Episode 434: Gareth & Cat of Tarts Anon
In this episode, Fiona chats with Gareth and Cat of Tarts Anon. They share their insights on sustaining a business in the fast-paced world of hospitality. They discuss the challenges and triumphs of growing their tart-making business. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Challenges and growth during the pandemic
Balancing technical skills with business demands
Marketing and community-building through social media
The transition from home kitchen to commercial space
Staff management and maintaining quality
Visual branding and aesthetic decisions
Strategies for business growth in the food industry
Importance of continuous learning and experience in business
Sustaining a business beyond the initial excitement
Importance of focusing on trade and innovation
The transition from doing everything in the business to hiring experts
Influence of hospitality career on business development
Challenges and achievements in their business journey
Balancing business responsibilities with personal life and family
Get in touch with My Daily Business
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My advice is once you get to a certain size, you need to get people who know what they're doing to help you. I think trying to do everything is difficult and unsustainable, and it holds you back in the end. Now we have people who shoot our content. We have an accountant, and we've got someone who does payroll. All of those things that I was interested in and trying to do. It's more serious that we've got staff, we've got things and I have just wanted to go back to my career as well. I think you have to know when to call in the experts essentially. If you do get to the point where you've gotten to that size, that's what I think.
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Welcome to episode 434 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is an interview episode and I'm excited about this one for so many reasons. I'm excited because the people were just lovely to chat to. I'm also excited because what they create with their business is next level. As somebody who has a passion for this space, I'm just blown away by what they're doing in terms of innovation and flavour and taste and also just working as a couple. But before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these beautiful lands on which I get to live and play and work and meet these people for the podcast interviews. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. And I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also wanted to remind you that Group Coaching is open. We've already started the interviews for group coaching and I honestly love my job. I get to meet so many interesting people and hear their stories and hear why they've started their business and what they're passionate about and get to work with them in group coaching for a whole year. Group Coaching is unlike anything else we do. You work for an entire year. You have me, you have the other people in the group. You have a range of experts that we bring in from all sorts of different backgrounds, including diversity, SEO, law, finance, psychology, mindset, and just so many parts of business. You also get access to all of our courses, including any we bring out during the year that you're coaching. If you're interested in that, we kick off at the end of August. If you are keen, get on over and apply so we can chat with you and get to know you and see if it's a good fit for each other. You can apply at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. Let's get into today's interview episode.
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Today I'm bringing you an interview that I did a couple of months ago now with Cat and Gareth from Tarts Anon. The reason that we held off on putting this out is because they have just published a book, a cookbook that is all about the beauty of what they create with tarts and on it's about tarts and it's about how you can replicate some of these at home. As somebody who loves baking, I grew up baking as early as I could with my mom. My mom was an incredible baker. We had a lot of baked goods around our house all the time. It was a way of expressing love and chatting with people but also because Gareth and I should say Gareth Whitton and Catherine Way the founders of Tarts Anon. Gareth and Catherine started the business as an ISO side project.
They were in lockdown in Melbourne like so many of us. And Gareth had been working. He's a pastry chef. He's got 15-plus years of experience working at some of the top restaurants. He had been working at Dinner by Heston Blumenthal now which had closed in February 2020. As he talks about in our chat, he could not find work even though he had this incredible skillset, just what was happening at the time with the hospitality industry and Covid and lockdowns. He started working at a supermarket. To help him relieve some of the pressure and just overwhelming that all of us were going through at that time. To keep up this passion that he has for these beautiful pastry items, he decided to start creating these tarts. Catherine, who's a speech pathologist, is not in the same industry but saw that they could start selling.
We could start making them for friends and family, and then maybe we could just sell what's left over to people in our apartment block, which is what they did. Tarts Anon was born. From those very humble beginnings, they've now grown and they have two physical locations. They also sell a lot of their tarts to some of the top restaurants around the country. And they are just delicious and they look incredible. Sometimes you see things and you're like, that might taste nice, but it doesn't look that good. This look is out of this world for me and all of the flavours and the way that they combine the flavours, it's just magical and it makes you want to eat tarts all day long. In this interview, we talk about how they created the business.
When did they decide to go from, this is a side thing that we're just doing from our apartment through to we're going to do these and like open a shop. And then what prompted the second location to be opened and how did they do that? How do they staff that? Just so many questions we go through, what it's like to work as a couple, how they came up with the name, the branding, and all sorts of things. It's such a wonderful interview. I just want to say a massive thank you to Gareth and Cat for coming on and sharing so openly. I hope that you check out Tarts Anon. If you're not able to come in and check out their food, they also do delivery. They also have their brand new cookbook, Tarts Anon, which is published by Hardie Grant. Here is my interview with Gareth and Cat from Tarts Anon.
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Hi Cat and Gareth, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for having us.
I'm excited to get going and cracking into this. How are you both?
Life has been pretty hectic lately. I have just recently gone back to my job at the hospital after I think it was about 20 months of maternity leave and during that time running or helping to run the tartan on business. There's a lot on our plate at the moment. Good and challenging, I would say.
And you, Gareth?
