Table of contents
I got into cooking partly by a happy accident. When I was in my mid-teens, I kept getting kicked out of schools. My father, in a brilliantly insightful move or possibly just because he’d had enough, told me one Saturday morning to “go out and get a job”. As a 14-year-old, I found myself working as a kitchenhand-come-assistant in a bakery-cafe, and I found my people.
Find your place and your people
I think there are a couple of things I enjoyed about that job. I loved the craft of it. The technical side of baking is very interesting. If you want to do it properly, it’s quite intellectual, but at its heart, it’s still fundamentally a trade. It’s something you get better at by doing it, not by being overly bookish. So that appealed to me.
I liked the people. Finding a group of people who were kind and patient but very hard-working and had very clear expectations, I think, psychologically, that works for me. So, I think it was partly the people and partly the craft.
Also, because baking is such a busy thing, there’s always space for people who want to carve something out for themselves. The reality is that there’s no baker in the world where the people running it can do everything; they need to be able to delegate some tasks. So, if you’re a self-starter like me, very quickly, opportunities present themselves.
Seek out new experiences
I moved around a bit and ended up in cafes, restaurants, and bakeries. As a teenager, you move around, which is really good, particularly for young people learning their craft.
No matter what you do, moving around allows you to access the skill sets and vision of very different people with different perspectives, which is really a very rich way to learn. I’m all in favour of that. It certainly worked for me.
Embrace opportunities
I was running a restaurant in Woolloomooloo in Sydney when a producer, a regular at the place, called one day. She was supposed to be filming at another restaurant, but the chef cancelled on her. She said, “Is there any chance you could host us to film a little ‘day in the restaurant’?’ And I said, “Sure, of course. How can I help?”
I’m very much about hospitality before anything else. This is somebody who needed something from us, so we made time and space available. I didn’t think anything of it. I was just being me. They were in a rush, and at the end, she said, “We’ve got to get you to cook something!”
So, with no vision in mind, I just made something on the spot. I had no idea what I was creating, but, for me, it was a bit of entertainment. It turned out she was married to the series producer at Better Homes & Gardens. When she was editing some stuff on a computer at home, he walked past and went, “Who’s that idiot? I want to meet him.” It went from there.
Have the right attitude
A thousand opportunities pass you by each and every day. Some of them are great, some less so – but they’re all there. What has to happen in order for them to become materially interesting is three things.
Number one, you have to recognise that there are opportunities out there. You have to accept that premise. Secondly, you have to see the opportunity for what it is in that moment. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, you have to be prepared to do what it takes to take advantage of it.
And so, working out how to take advantage of an opportunity often really starts with working out how to say no to other things. What are you prepared to give up? For me, I was prepared to give up my only day off every week, which is Monday, to film.
I wanted to create a community business. I love being part of a community. I think it’s something that has really been lost in a lot of ways in Australia, particularly for small businesses. I think that if you want a business that’s going to hang out for the long term, you absolutely need to invest in your community. I don’t think there’s another way to do it.”
Ed Halmagyi → Owner
Be helpful and hospitable
I ended up doing TV for 20 years. No one works in television for 20 years, certainly not presenting. The key is to see how you can help. And really, what that comes down to is the very principle that guides what I’ve done my whole career, which is hospitality.
In the end, what you’re really talking about is a bunch of people trying to make a TV show who have a bunch of needs, and the question is, what can you do for them? How can you make their life easier? And for the people watching at home, how can you enrich their lives?
Find what makes you happy
I never really stepped away from cookery. Everything from running a catering company to consulting to content creation, we had a whole range of different things we were doing in the food space along the way. But bakery is very much where my heart is. It’s the thing that’s always made me happiest. It’s something I think I’m pretty good at.
The idea of Avner’s itself, I probably spent five years on. We used to have a test kitchen in Warriewood [in Northern Sydney] where we filmed stuff: content for clients, rescue development, that kind of thing. Every Friday morning, when I was in Sydney and not travelling for work, I would go there around 2am and bake. And amongst everything else, I would always bake challah and bagels.
That wasn’t for any particular reason, mostly it just made me feel good about the world; it was a small investment in myself. But we used to go and deliver the challah to Jewish families on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, as a little gift. You can’t buy good challah, so it was a nice way of helping them to have a better Shabbat. And that just felt like a good thing to do until I realised, ‘Actually, this is a really, really good product that we’re making. What’s the chance of doing that commercially?’ And it turns out there is a real chance.
Have a vision for your business
We set out to do three different things with Avner’s. Number one is to share the cultural heritage – I love Jewish bakery. I think it’s delicious, and most people haven’t tried it. The second thing I really wanted to do was to create something which showed Sydney and Australia what it means to be Jewish.
The third part is that I wanted to create a community business. I love being part of a community. I think it’s something that has really been lost in a lot of ways in Australia, particularly for small businesses. I think that if you want a business that’s going to hang out for the long term, you absolutely need to invest in your community. I don’t think there’s another way to do it.
Choose products that help you run your business well
I assumed that most point-of-sale operations would be fundamentally the same; they’d all be okay. What I didn’t expect when I first started learning about the Square Point of Sale was how good the customer support was. It is one of the most important bits.
I mean, if I’m buying anything, I’m not buying a piece of technology. What I care about is having something that allows me to serve customers quickly, works accurately, and gives me the reporting data I want. More importantly, I’m buying into an ecosystem where problems can be solved when I need help.
