The Dream Stage of Business: What It Actually Cost Me (And Why I'd Do It Again)

Fall 2019 Dani's first Professional Photoshoot

There is a version of my Dream Stage story that I have told many times.

It starts in 2015, when I wrote my first business plan for a teaching kitchen. It moves through six years of working in agricultural lending and food safety, building skills and savings and stability. It pauses at January 1, 2019, when I officially launched Dani's Kitchen Shop as a cookie business from my home kitchen. It ends somewhere around March 2021, when I signed the papers on a commercial property and the dream became a building with my name on it.

That story is true. Every part of it happened.

But it leaves out the part that actually changed everything.

Six Years is a Long Time to Wait

I want you to understand something about why my Dream Stage lasted as long as it did.

It wasn't because I was afraid of working hard. Anyone who knows me or this business knows that isn't the issue. I was working harder than I probably should have been from the very beginning.

It was because I was doing something else at the same time that required everything I had.

I was building my family.

Herbie and I knew we wanted children. And I knew — in the way that women in this country are quietly and constantly made to know — that if I was going to grow babies, I needed stability first. I needed health insurance. I needed a salary that didn't fluctuate with order volume. I needed the kind of security that a brand-new creative business simply cannot offer.

So I stayed. I worked. I saved. I kept the dream in the drawer.

Six years, I gave myself to the job before I gave myself permission to dream out loud.

And I want to be careful here, because I don't want to frame that as a mistake. It wasn't. It was a rational, loving, responsible choice. I made it with full awareness. But I also want to name what it was: it was a trade. A trade that women make quietly, constantly, and rarely receive credit for.

We are told to be practical. We are told to be patient. We are told that the timing isn't right, the idea isn't proven, the market is uncertain. And often, underneath all of that "practical" advice is a reality that no one says plainly: if you want to be a mother and a business owner, you will have to sequence those things. And you will almost certainly be asked to put the business second.

I am not telling you this to be bitter. I am telling you this because I think naming it honestly is the beginning of building something different.

What the Dream Stage Actually Looked Like

My Dream Stage was not glamorous.

It was me, decorating cookies at my kitchen table after my day job, learning techniques from YouTube videos, responding to DMs from people who wanted to order something. It was weekends and early mornings and staying up too late. It was building something that most people around me couldn't quite take seriously yet because I was still showing up to a different job every Monday morning.

In January 2019, I launched officially. And within a few months, something shifted. Orders were coming in. People were responding. The cookies were getting better and the business was getting real.

Eight months in, I did my first professional cookie photoshoot.

I remember getting dressed that morning. I remember feeling proud and a little terrified and completely in love with what I was building. I was also, at that point, newly pregnant.

I didn't know yet what that pregnancy would cost me.

The Week That Changed Everything

I lost that baby.

I am not going to dress that up or soften it. Pregnancy loss is one of those experiences that women carry quietly because we are expected to — because it happens early, or because it's common, or because the world has not built much space for the grief of something that never quite became visible to anyone but you.

But it was real. It was mine. And the week after it happened, I quit my day job.

Not because I had a plan. Not because the business was ready. Not because the timing was right by any conventional measure.

Because I knew — in the bone-deep, wordless way you know things after grief strips away everything that isn't essential — that if I was going to grow a baby, something had to change. I needed a different life. I needed to be building something that was mine, on terms that were mine, in a way that left room for me to be a person, not just an employee.

I don't know how to explain this in a way that sounds fully rational, because it wasn't fully rational. It was a decision made from the gut. A decision that said: I cannot keep living the same way and expect anything to be different.

So I walked away. And I started building.

Three Months Later, I Went Back

Dani's Return to OSU in 2020

Here is the part of the story I don't usually tell.

Three months after I quit — three months into going all in on Dani's Kitchen Shop — I went back to a job.

Not the same job. I returned to a prior position at Oregon State University, teaching, because I needed what that job could give me: health insurance and a stable income. My husband is self-employed. Between the two of us, we had no safety net for what I knew I still wanted: to grow our family. To have another baby. And to do that with any sense of security, I needed a paycheck I could count on and benefits I could rely on.

