Earn Money Baking From Home: Is It Possible? Find out how I make money legally by baking at home

If you’ve always wanted to make money baking for other people, I’m here to tell you to forget it! Well let me clarify that if that’s what you want to do, it better be a tough cookie. However, sturdy cookies may not be a good description if you want to make money baking! At this point, you are probably thinking that I myself am a little half-baked.

Seriously, I’m not writing this to be a dream killer, I just want to help you make your dream come true, and more importantly, I want to help you avoid the pitfalls that I encountered when I started my corporate home catering business.

This is quite a long story, and we will have to spend a little time together to get through this, so maybe I should introduce myself and get to know each other. I am a mother of twelve, (yes, they are all ours). He had searched for many years for the answer to working successfully from home. As you can imagine, in that long search, I came across many scams and lost more than a few dollars buying empty promises.

I’ll give you some background to help clarify how I finally decided to start my own business. To help raise money for a church building expansion project, I started a baking drive that was very successful. Soon I had other churches requesting my help. I’ve often heard “I should start a business doing this.” To make a long story short, I finally decided to do just that. I ran that business, mostly from home, for ten years.

I made all the mistakes in the book and a few more. I started by taking classes on how to start a business. It was fine, but it lacked many forms. I thought I had checked the box on education. I was not experienced enough to recognize that many of the commonly accepted practices for starting a business did not fit well with our family. For example, it costs money to start almost any type of business. Common practice is for businesses to be run with OPM (other people’s money). Unfortunately, we took that advice and it cost us dearly.

One of the realities is that many small businesses fail and the percentage in the food business is higher than most. There is certainly a lot of debate about the actual failure rate, but that is beside the point. The real problem is that no matter what business you decide to start, most of us don’t want to be a statistic. Some of the best advice I can give you on this topic is to dip your toe in the water, start slow, and accumulate some savings that you can use to start your business.

If you really want to get started, you can find a licensed kitchen that you can use, and many times you can find one that you can use very inexpensively. I started using our church kitchen for FREE. I agreed to make sure the kitchen was cleaned well and I was the contact person for the health department when they needed to inspect it. I know others who have a deal to be the kitchen manager when renting for parties. It really is possible, you may have to trade in some time and effort, but having the ability to start with very little investment is worth it.

After a while, I really wanted an arrangement that was more convenient. When I used the church kitchen, I had to carry all my supplies in the middle of the night, bake, clean, and get home by 7:00 a.m. M. So my husband could get to work on time. I also had to receive the orders. It was for that reason that we decided to add a licensed commercial kitchen to our home. Remember at the beginning of this article I said it would have to be a tough cookie, well I said that because dealing with the health department to add the kitchen to our home was a tough battle.

There were permits, zoning issues, compliance requirements. It was a long process and there were many discussions with the city offices. In the end, they gave us the permits and we started construction. It was by no means cheap, but compared to the cost of leases and lease upgrades, it was certainly a great choice. Note that I did not have a retail business so there was no traffic coming to my house, I delivered all the orders. On top of that, another concession I made was that I didn’t have delivery trucks coming to my door, I had to pick up all my supplies. Again, those were minor problems in the grand scheme of things.

Finally we put all the requirements, and we added the commercial kitchen to our home. It was worth the fight. I have loved having the ability to work at home, do something that I have always loved. In addition to the ability to generate money for our family, I have had the facility that has allowed me to continue helping youth groups raise funds for mission trips and other charitable causes.