted isn’t actually what I want. Once I began to view it all as a grand experiment where failure doesn’t actually exist, I slowly became able to pivot more and more easily.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

My biggest blind spot and greatest opportunity for growth has been hiring and leading a team. I had no previous experience or education in this role. However, I knew investing in the right team members would be essential to growing a healthy and enjoyable business. I read the book Run Like Clockwork then invested in their online training program to learn how to hire, train, organize, and lead a team. How to set up processes and systems to delegate so I could focus ON the business instead of getting lost inside it. I honestly don’t know how I would’ve figured it all out without the guidance of that program.

Once the team was in place, I then realized I needed to improve my own personal mindset and performance as a leader. In early 2022 I hired Kelly Ruta, a therapist turned CEO development coach. It’s been through the combination of team, systems, and operations AND personal development that has made the growth of the business possible.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://handletheheat.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/handletheheat/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HandletheHeat/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tessa-arias-35a53773/

Image Credits
Lauren Hansen, Joanie Simon, Ashley McLaughlin