Hello,

My partner and I are writing our business plan to see if it makes sense to start up a custom cake bakery in our area. Among many difficult questions we are striving to answer, I am wondering if we should be including an income for ourselves in our start up costs in our biz plan? I say no, my partner says "Heck YES!" Her family cannot go for a long term without being paid anything. So far the financials look very promising but I guess I thought that a bank would think we were crazy including income for ourselves when asking for a start up loan. How did you retail bakery owners handle this?

Also, we like the name Sublime Cakery and Cafe. Any opinions?

Thanks!

Tammy

I agree with your partner...are you gonna just give your hard work, time, sweat, and tears for free? I would totally hope not. I had a mentor tell me when I was in the process of putting together a business plan that there is where so many new business owners go wrong, they forget to add there own income into the complete financial picture.

Oh, and I simply love Sublime Cakery and Cafe...do you plan on having an actual cafe in the bakery also?

Justout of curiosity, what was the inspiration for that name?

And the bank will want to know how much you plan to pay yourself. If you don't include an incomed for yourself, it's a red flag to them. Nobody does this much work and gambles that much of an investment so they can personally make zero money.

Include it.

Thanks so much you guys! That helps. It's not that I wasn't planning on getting paid. It was just that I wasn't sure whether or not to list our incomes as part of our first year "start up" costs or if we should show them coming out of our projected profits. Does that make sense? Maybe it doesn't matter as long as we show what we plan to pay ourselves.

As for the name, we both felt that it was such a descriptive word about how we wanted our customers to think of our offerings. Not just really good, but SUBLIME. The Cakery and Cafe tagline is a further clarification. We hope to offer custom cakes, breakfast pastries, limited desserts and coffee. We ar also trying to be able to offer light lunch but this is really not our focus. I don't want to be such a slave to it that I couldn't do cakes.

We would be in an old fashioned town square with the county courthouse kitty corner so a portable (maybe bento box style) lunch would be good to offer and maybe some quiches and soups. Not sure yet

Thanks again for the feedback. I really respect the opinions here and welcome any advice!