New Age music and incense calm Ben Rose’s tiny office at his bustling La Gemma Fine Italian Pastries. Head shaved, content grin and hands clasped at his glass-top desk, no clutter in sight, Rose embodies a peaceful Buddha, even as he talks 15-hour days and small business uncertainties.

Just outside Rose’s door, head baker Roberta Campani juggles three employees in the boisterous kitchen. One weighs dough for bread loaves. Another brushes focaccia with tomato sauce. A new worker is seeding Roma tomatoes. Campani herself is juggling various elaborate pastry creations while training the crew.

Like Rose, Campani is focused, at times frustrated, but at ease. Both she and Rose left pinnacle career positions to land at their happy places in this little bakery on 17th Street in Wilmington.

“The bakery name is La Gemma, but the company name is The Peaceful Baking Company, and I want to make sure we can live that and be that as closely as possible,” Rose said.

Stress switch

A professional baker born in Clinton, Rose grew up helping his mother and grandmother prepare Southern desserts like pecan pie, banana pudding and layer cakes. His cooking career began at a wholesale bakery that produced up to 400 cakes a week, Rose said.

When a popular restaurant named NOFO opened in the late 1990s at Wilmington’s The Forum shopping center, Rose helped launch and manage the place. Five years in, he was ready for another big challenge.

“Little did I know how big a challenge I was going to get,” he said.

A NOFO catering client with a burgeoning legal firm tapped Rose to manage the office. Rose found himself administering eight attorneys and 10 staff members.

“From there, the office grew,” and so did Rose, he said. “Not one to just stay in a box, I just kept adding on to my responsibilities. I enjoy growth. I enjoy learning new things because I think it helps keep the creative juices going.”

The work was rewarding, the hours inflexible. When Rose wasn’t at work, he was thinking about work. After a decade, including the addition of Rose and his partner Wil Wilkenson’s three children, Rose faced a difficult decision: should he trade a secure, good-paying job for the happiness and calm he felt as a baker?

Meantime, after running their bakery for four years, La Gemma founders Campani and her husband, Jim Gannon, were finally seeing substantial profits. Major wholesale customers were knocking, and farmers market sales were rising. Site expansion was mandatory, but the couple was dealing with a more worrisome situation at home: their new daughter suffered severe asthma.

“She was getting sicker and sicker. It was hard to keep going with the bakery. We started to see La Gemma becoming more like a factory and not the original mom and pop,” Campani said.

Growth was welcome, but Campani remembers the exact date she decided to forgo the opportunities.

“It was Dec. 16, 2012,” she said. “My daughter had the worst asthma attack ever. We thought she was dying that night.”

Shortly after, on a drive to deliver a wholesale order to Raleigh, Campani decided to sell the business so that she and Gannon could spend more time with their two young daughters.

Angel in the details

Both Campani and Rose struggled with financial concerns related to their career changes. Campani and her husband searched for jobs inside and outside of Wilmington, all the while wishing they could cling to the bakery they worked so hard to build.

Rose had prepared a bakery business plan, crunched the numbers and consulted business experts, but he still wondered if a bakery would be viable. Could he end up just as or more stressed than before?

Rose and Campani connected when Rose saw La Gemma’s for-sale advertisement. The turnkey had a following and proven success. Rose could maintain the business’s integrity and add his own touches along the way.

The sale also afforded Campani an opportunity to remain at La Gemma. Rose asked her to teach him Italian recipes, and he trusted her to run the kitchen. A trained artist, Campani relishes creating fancy pastries and elegant, hand-painted cakes, things previously sidelined by day-to-day business operations.

With Rose handling hiring, marketing, paperwork, equipment repairs and other business issues,  Campani spends time doing the cooking she loves and improving her family life.
“Without even knowing it, I was transmitting much of my frustration to home,” Campani said. “Now, we are just doing so good.”

Campani’s daughter is well, Gannon has settled into a good job and the future is bright.

“I want to open a business again, a food business,” Campani said, advising potential career changers for family to remember that opportunities return.

“I have to remind myself, ‘You can’t do it right now, but you can do it later,’” Campani said, looking ahead to when her children are older.

Rose is as content. At La Gemma, he applies his entire skill set – marketing, client relations, employee management, office operations, public relations and his beloved baking.

“I find the whole process calming,” Rose said of baking. “And who doesn’t need calm?”

Hours are long but flexible, meaning Rose can spend more time with family.

Smooth shifting

Thirty-four percent of survey responders told Monster Worldwide Inc. in a March poll of nearly 1,000 users of the company’s job search site Monster.com that work-life balance was among their workplace stressors. Eighty-four percent of respondents claimed a stressful job has impacted their personal lives. Twenty-one percent reported family or relationship issues as a result of work stress.

When asked how they coped, 66 percent of respondents answered “nothing,” an unwise choice, Monster career advice expert Mary Ellen Slayter said in a press release.

“While every job will come with a degree of stress it is important to act if it becomes unmanageable,” Slayter said. “It’s good to start by tracking your stress levels and looking for common triggers. Your workplace stress might feel like one big cloud of anxiety, but there are likely many contributing factors and evaluating them individually is crucial.”

Determining stress causes helps one decide if they need to change jobs and what work would make them happy, Rose noted.

“Some problems, once isolated, might have simple solutions, like making adjustments to an unbalanced schedule or ensuring you always take a break at lunchtime,” Slayter said.

Before and after a decision is made, trust your gut have a support system in place, Rose suggested. Choose friends, family and professionals who will lend honest, constructive feedback.

 “And most of all,” Campani said, “be happy in what you do.”