family...business...bee sting (as in cakes)

I absolutely love living closer to other family members. It is so nice to “bump” into people. Dennis and I decided to go to Northlands for a little while and have lunch there. I knew Peter was visiting Mum and taking her shopping. And wouldn’t you know it…they were having lunch same time as us same food court. Now these lovely surprises NEVER happened when I was living in Mt. Evelyn. Oh..maybe not quite true. I did once or twice bump into Janine and the girls shopping at Eastlands and we did arrange to meet up with Michael, Natalie and the girls at Knox a few times…and come to think of it…I have also bumped into Kathryn and Holly at Knox the odd occasion many moons ago…even Helga … when they were living that side of town.

And going even further back down memory lane…there was that time when I bumped into Susie and Mum standing opposite Dimmy’s in Richmond. That was mid 1983 to be precise and that meeting had dire consequences. But come to think of it, it was probably a very good experience and something we all had to go through so..that gets me into story telling mode…

1983…for the first half of the year we lived in Mittagong, NSW working on a small farm that belonged to a lady who worked with catholic lay missionaries before they were let loose on the mission fields in the Kimberleys. She worked closely together with the Bishop of Broome and her property was used for 3 week training courses. We had attended such a course prior to heading to the mission in January 1981. When our two year stint in the Kimberleys finished we wanted to continue being involved but wanted to move to an area close to high schools to avoid sending Michael to boarding school. So we were offered this job in Mittagong and we took it. We had our own small house in the town and every day headed to the top of the mountain to work on the farm. Things didn’t work out too good…another long story…and so halfway through the year we headed back home to our house in East Ringwood.

One day I decided to go shopping and call in at Dimmeys in Richmond. Unbeknownst to me, Susie and Mum had the same idea. We met as I said across the road from Dimmeys, in fact waiting to cross the road. A few doors down from Dimmeys was a small café  where they served nice cakes so we headed there and had a cuppa together. And mum mentioned her dream to one day have such a place herself because she enjoyed baking so much. We got to talking about the idea and suddenly we decided considering that the 3 of us were all not working at the time, why don’t we investigate if we can start something together. We bought a paper and looked at shops to rent. We found one in Armidale. We looked at it. Mum fell in love with the shop which also had a flat upstairs. And the rest is history….Hetty’s German Cakes was born. The fact that I lived in East Ringwood and Mum in Heidelberg Heights and didn’t drive didn’t seem to be a problem to us. The fact that the shop was an electrical shop and had never been used for food production, the fact that it didn’t have a kitchen, all those didn’t worry us. After all we had been brought up to never say NO…everything is possible if you only put your mind to it. Maybe we should have been concerned when the Health Inspector told us we would not get a license for people eating in…not enough toilets. But we immediately adjusted our dreams to a takeaway shop idea. Maybe we should have been nervous when the Accountant pointed out that a hobby costs money …a business makes money and that we had to decide very quickly what was it to be ..hobby or business. My cash flow reports showed that with 2 ovens going full blast we could earn a fortune. The fact that making and selling are not exactly the same thing didn’t worry us at the time. We didn’t know until much later how hard it is to dispose of perishables. In fact harder than making them in the first place. And we didn’t understand until much later that all our competition in the area filled up their shop windows with cakes that had loads of preservatives. This was revealed by a study we did later on when we saw factory trucks deliver on a Monday and the windows being still full on the weekend. And we didn’t realise that even to “donate” leftover cake to a charity would mean we had to buy a refrigerated truck.

The first few months were fun. But then the hard grind set in. I had been away from computing for three and a half years and I still remember the feeling when I started working at the small computer school and taught people computer programming languages. A feeling of…wow….I actually like this…I actually missed this…this is what I am good at….not washing pots and pans and floors and baking lots of cakes. The odds were stacked against us. Advertising was too expensive. We tried our hand at leaflet drops but the sort of cakes we specialised in would require consumers from further afield. The area around the shop was semi industrial…office workers gave us some lunchtime trade. In the afternoons our side of the street was a clearway and people were not inclined to park around the corner. If we had all enjoyed the experience, I reckon another 2 or 3 years the business could have been successful. But it was a long shot from the nice little country café that Mum had dreamed about. We all learned a lot from the experience. We learned that having a business requires extreme dedication and your heart to be in it. No use taking up someone else’s dream because the dream wears thin when the hard work sets in. We learned that a food business has the problem with perishables. And when you bake them yourself it is even harder to throw things away. I learned that having a job is sometimes more rewarding than having your own business. In fact there can be more freedom. Unless you happen to strike it lucky and make money doing something you absolutely love doing. The feeling of knocking off at a certain time and having the weekends to yourself can be very nice. Most business people don’t enjoy that privilege. Also being able to take your annual holiday. Not stressing out when you get sick. All these are benefits one gets when being employed that unless you have worked for yourself, are really hard to put a price on and appreciate. We learned that working together with family members, especially when you are all under stress, is much more difficult than working together with strangers. A lot of people loved the cakes. And a lot of our friends benefited from the left overs! In fact one young man was yearning for “bee stings (Bienenstich)” for years afterwards and sent me a card from Germany saying that he had yet to find a bee sting that tasted as good as Mum’s. At the end of 1984 we managed to sell the business without too much fuss and loss. The only negative thing was that both Mum and I were now the owners of a bank card that we may otherwise not have had J and that sadly Mum had invested quite a bit of money up front which we were not able to recover from the sale of the business. But that is what happens to dreams sometimes. They cost money.