We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Taysia Matthias a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Taysia, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
In short, resilience to me is just my sheer willingness to survive, but here’s the long version:
I was raised by two successful business owners who started with nothing. My dad grew up on a farm in Northern California with 4 siblings. My mom and her brother had to help raise their youngest brother because their dad had to work multiple jobs to provide for them on his own. They built their business from the ground up, and instilled in me their beliefs, work ethic, and problem solving skills.
For as long as I can remember, I have suffered from horrible panic attacks. Let’s just skip past some gruesome details about childhood trauma, being bullied in school, and family dynamics growing up. As a teenager, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and OCD. By the time I was a senior in high school, my doctor had prescribed me a medication that I had a severe adverse reaction to. I ended up missing more days than I attended that school year, but keeping my mind occupied is what kept me sane. I got all of my schoolwork done, showed up for important days, never missed band of course, and still graduated with a 3.8 GPA. Recovering from the effects of this medication lasted years, though. In college, again I hardly showed up for class, but I again graduated with a 3.6 GPA as a two time Dean’s List student with grades in the top 10% of my college. Afterwards, I quickly realized that normal day-to-day life wasn’t enough to keep my mind engaged and my anxiety took over. I started missing work so much that I was threatened to be fired from multiple jobs while having panic attacks that made it hard for me to breathe multiple times a day. Things didn’t start to get better until very recently.
About 5 years ago, I discovered I was pregnant with my son. This new life I was creating gave me a reason to keep going, as well as the reason I started my business. My wage working full time was basically the same amount I would have to pay for childcare, so his father and I decided I would be a stay at home mom. Already passionate about baking, it didn’t take long for me to fill my free time trying out new recipes and teaching myself how to decorate. This quickly became my new way of distracting my mind from my looming cloud of anxiety. Long story short, people liked what I made, so I started a business. Easy peasy, right?
Surprise! It hasn’t just been sunshine and rainbows since then. My relationship at the time was very strained, which made being a mom and running a business that much harder. Still, my business was my getaway. Being able to play music in the kitchen and watch my son play while I baked and sharing treats with him after are some of my favorite memories from his first 2.5 years of life. But about a year and a half ago, everything changed. His father and I broke up, which sent me spiraling for a few months. Suddenly I had to find my own place to live, go back to working two regular jobs to provide for myself and my son, and having panic attacks on a daily basis. While in that relationship, I lost myself. I lost my ability to joke and laugh, to wear the clothes I wanted to wear, and to do the things I wanted to do. After that relationship, I still couldn’t do those things because I was in survival-mode, focused on making just enough to pay the bills and keep food on the table.
But one thing my parents taught me is that if you have faith, the universe will provide. No matter what, just keep going, because there will always be a way out eventually. For me, that way was my experience on entrepreneurship reality show The Blox, which led to my current relationship. I met someone who supports me and my happiness in every way. My experience on The Blox helped me start working my business again, which led to being able to quit my jobs and focus solely on baking. Now, a little over a year later, I can honestly say that I don’t remember the last time I had a panic attack. This thing that had been following me around like a dark shadow has disappeared completely. I never thought I would know life without it. I even used to joke that I didn’t know what it meant to feel “happy.” But like Dory says, “just keep swimming,” because the only way to fail is to quit.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
My business is Alani Bakery LLC, a small cottage food operation in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
I specialize in custom event baking, focusing mostly on decorative cakes. I offer a myriad of other products, and to be completely honest, I’ll make just about anything that’s requested of me! I am not one to turn down a challenge – the more creative the request the better!
My company may be small, but I am mighty! I was recently crowned Master Chocolatier at a local event known as The Chocolate Affair. This event happens every February in downtown Coeur d’Alene, where numerous businesses seek out their own chocolatier to compete for the title. The only rule is that is must be chocolate! This year, 24 businesses participated, and the judges decided that my chocolate was the best!
Since being able to focus primarily on my business last July, my average monthly revenue has almost tripled. I was able to purchase a secondary mixer, and I have begun to participate in more community events and fundraisers. I’m excited to keep expanding, and I can’t wait to see where it goes!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The absolutely most important thing, in my opinion, is networking. This is something I have always been terrible at. I never had many friends growing up, and I still feel incredibly awkward having face-to-face conversations with people I’m not yet familiar with.
I think the best way I have overcome this challenge is bringing a networking wingman with me to events. Whether it’s a friend, partner, colleague, family member, doesn’t matter, just bring someone who is personable and willing to help you get the conversations moving in the right direction.
For my business specifically, quality and attention to detail are the next 2 important things. It doesn’t matter how personable I am, if my baking tastes bad, then people aren’t going to order from me. As for attention to detail, I believe this really does set apart great artists from the rest. For art-based businesses like mine, it’s important to have that refinement locked down. I will gladly spend an extra 5 minutes making sure my lines are perfectly straight, edges are sharp, there’s no bubbles in my buttercream, etc. There’s also things like packaging that can make a huge difference when it comes to custom-made food, and especially that made for important events like weddings for example. I will spend the extra few bucks on a sturdy cake box to make sure there aren’t any mishaps during transportation, adding a ribbon to cupcake boxes, or even just taking a few seconds to write a quick “thank you” note.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
When it comes to strengths and improvement, I think a good balance between the two is best. If we focus all of our energy on constantly improving, then we will never get to utilize our true strengths to the best of their ability. However, if we go all in on our strengths and never try to improve on anything else, then eventually we’ll hit a wall and burn out.
When I first started my business, it was all improvement. I hardly knew what I was doing, so I just tried a bunch of things but focused primarily on improving the things I enjoyed doing the most. Now that I have built my skill set, there’s definitely areas that I’m strongest in, but the way I take orders is completely customer’s discretion. What the customer wants, the customer gets, and if I don’t know how to do it then I’ll learn. I do want to clarify that the reason I work this way at this point in my business is because I’m not in a place where it makes any kind of sense financially to turn down orders just because I don’t “want” to make a certain product. Once I get to a point where I’m so busy that I have to turn down orders on a regular basis because I physically cannot fulfill them all is when I will start to limit the types of orders I take and favor the ones that I would “rather” work on. For example, I really dislike decorating sugar cookies. I feel more confident with buttercream (cakes) than I do with royal icing (cookies). Cakes are primarily my strength because they happen to be most requested. It’s because of this that I haven’t had a ton of opportunities to refine my cookie skills, so cookie orders take me a lot longer to complete than cake orders. However, until my books are so full of cake orders that I do not have the availability for anything else, I must take the cookie orders that come my way because, to put it simply, I need the money.
In other words, I invest effort on improving areas I’m not as strong in out of financial necessity, but once I reach a point in my business where I can focus more on my strengths I would love to do so. In a perfect world, I want to push my strengths while still having the creative freedom to try new techniques and execute new designs.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.alanibakery.com
- Instagram: @alanibakery
- Facebook: Facebook.com/alanibakery
Image Credits
Photos taken by David Johnson/Voidrabbit Apparel