Much the same at the Vet Leave. We've been presented with a lot of cool opportunities in the last two years and we've taken them on pretty reluctantly in some cases. But we've gone from strength to strength and there's a good bit of satisfaction at the moment, but there's also a lot of stress on the plate at the moment just because of perhaps what some of these new challenges pose. But all in all, it's very good.
I guess the net outcome. Can you tell us a story about Tarts Anon? What is it? How did you come up with it and how do you describe it? And also, great name.
It's funny you say it's a great name. Because I think we've come to not despise the name, but just have come to accept the name of the business. And I often talk about that on socials that it's too late to change the name. We fell into Tarts Anon in a certain sense. Just to speak for Gareth, he was working at Dinner by Heston in the Crown and was made redundant right before Covid. Then Covid started and Gareth was at home and I was working from home in my job. We had a lot of time on our hands. Many people in Melbourne during that time, and this seed of an idea that Gareth could start baking things and I would sell them on Instagram, I had this idea that it would work.
I saw other people doing it on Instagram and I was like, what Gareth makes is better than this. We could make something out of this. It took a while to convince Gareth that it was a good idea and worth our time and effort. Probably the angle I took was we didn't have anything else to do. Let's just give it a shot. It'll be fun. You reluctantly agreed, Gareth, I would say. Eventually, it just took off from there. It was almost from the first order we couldn't stop. It just became so wildly popular in that time that we've just been propelled ever since then.
Gareth, why were you reluctant? Was it like, I get that you'd be so hardworking at the other place in the Crown and maybe you were a little bit like, can I just rest for a minute? Or where did it come from?
I rested for a little bit. It was anything, it was probably what Tarts Anon was my release my way of getting a little bit more excitement to my day-to-day. When the restaurant closed down, there was still a small window between that happening and Covid feeling very real. It was February and we had at least another month in between that before, people started going into lockdowns and I had taken on a job at Woolworths because there was nothing else I could get at that time. I was applying for jobs outside of my training. I had a bit of a mini midlife crisis and was looking at getting out of the kitchen and staying within the industry. I was looking at all sorts of stuff like recruitment, key account management, working with distributors, and suppliers, working more with the product than in the kitchen, just as a way to wrestle a little bit of my life back, get some of that balance that I perhaps lost.
I think when the world came to a head and everyone started panicking a little bit more, those jobs fell away and all that was left was the crumbs. I just thought it was better than just sitting in the house demanding money from the government. It wasn't until I spent a few weeks or months stacking shelves at a supermarket, then I realised my place was in the kitchen and that's where I belonged. The tail between the legs went back and decided maybe it was time to start cooking again. I think the reluctance itself came from the fact that as soon as that clicked for me and I knew that I needed to be cooking again, it was very much a case of working to the highest level.
My entire career had always strived for that, not for any other reason than knowing that if I expose myself to the highest standards there, then that's the best way I could improve, which is not exactly flawed logic, but I wouldn't swear by it. But I did it. I worked at three-star, and two-star places in Europe, the UK, Sydney, and then Melbourne. When I thought I've gotta go in the kitchen, I was like, I've gotta get back into like a high-level kitchen to continue honing my craft. I pretty much snagged a job at Loon at that point. I was just waiting for it to be processed because they had their own struggles that they faced during Covid too, and taking on new staff members was something that they weren't jumping at because of slowed revenue.
Whilst I was waiting for that job to process, I was like, let's do a bit of this baking. I was like, okay, cool. I'll do it for a bit of fun, it'll be great. We'll do something together. It'll be a nice activity, generate a little bit of revenue, get my creative juices flowing again, get me back into that rhythm and then when the job at Learn comes about I'll start there. And that is pretty much the shape that Tarts Anon took for, I would say the entirety of its existence up until we got our own kitchen.
What is it about Tarts specifically? Why choose that too?
The reason I tell everyone, which is the truth, is that of all the things that I think we could make in our kitchen, it was probably the most technical thing that we could do with the least amount of specialist equipment. As a chef, I'm very technique-driven, as in motivated and very technique-focused. I think that it's probably one of my strengths as a chef is technical skills. And by this, I mean very manual techniques, not necessarily dry ice nitrogen isomalt stuff. I like to do things that require a little bit of understanding of cooking but that are very steeped in classic techniques. The tart is a very classic thing and it's also a very technical thing. I think what I love the most about it is that it's almost understated in the way that anyone can make a tart.
I think that that's a beautiful thing, but when you can elevate a couple of different elements to the highest standard and just make them exceptional, then it takes it from a very humble and easily approachable thing to quite a spectacular product. I think that's what spurred me was the ability to do very technical stuff. I shot myself in the foot because it was the thing that people only in the industry or people who know what it means to do will appreciate and everyone else will go, “That's very nice.” They're like, “Thanks.” You feel like you're shamelessly plugging yourself by trying to explain how difficult and how intricate what you've done is. But without any bells and whistles. Again, that was what always spurred me on, it's very much the ethos of di Heston where I spent six years working. And for me to take even a further step back in terms of elaborate and whizzbang cookery, which I grew up with, and just focus on the important stuff. And then hone in on highly technical yet just honest and uninhibited cooking. That was fun.
Amazing. I'm so hungry right now. Cat, you mentioned that you've recently gone back to work at a hospital. What were you doing before Covid?
