Or, what happens between “we signed the lease” and “we’re opening soon”.
At some point, opening a bakery stops being about recipes and starts being about construction.
This is the part that doesn’t show up in photos. No one posts a picture of a plumbing issue and says, “We’re getting closer.”
But it’s where a lot of the time goes.
There’s a phrase that comes up often. Hurry up and wait.
You move quickly to make a decision, approve something, schedule something. Then everything pauses. You wait on a permit. You wait on an inspection. You wait on someone else’s timeline.
Then, just as things start moving again, something else comes up.
A bathroom plumbing leak that wasn’t supposed to exist.
A piece of equipment that arrives and doesn’t work the way it should.
Something that needs to be replaced, reordered, or rethought entirely.
None of these things are unexpected, at least not if you talk to anyone who has done this before.
But knowing that doesn’t make them any less real when they happen.
There’s also the coordination. Contractors, electricians, inspectors, deliveries. Everyone has their role, and everything has to line up at the right time.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t.
From the outside, it probably looks like steady progress. Walls go up. Equipment comes in. Things start to look like a bakery.
From the inside, it feels more like a series of starts and stops. Solve one issue, move forward, hit the next one, adjust again.
And through all of it, Ann is still focused on the same thing she was from the beginning.
Getting it right.
The space matters. The equipment matters. The details matter. Because once the doors open, all of it becomes part of the experience.
So yes, there have been setbacks. A few unexpected ones. A few that felt like they came all at once.
But that’s part of building something from scratch.
You don’t skip this part. You just work through it.
