Owen McShane had originally worked as a teacher for more than a decade before changing career
Owen McShane has supplied pizza dough and freshly baked sourdough to the hospitality industry for the last 10 years(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After working as a teacher for more than a decade, Owen McShane, 49, decided to leave the profession behind and turn his hobby of baking into a full-time job. Moving to Liverpool from Pembrokeshire to study at university in 1995, Owen quickly settled in the city before marrying his wife, Liz, 10 years later.
Since then, he went on to teach at Cardinal Heenan high school in West Derby for 14 years. But, after nearly a decade and a half in education, he said that his time in the role had run its course. Owen told the ECHO: “I’d been a teacher for a long time and I’ve worked particularly with sort of hard to reach pupils and I felt that I’d kind of done my stint if you see what I mean. Also, teaching is becoming a more and more difficult profession to be successful in.”
While he had felt that his time in education was coming to an end, it was a moment of “boredom” at home that paved the way for what would be the start of a major career change. He said: “I was at home one day and I was bored, so I looked in my cupboard and I found some flour and some yeast and I thought ‘ooh that makes bread, I’ll try and make some bread’. I tried to make a loaf of bread and it was awful, but I had that typical manly instinct of going ‘no I won’t be beaten, I’m going to make good bread’.”
He rustles up his baked goods from Lovelocks Coffee Shop in the city centre(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After a period of trial and error, he gradually began to hone his baking ability to the point where he would eventually let friends try his creations. He said: “I was looking for a way out of teaching and people would come round to my house and they’d have some of my toast and they’d go ‘that’s really nice, you should do that for a living’ and then one thing led to another and baking became my way out of teaching.”
However, while he had come to the decision to finally leave his teaching career behind, the next step was trying to get his business idea off the ground. After speaking to a close friend who owned a climbing centre in the city, he offered Owen the opportunity to set up as a baker in the centre’s kitchen, which was currently unused. He said: “I had literally saved my last pay check of being a teacher, I only had about £2,000, so I bought second hand equipment off eBay and I just started. It was probably quite a stupid, knee jerk reaction thing to do, but I thought ‘if I don’t try now, I’m never going to do it’. So, on a shoe string, I started the business.”
Looking back to the start of his career in the industry, Owen recalled some of the early challenges to starting out on his own. He said: “The challenges were pretty much everything to do with business, because having been a teacher for 14 years, my national insurance was paid for me, my pension was paid for me, I was just on a payroll. I didn’t know about bookkeeping, accounting, marketing, these are all things that I basically had to learn the hard way.”
He had originally worked as a teacher before taking the leap and starting his own business(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
After taking a risk and deciding to start his one man operation 10 years ago, Owen’s business, Soured-O’s, has now supplied his freshly baked bread and uncooked pizza dough to some of the city’s most popular independent hospitality venues.
Going through a long and thorough process to make sure that he manages to complete all of his orders for the day, he starts his day in the kitchen at Lovelocks Coffee Shop while most are still in bed. He said: “I start everyday at about 6.30am. It begins by picking up my flour and going to the bakery. The bread that was shaped the day before, I put the oven on and I bake that, so the bread is baked fresh every morning.”
Once he has put his orders of freshly cooked bread into the oven, he then moves onto the next stage of his daily routine. He added: “While that is baking, I start doing my mixes of dough for customers pizza dough and bread. Those mixes go into boxes to prove for two hours, the bread comes out and I put it out to cool. I do my washing up and then deliver that bread and pizza dough to various customers.”
He said that a close bond with his customers has been one of reasons behind his success(Image: Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)
Over the years, Owen has had to manage the various changes that have made it harder for independent businesses in the hospitality sector, but he has found that one thing has helped stand him in good stead. He said: “I think the most important thing is actually having a very personal one-to-one relationship with all of my customers, so they know me, they know my name. If they’re desperate for something, they know that they can call me. I just feel that if I was a faceless supplier at the end of an email address there’s no relationship there.”
While, like all business owners, his first priority is to earn a living, he said that there is a somewhat lesser known part to what he does, that gives him and his family extra pride.
He said: “I think the family are very proud of what I do because there’s another element to my business. The commercial side of my business supports the community orientated part of the business. So, I make profit and that allows me to go and do things like free bread making lessons in schools or help schools set up their own bakeries. Once you’ve been a teacher, you never stop being a teacher.”