How Many Bathrooms?

Before we were granted a waiver for the grease interceptor that Megan wrote about in her last post, we had to attend a meeting of the Omaha Plumbing Board to ask for another waiver. 

On September 12, 2012, Megan, Barbi and I (and our team of professionals from Bahr Vermeer Haecker and Alvine Engineering) walked into a conference room on the third floor of the City/County Building prepared to request a waiver to allow a unisex bathroom. Upon entering the room, it occurred to me that this was where all the men in Omaha congregate. Five rows of men wearing heavy denim and Carhart, and suddenly I remembered the men of my past career. . . . as an environmental consultant! Oftentimes we would stand on sites in the center of construction and talk to the men who would be making the intangible tangible. I've always found this type of man comforting, quite like the teddy bear you can't give up.

Section 49-631 of the Omaha Plumbing Code details the requirements that must be in place for an ADA compliant unisex bathroom to be installed, rather than two ADA compliant restrooms. The space taken up for two large bathrooms would've reduced the space needed for our kitchen, and it's a tight fit to begin with. The part of the code that our situation did not satisfy, and thus would've disallowed us from having a unisex bathroom, was this:

Unisex bathrooms shall not be installed in the following facilities. . . . (4) Where food or drinks are prepared or served except in a business where the customer is served food and/or drink only from a drive up window and there are four or fewer employees and the gross area of the building is 600 square feet or less.

While we will have fewer than four people working on the premises, we will be serving food and our area is about 900 sq ft (greater than the allowable 600 sq ft). 

Similar to deciding to remove the bacon-maple muffin from the menu, we decided to remove the limited seating (four stools) we had originally planned for the bakery. This was an easy decision as the space didn't allow for much seating to begin with, and we plan on being a drop-in, rather than eat-in, bakery. 

Megan, Brian Hadfield (Alvine Engineering) and myself were summoned to sit at the table with the 7 folks representing the Board, and explain our case. Within less than 10 minutes, we'd explained our situation, answered questions, been ribbed about not bringing cupcakes, and were granted a waiver that allowed us to have one bathroom instead of two. Here are the Minutes of the Plumbing Board from that day. And, here's Omaha's Plumbing Code. It's a dense read and you can find great ingredients for poetry, like the word roughing-in for instance!

We hope you come and visit us and use our unisex bathroom; it will have a urinal!!

Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago, and here's a photo of my vegan pumpkin pies just before they went in the oven! Happy Holidays!

~ Trilety

Grease Trap vs Bacon-Maple Muffin

Grease Interceptors, aka grease traps (this next blurb is taken from Wikipedia):

are plumbing devices designed to intercept most greases and solids before they enter a wastewater disposal system. Common wastewater contains small amounts of oils which enter intoseptic tanks and treatment facilities to form a floating scum layer. This scum layer is very slowly digested and broken down by microorganisms in the anaerobic digestion process. However, very large amounts of oil from food production in kitchens and restaurants can overwhelm the septic tank or treatment facility, causing a release of untreated sewage into the environment. Also, high viscosity fats and cooking greases such as lardsolidify when cooled, and can combine with other disposed solids to form blockages in drain pipes.

Grease traps have been used since the Victorian days, although Nathaniel Whiting obtained the first patent for a modern day grease trap in the late 1800s. They are used to reduce the amount of fats, oils and greases (FOGs) that enter the main sewers. Effectively they are boxes within the drain run that flows between the sinks in a kitchen to the sewer system. They only have kitchen waste water flowing through them and are not served by any other drainage system such as toilets. They can be made from a number of different materials; e.g. stainless steel, plastics, concrete & cast iron. They range from 35 litre capacity to 45,000 litres and above capacity. They can be located above ground, below ground, inside the kitchen or outside the building.

Well, it makes a lot of sense for food establishments that cook up a lot of grease. However, that is not us. The only product that would produce grease is our Two Strips and a Short Stack Muffin (bacon and maple). Even then, the grease from the cooked bacon is poured into the trash, not into drains. (I had been told that this is the best way to discard the grease from cooking meat and now I have a very thorough explanation as to why!) Anyway, the bacon-maple muffin is our only product that produced grease. So we asked ourselves if spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to install a grease intercepter was worth keeping the sweet and savory muffin on our menu. It would be a massive project that would involve ripping up an already existing patio, amongst other logistical challenges because of the location of the sewer system.