I'm a speech pathologist, I work at the children's hospital. I was working there in our early intervention team, which was a home-based service. We would go out to people's homes and when lockdown happened, I think clients and our service, were still doing telehealth, but it slowed down. There was a lot more time in the day. I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit. I think I've always tried to be like, maybe I could import that and sell it, or maybe I could or something like that. Whereas I think Gareth's the complete opposite like I don't think Gareth, you've ever tried to think about like, how could I make this into like a fiscal thing?
No, I'm like a tortured artist. I think I'd rather throw myself on the sword and work unpaid hours for someone else. But with that, just purely for my own self-satisfaction, and personal gain, but so carbon opposites.
Then Cat, I was going to ask, even when you said we could start selling these on Instagram, I thought, maybe you have a marketing background, how did you say, we are going to do this and it's going to be a business. And even running imagery making, I mean, tarts sound amazing as is, but making it something that people are going to buy. And then what was your role in the early stages of Tarts Anon, and how did you navigate it from we are going to put some images on Instagram and sell them locally to, we are going to open a physical shop?
It's been a journey. The initial steps were I found quite easy. I don't know if it was just a product of the environment we were in at the time, but I've always been interested in photography. I did a degree in fashion and design before I did speech pathology, which doesn't mean I have any photographic skills. I have been interested in that. I enjoyed doing my own personal Instagram and I guess went a little bit dry because we weren't travelling, we weren't doing anything. I just started taking photos of the tarts that Gareth was creating. They're very easy to photograph. They're quite beautiful in themselves. Probably two years later trying to get interesting photos of a tart is difficult, but at the time it was quite easy.
In terms of we didn't have a plan. What happened was I said to Gareth that I'm going to do a letter drop in our building and you can make two flavours and we'll sell them quarter half and whole. And one person got back to us and they were like, I'll have a quarter of each tart. He has to make two whole tarts and we're only going to sell a quarter of each. I need to sell the rest of them. I just did a post on our Richmond 3121 Facebook page and it's community-focused Richmond. I think we had such limited capacity. Gareth was baking out of a literal microwave oven like it was a microwave and an oven.
We had just one tart shell at the time. We just sold it and there were a lot of people who missed out. And it wasn't like a planned scarcity effect at all. I think we wouldn't have been clever enough to not give into the temptation of making more had we had the ability, but it ended up from a marketing perspective and getting our name out there worked well in that. We had wait lists of people, people were getting furious and they couldn't get a tar. It was just funny, and I think from a social perspective like I was putting up a post saying the tarts are available. I was getting a hundred, 200 messages within the first minute and we'd only be able to serve 20 of those people.
It was funny. And then everything else I guess that I was posting was not about sales 'cause we had nothing to sell. We were just building a community and building interest in the product. That is what has worked well. And we still have people in that community now, even though we've got so much more capacity, we don't like selling out of stuff except for specials. We're running two shops, but we still have that community feel about the business. And it wasn't planned. We were just lucky in that sense.
Wow. And lucky and hardworking and the Tarts tasted great so people were staring and spreading that I had Natalie Paull from Beatrix Bakes on the Podcast a while ago. And she had the same thing where she'd put up something and then people, so many people wanted a piece of the cake or wanted this or wanted that. Did you ever have people say to you that you should make this flavour? Sometimes when people's businesses can take off, they get swayed by what the audience wants as opposed to what I'm trying to create. And Gareth, when you talked about you were doing this partly for your own artistic once, so did you ever go down that path of, everyone's asking for peanut butter and chocolate? Something that you were like, now we are catering to them as opposed to what we started out as? Or was it always like, no, we have a clear idea of what we're doing and we're going to stick to that? 'cause It's worked?
I think a bit of both. We still get inundated with requests. Some people don't even feel like a request anymore. It feels like a suggestion or a demand. You'd be better off if you did these things and you're like, just shut up. I don't personally love it because I feel that there's enough conversation around it. We're very open to things, but when people start asking for stuff that doesn't fit into what's a pretty classically driven approach in terms of our flavour combinations and our product conceptualisation. I do pop it straight away and think like, let's just focus on what we do. But again, at the end of the day, I think what happened was with us as soon as we decided we were going to grow and as soon as that growth started happening exponentially, we pretty much realised that we weren't just in the food game anymore.
We were in the business of making money. We needed to sell stuff to be able to continue to do what we do. We had a team, we had overheads at this point. This is once we moved into a kitchen we probably were a little bit more inclined to do things that we may not love, but would put bums on seats. I think what we did, and what Catherine and I, if I may say so have done well is that we've always somehow in some way made it feel like we were listening to them, but this is already also our idea. If that makes sense. We're giving them what they want, but it's like, this great idea I had as opposed to like, here's a request you gave me so I will make it.
Yes. When you open, so you've got Richmond and Collingwood. When you opened the first shop, was that during Covid or was it after Covid, I mean I guess COVID is still existing, but as in, was it after all the lockdowns in like, or was it in that time when people were still locked down but they could go and get a coffee or they could go and like get something to take away?
