… to temporarily close a business

I when I was 15. 

So I lived with my grandma growing up and she was a fantastic cook and a fantastic baker so I would always watch her in the kitchen. 

She was more of a follow the recipe to the book type of a person and I was more of a ‘Oh let me just see what I can create.’ And then I would just taste something I liked the flavor of and just try to recreate it in different forms which is still what I do now

And I just fell in love with baking. 

I guess I created “Blessed Little Kitchen” in October of 2016 and then we moved to a commercial kitchen in April of 2018 and then we opened the retail location in October of 2018. 

[Opening day] was overwhelming. It was something I dreamed about for 20 years that was a physical manifestation of that. And to have such a huge support system around me, not just of my family and friends, but of the entire town we had like over 1,000 people come to the grand opening day. So that was just incredible to see all the support behind me. 

So on Monday [March] 8th was when I started panicking and that’s when I started praying of just ‘God give me an answer of what am I supposed to do here. Am I supposed to stay open? Am I supposed to stay closed? What am I supposed to do?’. 

I was in turmoil that whole week. 

My initial thought was ‘Shoot how are we going to close our doors for two weeks and how am I still going to pay the bills?’. 

When you’re a brand new business you’re in the red. You’re not profitable for the first few years so you really need all of your sales to pay your overhead and to pay your staff and things. 

And it was Friday [March] the 13th that I felt very at peace, I felt like God was telling me that I needed to close for those two initial weeks. I had closed for those two weeks and had just planned on doing those pre-orders, but then as I started learning about how the disease spread and how it can be on realistically the cardboard boxes that are being delivered to my bakery. 

And then a close family friend of ours wound up in the ICU with it and almost died. He’s still fighting for his life right now. 

So once I found that out about him, that was when I was like ‘No we’re not doing pre-orders any more.’ 

There’s no amount of money that could ever replace someone’s life. If this means the business dissolves it means the business dissolves. I have to go to sleep with myself every night and know that I did what I thought was right and I just felt like fully closing was what I thought was right. 

And in the end I just had to keep going back to people over profit. You can make money back. When we open our doors if I have to take out another loan, if I have to max out my credit cards money can be made. If I get someone sick or if one of my staff who I love gets sick I can’t ever fix that. 

[Closing my business felt] horrible. For me it’s the unknown. 

I had to come to a peace within myself of whatever happens happens and try to look on the bright side of things, but to work so hard….I mean I had been actively working for four years before the business retail location opened. I work seven days a week, between eight and 16 hours a day for four years I did that to get the retail up and running. 

So to have the doors open and then six months later to have to close them, no fault of your own, no fault of my staff, no fault of my customers, just nature. It’s awful. 

What I would like to see happen is I would like to have a huge, grand re-opening where we can just celebrate the same way we did on grand opening day. In some way I would love to be able to incorporate all the small businesses in town and really just for us to celebrate that we rose from the ashes, that we came out of the storm. 

But what actually is going to happen … I have no idea.