We know how much our customers and loved ones have enjoyed the bacon-maple muffin, and perhaps we will find some way to put it back on our menu in the future (options include purchasing pre-cooked bacon or using a vegan bacon substitute). But for now, we will be putting that recipe on the shelf. It was a bittersweet decision and we hope you'll understand. We feel confident that the remaining muffins and cookies that we will offer will more than make up for the absence of our Two Strips and a Short Stack muffin.

Call it progress, evolution, or just plain practicality! We are learning constantly through this process.

~Meg

Metric of Life

Being approved for a loan requires a solid loan application, detailed business plan, successful financial projections, tax returns, and, as we recently found out, life insurance! Well, it's not required by the bank, but lenders look kindly on being given assurance that they will be paid back even if the lendee expires before the loan does.

Adam Musfeldt, a friend of Megan's from high school, helped us through the process of securing life insurance. Beyond paperwork and choosing the right policy, a physical exam and blood work was required for the policies to be issued.

Megan and I took the physical together, so now there are no secrets between these two birds! Though, we did use separate bathrooms to produce our urine samples.

The exam included a lengthy questionnaire about our health histories, as well as health metrics and blood work.

Megan and I sat side by side as we were mosquitoed by a skilled phlebotomist. My veins are hard to find, and Megan's easily collapse; they give up giving blood. Basically, these two birds are difficult blood draws!

Here's a peek into our metrics:

Megan is 5' 7" in height.

I am 5' 2" in height. (We're making sure to have a step stool in the bakery for the days that Megan and I work different hours)

Megan is a slim 140 pounds. (clothes on)

I'm a healthy 129 pounds. (clothes on)

Now for blood pressure.

Our blood pressure was measured three times in a row. Being curious about data, I decided to meditate during my last reading, and it was measured as lower than the first two. Anecdotal, but interesting nonetheless. While my readings weren't high, you'll see that Megan's blood is not a harbor of stress, rather it's pumped like slow, tranquil waves.

Megan's blood pressure readings were: 85/56, 90/56, 86/6

My blood pressure readings were: 100/66, 102/64, 92/66

We were granted life insurance! Now we're just waiting to hear back from the bank. . . but that's content for another post.

~ Trilety

Uta Halee Auction

Since beginning our bakery-owner research, we have been told by a few restaurant owners that auctions are great places to get deals on kitchen equipment and utensils, as long as we went into them knowing what actually was a deal!

Our auction opportunity came this past August. Omaha's Uta Halee Home for Girls, which had opened in 1950, closed down in December of last year. Located in Ponca Hills, it was a group home that offered psychiatric help for teens with emotional and behavioral problems. The campus is in such a beautiful and serene place, surrounded by woods and nature. It seems like the location alone would help in the healing process of the mind.

Well, so, our opportunity came when friend of ours saw on craigslist.com that Uta Halee was having a liquidation auction on August 29th. Online we found that all of the items up for auction were listed, photographed and described on a central website called proxybid.com. Holy wow, there was a lot to look at! Rooms upon rooms of office furniture, vans, lounge chairs, exercise equipment, and a golf cart. We were more interested in their commercial kitchen equipment. We saw a 20-quart mixer, two convection ovens, a gas range, a three-basin sink, over one hundred sheet pans and muffin tins, and many many units of industrial wire shelving. There were also a lot of bins full of random utensils that we could have used. Overwhelmed by the selection, we made a list of the items we wanted to bid on, and the prices of those items both new and used. We were prepared to get some deals! Oh yes we were!

The auction was a great experience; it was really fun! I got to hold the little fan with our registered bid number on it while Trilety helped me to keep track of which items we were bidding on and when to stop bidding. I think I can understand why people like to do that and how it could be addictive. I got a cool rush each time I raised my little fan in the air.

As it turned out, we were outbid on all but one item, which was a microwave. But as we had looked up new and used prices for all of this equipment prior to the auction, we knew that we were not only being outbid, but that people were severely overbidding on a lot of things. Trilety and I found ourselves giving each other looks of bewilderment as the bidding ended on each item, well over what we had priced out a few days earlier.

In the end, we walked out with a really great experience as well as a pretty great microwave. Perhaps we will have more auctions in our future. I hope so!