I think we were using initially that kitchen as a pickup spot. We were running a very similar model of pickups, only pre-orders. But we just wanted to make more and fulfil more demand. And then when everyone started coming out of lockdown and everything was more stable, I think we felt that people were not going to come and pick up a quarter or a slice a half a tart and go home and eat it. That's when we went, let's do coffee, let's get more flavours on the menu, let's make this an experience that people want to come out and enjoy at the end of lockdown. It was inevitable that we would have to do that. But then along with that have come so many more challenges in terms of running a business and having staff and all the things that are small business.
I was going to ask that exact thing because I used to get this sourdough bread from this guy in Elham and as you were talking, I was like, I don't even know if he's still going. He might be still going. But it was very easy during Lockdowns to be like, we are always home. Yes. Or I can drive over and it's less than five kilometres and I can pick it up. But then, and I feel bad saying this, but like, I haven't ordered anything from him in at least a year and a half because that you do, you just end up going back to your normal bakeries or your normal places to get things. With that, what were the things that helped you then grow that customer base? Or was it all through social media? Like how did you grow the customer base to say, you can now come here and have your coffee and you can do this? And it's not just about picking up the quarter tart.
We've had a couple of boosts along the way. Our social media has always been pretty strong in terms of community and getting messages out there. And it was in those initial stages I think people were excited to come and visit us for a slice and a coffee initially. I think now we are focused on, or Garrett's focused on the creative side. We have seven or eight tarts on the menu at any one time. We do specials on the weekend. Whereas back then we'd offer two flavours and we probably had 10 on the whole repertoire that we rotated through. Now our cookbooks coming out and there are 50 tarts and since then you've probably done another since we wrote it, and Gareth's probably done another 30 or 40. We've had to focus on what makes people want to come back.
About the second location then when you decided to launch Collingwood. And for anyone reading outside of Australia, that is another inner-city suburb right on the outskirts of the central part of Melbourne. But on the north side versus the south side, which is the other one, why did you open a second location and how did you decide on Collingwood? And again, with one location and Gareth you're so heavily there and coming up with everything, how did you then find the right staff to be able to open a second location? That's often a thing that a lot of clients will ask me, especially if they've got a retail shop where they're like, we're doing it well in this spot and there's a risk when we open a second one of getting the right manager, the right people in place because we can't be in two spots at one time. What was the thinking behind all of that?
We fell into it again. It was something that just came onto our plate without any prompting. We weren't in any way looking at doing that at that time. It was on the horizon and it was more of a pipe dream, but it almost felt like a trial run at a second location. Because the venue itself was very small, it was a sublet space. It's connected to another business, with which we have developed a good relationship over time and have some manner of synergy between the two brands, which has been good. But at the point that we took it over, we were like, how do we turn this into something? Do we want it to be a smaller version of what we have? Do we want it to be a different model altogether?
It did start off as a smaller version of what we did, which thankfully we were able to pivot away from because we found that we were far more economical and profitable and even dare I say, improved the quality of our service and product by changing. We would eventually turn it into what is now like a small satellite store where we drive a product over in the mornings and then sell it till it sells out or maybe even do a second run. It's slightly different in that we all make the pastry or all pastries out of the rear side, but finding staff at the time was quite good. We've been very blessed with having a good staff roster for the last three years. I brought a few former colleagues with me to help start things up and they've stuck around ever since.
We've seen a lot of people who have worked with me at previous venues, Ben Heston and alone stick around and be integral parts to the makeup and in terms of front, in front of house staff to run those venues and run those sites. It's been very fortuitous in that the right people have come across at the right times and we didn't have to go through a full vetting process where we trialled and tested a hundred different options before we set on the right one. We were pretty fortunate.
Garrett's brother runs our front-of-house team, which has been awesome.
Amazing. And keeping it in the family. That's good. You can have real conversations with everyone and they know where your heads are. Building any brand in the food industry is so competitive. We've seen Melbourne is well known for people adoring our food, but it's also you'll have a restaurant that pops up and then pops down it doesn't necessarily, it's a quick turnover sometimes.
What were some of the sta strategies or tactics that you employed to build the brand physically was it Cat looking at your fashion background for how it looks visually the whole atmosphere? Collingwood and Cremorne are probably very well known for being visually aesthetic and the cool kids. How did you tap into that and did you get help with a branding agency or did you just like, this is what works, our knowledge together, we can pull it together and create something amazing?
It's funny. I think even just looking back at the logo now like people have asked me on Instagram before, who did your branding? Who did your brand? I'm like, I just made it all on Canva. I made three different versions of the logo and sent them out to Garrett's family group chat, they were like, choose this one. We just had low stakes on everything at that point when we were building what the brand was going to be. It's evolved since then, but we didn't deliberate too much on it. I was just like, we'll just use this. It's like a tar shape. It's not that creative. I don't think that it is my aesthetic. I think Garrett's too, and it reflects the product.
It's meant to be simple, and refined. If you look at the interior design of our store, again, like we went into that space. It was a real blank canvas. There was nothing in there. We had a minimal budget and I just had this idea of let's just model it off the apartment where we started it all. The apartment was just like subway tiles and wooden floors, like light wood floors. We just took that idea and just did it and added some greenery. We were lucky to just make it work. A lot of small business has to do that and you never know if it's going to work or if it's going to fail. We were averse to, I was anyway pouring heaps of money into like a branding agency or anything like that.
