Check Out Betsy Sauls’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Betsy Sauls

Hi Betsy, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I got started baking cakes back in 2019. I loved following cake bakers online and watching their videos, it was so relaxing! I had a friend celebrating a birthday and I said I can do this, I’ll bake the cake! That started something in me that wanted to keep growing my skills and start taking small orders. During COVID I was working from home with my day job and honestly pretty bored. I started doing cupcake giveaways on social media – anyone that had a friend or family or anyone in their life that was considered an essential worker could take their friend in the giveaway and the friend and the essential worker both got free cupcake dozens. This blew up our social media following and our orders started taking off. When the time came for me to go back to work I knew that I really didn’t want to go back to work because I would miss baking all day. So I quit my job and began focusing on taking orders. We knew that we needed a separate baking space (it was a baking space or my dogs and those girls are like my children, lol) so we sold our house and moved in to my parents house until we could find a house with a garage that we could turn into a bakery. After living with my parents for a few months we found the perfect house with a detached garage, and so Around the Table was born. We renovated the garage and turned it into a certified commercial kitchen and we got to work. My husband was a head chef at a local college at the time and we realized that we could do more in the bakery if he came to work with me so he quit his job and we both took a leap of faith and started this full time. For the next few years we would work crazy hours, 7 days a week, 14 hours a day to build our business. We were doing a little bit of everything and also trying to build a name for ourselves in the wedding world. We realized that we both really enjoyed doing wedding cakes and dessert bars but the everyday birthday cakes weren’t something we really loved doing anymore. So we really focused on building our wedding brand. We now are exclusively in the wedding market and average about 150 weddings per year. We travel north, south, east and west delivering cakes on most Saturdays. We typically divide and conquer and my mom helps deliver as well so we can take another delivery or two on a Saturday when she is able to help!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has definitely not been a smooth road. Working 24/7 with your spouse really challenges your marriage at times, we had to be able to separate husband and wife and be business partners sometimes and that was really tough. And then we had to really work at leaving work at work, and not taking it into the house when the night was over. On top of working with your spouse the burnout was real – we worked 7 days straight for about 2 years in a row. Up in the bakery at 6am, finishing up around 8pm, eating, sleeping and doing it all over again. We missed time with our families, our friends, our church – our social lives were non existent. We realized that we just couldn’t keep doing it like this, we loved serving our customers but had to find time to serve ourselves too.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We specialize in custom wedding cakes and wedding dessert bars. Our current niche is the vintage, lambeth piping cakes. Those are our jam and we love doing them!

What do you like best about our city? What do you like least?
We love getting to deliver in Raleigh because we get to see some really cool venues. The only thing we don’t like is the traffic and parking, lol!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://aroundthetablebakery.com
• Instagram: @aroundthetable_
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/Around the Table