The Monkey Diaries: The Monkey Has Landed

About author / Rebecca Michaels

Queen of the desserts and pastry chef extraordinaire; graduate French Culinary Institute; Golden Scoop Award winner; Flying Monkey Bakery founder

After years of working in my home kitchen and various places in various cities, I've finally found Flying Monkey a permanent home. And I thought it might be interesting to share my trials and tribulations with CDKitchen readers as I get the Flying Monkey flying. I'm very excited about this project and I hope I can help inspire anyone who's thinking about starting his or her own business too!

First things first. About a year and a half ago, my husband and I made the difficult decision to leave Manhattan and head south to Philadelphia. The old saying "If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere" may indeed be true, but the truth of the matter was economics, plain and simple. We wanted to be able to continue to live the city life and my dream was to open a bakery. Opening up a small business in New York City is not only a serious monetary investment, but unfortunately the likelihood of success is not in favor of the small but eager businessperson. It's not that I'm a pessimist, just a realist. And the reality was that Philly is on the verge of a boom, and it's picking up speed quickly as one of the "hottest" cities on the East Coast.

Needless to say, I love it in Philly. The restaurant culture is thriving, yet Center City still has a semi-small town feel where "everyone knows your name." It's true: chances are that someone you know knows someone else you know. Rent is cheap for the East Coast and people are moving here in droves (I can't tell you how many New York transplants I've met in the eight or so months that we've lived here already. It's astounding).

So, all of these factors combined with a little bit of elbow grease, pavement pushing, and a lot of luck to land me a spot at the Reading Terminal Market.

I had initially contacted a local paper about getting a small write-up to generate a little buzz in the neighborhood about the Flying Monkey and to get some small gigs with coffeeshops and BYOBs in the area. That write-up happened to have been read by the general manager of Reading Terminal Market at the time when some spots were opening up in RTM. It just goes to show that being in the right place at the right time--that is, sheer drop-dead luck--has a lot to do with the success or failure of a business.

But so does location. RTM is one of the top tourist sites in Philly. It's traversed by both locals and tourists as a place to buy Pennsylvania food from vendors of every stripe you can imagine: fresh produce, local cheese, wine, meat and poultry, the Philly Cheese Steak, take-out from local restaurants. I couldn't have fallen into a better location and I certainly appreciate it.

The next step was grey-hair inducing to say the least: securing the financing. But because of the nature of the location and relatively minimal investment (as opposed to setting up shop in a free-standing spot somewhere on the street), it turned out not to be so bad. But I did learn how to write a business plan, which was not only necessary to actually get the money, but it also helped me formulate my own vision of the business. I needed to think about every single aspect of the business: the concept, the market, the product, the competition, and so on. It was by no means a fun exercise, but I certainly learned quite a bit about running a business in general and in the specific Philly market.

If you're thinking about starting a small business, I strongly encourage you write a plan--even if you don't need to for purposes of financing. It will definitely hone your vision of your business and get you on the right track to success. And it will also get you very excited about your new creation! Join me here again for another installment in my 'Monkey Diaries!'