I was like, let's just test the waters. Let's just see what happens. We've always tried to fall back on the product and I think for me, I'm like, if the product's good for me, the space, we've done the best that we can. But it's not perfect by any means. We get Google reviews being like, this sta is sterile. But everyone's going to have an opinion. But as for us, as long as they come in, they enjoy the product and they get nice service, that's our goal.
With food as well, I do feel like if it is good, people will come. I always think of Sunny's Bakery on Smith Street in Collingwood it has been there forever, Vietnamese roles and people line up every single day and if the food is good, that is a huge part of it in terms of what advice you'd give to other entrepreneurs who are wanting to start something potentially in food and also together as a couple. You guys haven't done it by halves. You've got a child in the mix here and then you've also got a book coming out very soon on the 31st of July with Hardie Grant. How have you done it all? And then what advice would you give to somebody who's reading this who's like, that's it, I'm going to start making whatever food that they're good at and selling it?
From a food perspective, I think what's important in my opinion is that I think we didn't start this until I say late in life, but I see a lot of people going out and starting businesses as a chef or food professionals trying to open their own venue with only maybe a few years of experience under the belt. I think with the availability of information these days, perhaps through YouTube and the accessibility of recipes and all these resources, a lot of chefs are particularly taking that tap, that plunge a lot younger than perhaps they would've done in the past. I'm probably part of that generation where I was called imposter syndrome or whatever you like, but I was very reluctant to take that step until I was confident that I was established. And that wasn't until I was 33.
If anyone does want to open the business, my first bit of advice would be don't do it yet. You should just work hard at your trade take in as much as you can and learn as much as you can. Also, there is a bit of a tipping point where you start to have that, the more you realise, the more you realise how little light bulb moment where you think like, I'm a bit of a superstar. I can do all these great things at my job. And then it's all of a sudden, like it goes into a new space where it's like, I just worked out that there are so many other things that I haven't nailed on yet I haven't sussed out how to do.
The important thing is that you can learn as you go, but you just need to be prepared for everything because that knowledge and that experience is what's going to take it from like a cool idea and concept that works for a little bit to like how to then sustain it. Because of your point about Melbourne's revolving door being so rapid, things are older and faster than any other city I've ever known. People still talk to me about restaurants that in London we used to go to because they were the hip new joint, they're still hip new, whereas in Melbourne you can be forgotten in the space of six months. It's about how you then get to those six months and get through the honeymoon phase and go like, all right, what do we do now to be serious operators and continue to do that? That would be my advice just focus on your trade first. Particularly with food, don't take it for granted. It's not just going to be something that you can regurgitate for the end of the day you need to always have something fresh and relevant for the people to want to consume, otherwise, you'll be forgotten quickly.
I love that. I think it's very applicable to pretty much every industry. I've had people who have also been like, I did a nine-month internship in marketing. Now I'm going to run my own agency. I'm like, maybe do a little bit more because you will learn from the people that have been in there a bit longer than you. And then Cat, would you add anything to that or even anything around asking Gareth this as well, because I hate that it always just gets asked of women, but you've got a family, you're writing a book, you have two locations Garrett's working on all these things, you're also working in speech pathology. Any advice or anything that you've had to learn that you're like, that's the right lesson, that's the right mantra, or that's helped me in this process?
For me when we started the business and there was a lot of energy behind it, I was doing everything that Gareth wasn't doing in terms of bills, accounting, marketing, customer inquiries, and everything. And from my perspective, the way that we grew organically like we got to our capacity and we went, let's do a little bit more. And we were testing the waters every time we moved from home to a shared kitchen and we increased our capacity by 700% when we moved there. And then we said, we're still selling out. It still looks good, let's take the next step. But my advice is once you get to a certain size, you need to get people who know what they're doing to help you.
I think trying to do everything is difficult and unsustainable and it holds you back in the end. Now we have people who shoot our content, we have accountants, we've got someone who does payroll. All of those things that I was interested in and trying to do. It's more serious that we've got staff, we've got we've got things and I have just wanted to go back to my career as well. I think you have to know when to call in the experts essentially. If you do get to the point where you've gotten to that size that's what I think.
On that note about experts, have either of you had business mentors or Gareth, did you have people from your hospitality career that you were like, could help? Did you have anyone that helped or even like a book that you read or anything else like a documentary or something that you're like that helped?
We did have a business mentor. It's a good friend of ours, Leon Kennedy. He's the CEO of the Mulberry Group who we share a space with a square one coffee roasts in the back end of our, of the building here at Horne. We've become like cousins or neighbours in one way or another. And through that, we met Leon, who is a bit of a business whiz. He has a big background in hospitality since he was there his entire career from what I understand. He's done everything from front of the house, from coffee to any to getting an MBA and then moving into CEO roles where he oversees several venues. His expertise and understanding of the business environment have been pivotal, I think, to our growth in terms, particularly in terms of strategy down to earth and a very real guy as well. Not afraid to give it to you straight and tell you where you need to sharpen up. Having that support and enthusiasm from him, but also like some pretty sharp tactical now has been.
