How I Bought A Bakery
It all started in the summer of 1987. One of my father’s vendors and family friend Greg Desantis was asking my father if he knew someone that would be interested in driving a bread truck for him for the summer.
My father volunteered me. I asked how much and was told $80per day so I immediately said yes. My career in the bread business was born. We drove to Newark NJ and I was introduced to a few local Italian bakeries that we would pick up hot fresh bread from every day.
The first day I sat in a lawn chair “Yes a Lawn chair” the van did not have a passenger seat so we could fit the most bread possible. I could barely keep my eyes open on the ride from Brick NJ to Newark. It was approximately 1 hrs drive. Once we got to the bakeries we would load our freshly made product and you could still hear the bread crackling because it just came out of the oven.
“I was officially a bread man. This was my side hustle all through my college days”
We packed the van from front to back with this hot delicious freshly made bread and I was hooked. My newfound friend showed me where each Restaurant deli & Grocery store was located on the way back to south jersey and in a few days I had the route down. I was officially a bread man.
This was my side hustle all through my college days. I started doing it for summers then I would do it on and off all year round So I could put myself through Seton Hall. My father’s restaurant business was going through some hard times so I needed a way to pay for school because there was no way I was quitting college.
Four years later I graduated with a finance degree and I was all set to work on wall street but I had a few obstacles in my way. I wasn’t able to fully pay my tuition before I graduated so the school would not release my transcripts to the larger firms that were interested in me. The smaller firms that really didn’t care if I had transcripts or not were basically working in the movie “Boiler Room” So that was a hard no.
So where did this leave me? Hey dad, you want to start a business? My dad was burnt out from the daily grind of the restaurant business by that time he and my mom had owned their restaurant for almost 15 years. So when I mentioned starting a new business he was super excited.
“My dad passed away that night at the age of 49 just before his 50th birthday.”
The question was what were we going to start? This was a pretty easy choice. With all of the accounts, I was delivering to with my friend’s bread business I figured we could sell that other product. So with my dad’s connections with Italy, we started importing and selling all sorts of products to sell to the restaurants and food businesses I already delivered to. It was a low-margin business and it was a grind but we made it work.
One year later when I went to work and my father was on the ground unconscious. We rushed him to the hospital and found out that he had an aneurysm burst. My dad passed away that night at the age of 49 just before his 50th birthday. As you can imagine my family and I were devastated. Not only was my dad still running the restaurant where he was the main and only chef but he was the main contact with the Italian manufacturers that were buying our products.
Oh and PS I didn’t speak Italian. So we had no choice but to close the restaurant and I had to quickly sell(I mean basically give away) the one-year-old business that we had started.
“ I built the route up to do over a million dollars a year”
The problem was my mom was in huge debt from the restaurant and I still had to pay for products my dad had imported.
How the hell was I going to do all this? Well even though my dad and I were building a business together we were not making a ton of money so I still wanted to so l driving the bread truck part-time. When my dad passed away My friend let me work as much as I wanted to keep the lights on in my mom’s house. Less than 6 months later I bought a portion of my friend’s route and I was in business again
My aunt Millie and uncle Frank loaned me $35k and I put down $20k of my own money to buy this route. I built the route up to do over a million dollars a year then I got a great idea to own my own bakery and sell my own bread.
The Bakery was born. I renovated my mom and dad’s old restaurant and it started off as a restaurant, coffee house, and bakery. Eventually, it became just a wholesale bakery. Several years later I purchased a new building in Farmingdale NJ and grew the bakery very successfully until I sold it in 2019.
