When I was a teenager, my parents gave me subscriptions to magazines for my birthday. First it was "Young Miss," then "Seventeen," then "Sassy." Each month, my favorite section of the magazine was the quiz. But no matter how I answered the questions, I always ended up smack-dab in the middle: never pushing the envelope, never falling on one side or the other of the topic in question. My results were average: typical, normal and — in my young mind — boring.

 

So, in September 2020 — in the midst of a global pandemic and having taken a food business bootcamp class to see if I could handle managing a business — I launched Akron Bagel Babes LLC, a small-batch gluten-free baked goods business, initially based in shared kitchens and then running out of the dedicated gluten-free kitchen in my home.

 

In the back of my mind, I knew that most small businesses don't survive longer than three years, for a variety of reasons, but like my younger self, I wanted to buck the system, to thrive where others failed, to be the one-in-a-million success story — to not be average.

 

And, for the last three years, I ran the business: doing all the recipe research and development, baking in the early morning hours, delivering to customers from the Ohio City neighborhood of Cleveland to Wooster to Alliance, making countless runs to grocery stores, restaurant-supply warehouses and specialty shops for unique ingredients, tracking sales with a monstrous Excel spreadsheet, managing social media posts and building my website, www.akronbagelbabes.com.

 

Although I kept the gluten-free menu simple, over the years I became a much better baker — practicing new techniques, trying recipes just to see if I could master them and adding baked goods to my repertoire.

 

But, in the end, I learned it's not enough to have an easy-to-maneuver website, to earn "likes" or "followers" on social media or to have an excellent product that gets rave reviews ... if there aren't enough orders to survive, you have to make the call.

 

And so, with a heavy heart, I have decided to close the virtual shutters of Akron Bagel Babes, just a few days short of my business' third anniversary. It may have been the typical run for a new entrepreneur, a normal story for a small business owner ... but, let me tell you, these last three years were never boring.

 

I've really enjoyed being my own boss — it was challenging and frustrating, hard and incredibly freeing. If a new product wasn't ready to launch, I could test the recipe until I felt it was customer-ready. If I believed a flavor profile was better with strawberry rather than raspberry, I didn't have to "run it up the flagpole" or wait for a board of directors to give it the green light. I could get stuff done, and it was so much fun.

 

When creating the "About" page for my website, I wrote, "I've found joy in sharing good food ... I am so grateful to be on this adventure," and that idea holds true today.

 

A special thank-you goes to my husband and kids for being my patient, always-willing taste-testers and my brutally-honest voices of reason ... to my relatives and friends for being my hype team and sharing my posts on their own pages ... to my small-business buddies for allowing me to bounce ideas off of you and for reassuring me that my struggles are yours too ... and to my customers for reminding me that people who like baked goods are the happiest people in the world.

 

One of my favorite pastry chefs, Nick Malgieri, once said, "Bake something ... You'll feel better" — so, with my well-worn recipe binder in hand and a world full of food yet-to-be-tasted, I plan to keep my oven pre-heated and my curiosity nourished.

 

All the best,

Abby