A real strong player in our growth. But in terms of like chefs, I think I could probably just like tip the hat to anyone who played any part in my development as a chef from my first head chef as an apprentice Grant King up until Ashley Palmer White, who mentored me through my time at dinner Heston. All those sorts of things I can look back and see how I have been a better business owner and not just a chef as a result. Thank you. Also the guys at Loon I think are where we took a lot of good advice from, 'cause my experience in restaurants wasn't necessarily necessarily the most applicable to this environment. I learned a lot through them and got a good skeleton of how Taron would work having spent some time there.
Amazing. And you Cat?
I was just going to say that I think having those mentors or people you can ask things is so important 'cause it just helps you propel the business. If it were just Gareth and I making all the decisions, we would deliberate and deliberate and eventually do nothing. That's where we would just sit in, I'm not sure. We haven't done this before. Being able to have people to ask the questions and get advice and just be able to act on ideas is, is so important.
Amazing. What are you both most proud of from your journey in business so far?
There's been some good validation over time and whether or not that's been a validation of our success as a business or as individuals. I don't know when it was, and it's hard to pinpoint a time, but when we finally got our rhythm as a retail space here in Cremorne, I think that was probably the proudest moment. But again, you can't look back and say, yes, that one day in the calendar it was like looking back to where, how we were when we first started to like what it looks like now. I don't know how long it's looked like, or what it looks like now, so it's tricky to say. But that would be it for me. The cookbook is an incredibly humbling milestone, but for it to not fully happen yet, we're not yet, haven't fully experienced perhaps what it might be like. Those are all great occurrences in the business.
Amazing and Cat?
It's hard to say. I'll probably have to sit and think about what it is. When you're so tied up in a business, it's so hard to see the milestones along the way. But it is been an incredible journey for us. And the cookbook is something we are quite proud of the idea that people will have been interested enough to buy a book from us. Technically it's Gareth's recipes, I just co-authored it. But we've had a lot of cool opportunities come to us with brand partnerships and, and things like that and some of that stuff has been exciting.
Amazing. Tell us briefly, I know you've got lots on your plate and I'll get you to get back to your lives, but what is the book about, you mentioned before it has 50 tart recipes in it. Is it for anyone a home cook? Do you have to have some skills and knowledge of pastry chefing to be able to make the stuff? Tell us a little bit about the book that is coming out. In line with when people are reading this podcast.
I was always a little bit reluctant to do a book again my reluctance has always gotten better of me saying, but I didn't necessarily feel like we were ready or I was ready, should I say, to put a whole bunch of my recipes together into cookbooks. I've always, I suppose the cookbooks that I buy are from very accomplished chefs and they've always seen it as a chronicling of a chef's great career. I didn't feel that particularly within Tarts. I'd spent the last six years of my career writing recipes developing stuff and putting things together for other people's businesses. I didn't have a repertoire of dishes and recipes that I could call my own. Then only been doing my cooking for three years or thereabout, not even at the stage that we said yes to the book. It was quiet, I thought it was still very fresh and I was like, do I have this great career of creativity to draw from? But when we took the plunge we felt like we were just, it would just maybe move into that timeframe where it felt right.
Every author feels like this and I run a course on how to get a book published and I say to people, that it's a two-year process from when you get offered a book deal to getting all the contracts sorted to writing it, then to getting it printed, which can take nine months, then marketing it. I felt the same even with Passion Purpose Profit, there are things in there that I'm like, I wrote it in 2019 and I've changed as a person and there are things so always there for the reprint as well. But you are probably the worst critic, and you have this knowledge, whereas most people who are going to open that book will not be critiquing it in the same way that you are. But we are worse own worst critics and I can't wait to see the book. What's your favourite type or Cat did you want to add anything about the book?
The best thing about the book for me is that it's going to hopefully answer a lot of questions that people message me on Instagram that I don't know the answers to because I'm not a baker. People are interested in how to, how do the chefs portion the tarts, and how do they make the pastry so thin. What do they do if the pastry is cracking? All of those questions just to nail it. I think everything's going to be in there. Everything that Gareth knows about tarts with some of our favourite recipes I think of all time and our classic tarts that haven't probably changed that much since we first started. Chocolate caramel and pecan butterscotch are still on the menu and people still message me and say they're still my favourites. That's what people didn't expect and I think is most exciting for us.
Do either of you have a favourite tart or is it like a favourite child? Do you have a tart that you don't get sick of even though this is your business, that you're like, I could still eat this pretty much every day?
There are two for me and they're both in the book. My two favorites would be the cherry and almond, which is, I think one of the first ones we ever did. It was just a simple almond French pan with marinated sour cherries in it, in shortcrust pastry and ice and sugar on top. It's super simple. It's inspired by a dessert that we used to do when I started my apprenticeship 17 years ago, 18 years ago. The test of time and then I just took a component of it and put it in a tough shell and it doesn't say the menu very often because it is super simple and we've made things a little bit more elaborate than we used to, but it's one of the most delicious. The other one would probably be on the other end of the spectrum, the more complex one that we do, which is our Saint Honore, which is hazelnut caramel with baked vanilla custard. Then there's the caramelised shoe pastry and vanilla pastry cream and creme diplomat all piped on top in a very beautiful, but again, very classic manner, which is why I love it so much. I think it's a reflection of Tarts Anon and what Tarts Anon is.