New Logo

We have a slightly altered logo!

Megan first designed our logo a couple of years ago; it's a blend of an image and a wordmark/logotype. The image of the owl and the peacock have not changed, but the font of the text is improved.

We are currently working with someone to develop/design our website (another post will be devoted to that process!). He provided us with a link to over 500 fonts that we could choose from for the headings and content text for our website. After hours of perusing cleverly named fonts, such as "Architect's Daughter," we decided on a couple, but also realized that they clashed a bit with the font of our logo. Can we call Megan's handwriting a font? Sure!

As an aside, the documentary titled Helvetica has some interesting tidbits about font and typeface, but overall it is a surprisingly dull documentary about an intriguing subject.

See below for our original logo:

and now our altered logo!

There may be a bit of tweaking left, but this new flourish of casual font, rather than the blocky font, is what we will use from this point forward. 

Logos, like brands and businesses and people, undergo growth and change. We're not the only ones to change our logo. See this great post/article about the evolution of the Starbucks logo with commentary from one of the logo designers. It seems as the company grew, the siren became more demure.  Maybe in a few years, our birds will finally be wearing underwear!

What's your favorite logo?

~ Trilety

Recommendation: NBDC

One of the items on our checklist as we started out on our small bakery business idea was to create a business plan. Seems easy enough, right? Right. Well... ... not really. We knew that businesses often create business plans, but we didn't really know why or how to to do it.

A business plan is not completely necessary. That is, it isn't illegal to start and run a business without one. But in our case, it has come in very handy as far as organizing our thoughts. Also, the fact that we need to get a loan to cover our start-up expenses means that we need to have something to present a bank with outside of the fact that we just really want to own our own bakery because we think it will be fun. They want numbers (of course they do!) They want to know that they will get their money back. It's an investment for them as well.

Looking online at the Small Business Administration website gave us a good start to understanding what a business plan entails. It describes the business plan and its purpose and it outlines what needs to be included. Even with this universal resource, eventually we came to realize that we needed some guidance. There are parts of the business plan that we were able to do on our own, and that made us think deeper about who we wanted to be as a business. We initially created a market analysis, company description and a product line, as well as our business philosophy. However, we got stumped on financial projections. Neither of us are accountants. What the heck is a break even analysis?! We asked our accountant who gave some good insight but as far as coming up with all of the actual numbers (projected fixed expenses, opening expenses, marketing expenses, costs of goods, projected production numbers, and on and on) we were at a loss and to be honest, we were completely overwhelmed with this task.

A friend of Trilety's, as well as my mom, suggested we talk to someone at the Nebraska Business Development Center. Located in Mammel Hall (College of Business Administration) on UNO's south campus, the NBDC and its staff have been our business plan saviors! We first registered online and then set up an appointment with a business counselor who helped us reorganize and complete our business plan. We had most of the writing done already but needed major help with our financial projections (as mentioned before). Its been about eight months and we have completed a solid business plan. Wow it feels fantastic! Fantastic!!!!

If you are thinking about starting a small business of any kind, or are in the process, this is such a good resource. I should also mentions that they have many more services than business plan development. The Nebraska Business Development Center (NBDC) also offers business counseling services for web development, exit planning, energy efficiency, business valuation and transfer, to name a few. They also offer workshops in business development, business analysis, project management, government contracting, and government contracting.

As you may have come to realize, this post is an official recommendation. These birds give the NBDC five stars, two thumbs up, and partridge in a pear tree!


Megan

Back to Blogging

We've been quiet, busy birds as of late, but we are starting to chirp once again!

The summer of 2012 has been full of new experiences and exciting challenges. Here are just a few that we'll start to cover in upcoming blog posts:

• Working with amazing architects to design the bakery

• Finalizing our business plan and working with the Nebraska Business Development Center on financial projections

• Requesting (and receiving!) a waiver from the Plumbing Board

• Attending our first live equipment auction

• Experimenting with gluten free recipes

• Designing a website with a web designer

• Deciding on Life Insurance (we're told it comforts the loan officer)

• And so much more!

Each week, Megan and I will tell a tiny tale about one of these experiences, and we hope you come along for the listening and commenting.

Here's a picture of a Praying Mantis who was sunning him/herself on my patio the other day. I've heard they are a tough insect of a fortuitous nature.

~ Trilety