So I went back.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it's important.

Going back wasn't failure. It wasn't giving up on the dream. It was me making a clear-eyed, loving, completely unglamorous choice to do what my family needed — even when it meant swallowing some pride, rearranging the timeline I'd imagined, and trusting that the business would still be there when I was ready to return to it.

I stayed at OSU for one year and nine months. I ran Dani's Kitchen Shop alongside it. I kept taking orders, kept refining the business, kept dreaming about what it would look like to do this full time. And when my daughter turned one, I quit.

For good this time.

What This Tells You About the Dream Stage

I share this timeline not because it's tidy — it isn't — but because I think it reflects something true about what the Dream Stage actually looks like for most people.

It is rarely a straight line. It is rarely a single brave leap followed by uninterrupted momentum. More often, it is a dream held for years before you say it out loud. A launch that happens before you feel ready. A loss that forces a decision before you've made a plan. A retreat that looks like giving up but is actually just love wearing a practical disguise. And then, finally, a commitment that holds.

Here is what I know after living it:

In the Dream Stage, you are not just choosing a business. You are choosing a life. And the life you are building around the business matters just as much as the business itself.

The Weight Women Carry Here

I want to name something plainly, because I think leaving it unnamed does a disservice to every woman reading this who has wrestled with the same thing.

The decision about when and whether to have children — how that timing intersects with a career, a business, a dream — falls disproportionately on women. We are the ones who sequence. We are the ones who wait until the timing is right, who step back from opportunities to ensure stability for a family, who absorb the financial and professional cost of growing human beings.

I did not resent any of this. I made my choices with full eyes open, and I would make them again. But I want to name the weight of it, because pretending it isn't there doesn't make it lighter for the next woman who carries it.

I delayed my dream for four years in part to build the stability I needed to have children. I went back to a day job three months after quitting in part to have the second child I wanted. These were not small sacrifices made without thought. They were the cost of building a life alongside a business — and that cost is real, and it is unequal, and it deserves to be said out loud.

And I also believe — genuinely, not just because I'm supposed to — that it is a gift.

Not the pain. Not the grief. Not the sequencing and the trade-offs and the feeling of being torn between what you want and what your family needs.

The clarity.

When you are forced to choose — really choose — what matters most, you stop drifting. You stop putting things off for a someday that might be better. You stop waiting for a permission that was always yours to give. The losses and the detours and the humbling returns to a job you'd already left — they show you, very clearly, what you are actually building toward and why.

That clarity is the gift. And it shapes everything that comes after.

Where Are You in Your Dream Stage?

If you are reading this and you are in it right now — quietly holding an idea you haven't let yourself say out loud, weighing it against everything else in your life, trying to figure out what you're willing to trade and what you're not — I want you to know something.

The Dream Stage is not wasted time. A dream held privately for four years is not indecision. Going back to a job you already left is not failure. These are not signs that you aren't serious enough.

They are the shape of a real life being lived while a dream is being built.

And the fact that you keep coming back to it — even when the timing isn't clean, even when grief or practicality or love has pulled you in a different direction — that tells you something important.

It's still there. Which means it's still yours.

If you want to understand the full framework — all five stages of building a bakery business, and where you currently are in your own journey — I have a free quiz and starter resources at daniskitchenshop.com/a-bakery-of-your-own. You can grab my free Dreamer Guide Here!

And if this post landed with you — if something here felt true about your own story — I would love to hear about it. You can find me on Instagram @daniskitchenshop, or leave a note in the comments.

This week is for the dreamers. The ones still in it, the ones who made it through, and the ones who aren't sure which one they are yet.

You belong here.

— Dani

Dani Annala is the owner of Dani's Kitchen Shop in Hood River, Oregon — a custom cookie bakery, teaching kitchen, and growing platform for bakery entrepreneurs. She has made over 170,000 cookies, taught 1,400+ students, and spent the last decade building a business that fits her life rather than consuming it. She lives on a pear farm with her husband Herbie, their two children, Aatto and Winnie, and an unreasonable number of dahlia tubers.