Amazing. And Cat, do you get sick of tarts or, I mean this sounds like the idea of heaven that you are with somebody who can make beautiful tarts all day long? But are you, do you still eat tarts?
I have a taste here and there of the new stuff, I think my favourite ever was the passion fruit and ginger or the pumpkin and spiced caramel, those two classics as well that I just love. I'm not going to say I eat a tart every day. I haven't had as many, I haven't had that much that I can't eat it for a special occasion. It's still a very enjoyable experience when I do one.
Amazing. Thank you so much both for your time. You're both super busy, so what is the best way for people to connect with you, and follow you? If they're not in Melbourne, obviously if they come to Melbourne, make it a destination stop, but if they aren't, where can they find you and your book?
They can find us on Instagram, which is @tarts_anon or our website, tartsanon.com.au where we've got a contact form if you want to get in touch with us or book you through our website. And Gareth is signing all the copies that will come via us, but they're also available on Booktopia, Amazon and internationally as well. It's being published by Hardie Grant UK and Hardie Grant US also. It should be easy to find us, we hope.
Yes, it will be. We'll link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on. I so appreciate it and I'm going to buy one of your signed copies and get baking. I love baking. I'm nowhere near a good level at it, but I love it. My mom used to always bake her mom baked and I think it's such a beautiful thing. I'm teaching my 11-year-old, he's just started baking and I just think it's such a beautiful act of love for the people in your life. Thank you so much.
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Amazing. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure.
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What a lovely, honest, real chat. I just absolutely adored that. I have to say that I didn't know much about Tarts Anon before I did this interview. Shout out to Clarissa from True Tribe who set the interview up, but I didn't know much about them and honestly, I am such a huge fan after I spoke to them, I've pre-ordered their book. I'm very excited about deliveries coming to Warrandayte because I just love the story. I love how they were so real. I love so many parts of that. I love that Gareth went out and stocked shelves at the supermarket and was like, I can still do this passion and something will change and it will come back, but for now, I need some money so I'm going to go and do this. I also love that Gareth talked so openly about his journey as a business owner, as somebody so passionate and invested and curious in flavours and design and technique.
You can tell he just absolutely loves what he does and then to bring that into a business. And I just love their relationship. I love how supportive they are of each other and I love that even though Cat comes from a speech pathology background, which is very different to running a pastry physical location and beautiful pastry shop and brand, she was willing to jump into that with all systems going and fully understanding, how do we market this? How do we get this connection? How do we create this audience? There's so much in it, I just think they've got an incredible brand and I can't wait to see how it evolves. And just an amazing story behind it, an amazing strength. I think that is something that they've been able to support each other on, but also draw from their inner buckets to be able to create what they've created.
If you are in Melbourne, check out Tarts Anon in Cremorne and Collingwood. You can also get it delivered. I also know you can have it at multiple beautiful restaurants that they work with as well. And now you can start trying to make it yourself at home through the Tarts Anon book, which we will link to in the show notes. Before that, I want to highlight two things that stood out to me. I mean, honestly, this was one of those interviews where it was hard to just pinpoint two things because there were so many parts of it. It's also an interview that I'm going to listen to with my eldest son. And just the tenacity, the determination, we are not going to just give up, we are going to keep going, yes, we're going to have to pivot and change, but we're going to do that.
We believe in our product and we believe in what we're doing and we stand by everything. And we know we have the experience and expertise because we've put in the hard yards, there's just so much in this. But I'm going to highlight two things that stood out for me. The first is the idea of becoming the best so you can create the best. I love it when I ask Gareth about what his advice would be for people who want to start a similar business and he was like, don't start it yet go out and get the experience. He talked about, how he didn't start this until his thirties. I didn't start my business until I was 35 and I mean I'd been working literally since I was 14 and nine months, but I had been working in marketing by that stage for well over 10 years, maybe 15 years before then.
When did I start? I was 20 or 21 when I started. In marketing and I'm now 44. That is a lot of experience and a lot of time and a lot of mistakes and changing and challenging and doing different things and learning from other people. I love that he said he went out, worked at some of the top places in the world, and learned from the absolute best. And I'm sure what he learned was not just the elements of pastry and all of the incredible things that he does with the food part of it, but also the business, the customer service, the way you treat your staff, the way you schedule things, roster things. I mean the hospitality industry is renowned for having to have systems, otherwise, it does not work. I always say this, I teach a lot of classes on systems and lately, I've been referring to The Bear, the TV show that I'm sure a lot of people will watch and a lot of people in hospitality probably love or hate, but it's so obvious that's in the very obvious example of how much systems are needed and necessary in all businesses, but particularly hospitality businesses because it's so front facing.
It's so if your systems aren't working, your customers know about it right away. But he would've learned so many of those things. I love that he talked about going and doing the work, going and learning from people, and going and training other people. Learn all of that before you start on your own. I remember early on in my business, somebody came to me for mentorship and they said, “I'd love you to be my mentor.” They went through a couple of documents that they had and their pitch decks and I helped them work through things. I remember saying to them, do you want to do this because you've had about a year of experience and maybe it would be better to keep getting another couple of years of experience getting paid by somebody else, getting your compassionate leave, your sick leave, all the things that you don't get if you own your own business and maybe learning that bit more before you go out to fully do it for yourself.
I'm not saying you can't, and of course, there are loads of people who go out and do it from day one and you hear these stories all the time, but I agree with Gareth that if you want to be the best, you have to put in the work and you have to learn from other people who know a lot more than you, particularly when you're starting. I know that I would not at all be able to run the business that I have now if I hadn't done a huge amount of work at different companies under different mentors. And of course, some people I worked with weren't the greatest, some people were the greatest. Even the people that weren't the greatest, I learned so much from them. I love that he said that because I just think sometimes the whole idea of having a business, running a business, starting a brand, it's all seen as just so easy and you can just go out and do it.
Whereas I know that if you are in an employed role and you are learning still and you are still getting challenged and maybe it's not the right time right now, maybe there are still things you can do. Even when I decided to quit my job, my last job ahead of marketing in the six months before just like between deciding and quitting, I told myself, what else do I need to learn at this place? What else can I get from this company whilst I'm still here? One of those things was upping my skillset with Excel. So I know how to use Microsoft Excel or mainly I use Google Sheets, but I didn't know certain formulations and I knew that I could do better at certain things like that. I spent some time with our finance person at the company that I was at, at the bigger umbrella company and I asked her, can you show me at lunchtime?
Can you just go through some of these things? I knew I needed to have that skillset to go and run numbers and do all these things for other clients in my own company, but I could be better and I could learn from somebody incredible at Excel in my lunch break. And she did. She showed me so much. She also showed me a lot about hiring and pricing strategies and hiring staff and so much stuff that has helped me. If you're reading these and you have a dream of owning a business, you can do that. You can do it. But I would say much like Gareth that have you got everything that you can from the employed role that you're in right now, because believe me, you can learn so much and be paid by somebody else to learn that before you go out on your own.
I agree with him on that point. The next point was one that Cat brought up and she talked about this idea of expansion and the capacity and understanding where are we going and getting to a point when you just have to realise you can't do it all yourself and that you have to bring in experts or you have to bring in and pay and invest in people who maybe know how to do something more than you do or can bring you to that next level. And she talked about getting people to help with their marketing content and getting people to help with accounting and just other things. I feel like a lot of small business owners are very reluctant to spend money on a consultant who can come in and potentially has 20 or 30 years of experience in pricing strategy or planning or stock or inventory or warehouse management or something else that they can see in seconds sometimes what needs to be done that may take you months or years to come up to that solution.
I remember years and years ago we were thinking of making some changes to our house and I had a friend over who was a landscape architect, but had also worked in design and interiors and we for ages had been trying to figure out how to make our tiny little bathroom better and put a shower differently or how could we do this or that. I remember she said, why wouldn't you just change the laundry in the bathroom? Your laundry is huge and your bathroom is not, so why don't you just swap them? They've both got all the water attached and they've both got doors and you could just change this door from the laundry outside to a window and then make the tiny little bathroom into a laundry. I was blown away. She said that within two seconds of seeing the house, she was so used to looking at problems and solutions when it came to designing a house or a space or a garden.
She just knew that it wasn't anything for her to say that because she had so many years of experience in looking at these things instead of me and my husband who'd spent years going, how do we make our small bathroom better? Instead of just going, why don't we just swap it with the laundry? It made so much sense. The laundry was about two and a half times the size. These are the things when Cat was saying sometimes it just, you get to a point and you go, I need to get somebody who knows what they're doing to come in and help and look at what they've been able to create. And they were able to create a huge part of that themselves and then they outreached and got other people to come in and help them.
Sometimes that is hard. It is hard and it's hard to spend money as a small business owner especially right now in, in everything that's going on, but sometimes spending that money is going to save you a whole lot of money and heartache and time in the future. I know I've talked about it many times and Scott, who's currently editing, this exact podcast, so Scott is an incredible podcast editor. He has been working with me since day one of this podcast because I knew I was not a podcast editor, I didn't know much about sound. I'm not going to be as perfectionist as he is about making it sound good. I don't want to spend hours and hours and hours and months trying to figure this out when I could pay somebody who knows what they're doing and can do it and I can trust them and I can just put it into their hands to do a great job.
I love that she brought that up because it can be something that people worry about, but it can be just doing wonders for your business. That is the end of the interview with the wonderful Gareth and Cat from Tarts Anon. Now of course you can check out their book at Tarts Anon and we'll link to that in the show notes. You can also check out all of their incredible food on their website, which is tartsanon.com.au. You can also check them out on Instagram @tarts_anon, and we'll link to all of that in the show notes, which you'll be able to find for this particular episode at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/434. Thank you so much again, Gareth and Cat for coming on. Congratulations on your book. I hope the launch is brilliant. Thank you for reading this episode. If you found this useful, and I'm sure you did because there are lots of insights and tips, please leave us a review. You can do that on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to this podcast. Thanks so much. See you next time. Bye.
