Rick Carroll – Owner of Beigel

Beigel’s Rick Carroll had to reach a crisis point to find his true creative calling

Sometimes the life we are living doesn’t quite suit our nature and usually, if we are lucky, we eventually find our true path to our happy place.  Since our work is where we spend most of our time, it is a significant piece of the jigsaw and if it’s not going well, then our whole life is affected.

For Rick it was a series of life changing events, starting with the death of his beloved grandmother, that started a chain reaction towards his starting a brand new business baking bagels.

“Ever since school, my life was all about fitting in, I worked in corporate sales for 20 years and suffered under the pressure of performing and this led to my having a breakdown due to exhaustion. I had a new family and I didn’t know how to bond with my new son, I was so far removed from my true self and caught up in a depressive cycle which ultimately led to my losing my job.

It took this crisis point for Rick to re-assess his life and to accept that the corporate life was not for him.

“On our first day we received 130 bagel orders and before we knew it, we were delivering our bagels every Friday to households across Greater Manchester, we were bombarded with orders from our website and Facebook and had to increase our deliveries to two days a week and then gradually more.

“The business really took off when the owner of Manchester coffee company, ManCoCo loved our bagels so much he asked us to supply their coffee house in Manchester.  It was at this point Rick realised he could no longer run his business from home and decided to sign up for a lease on a shipping container at Mediacity.

“This coincided with the Van Gogh Alive exhibition, which brought us many more mouths to feed,  and as they say the rest is history.  I still make all my bagels at home every morning and supply wholesale to ManCoCo as well as running Beigel here at Mediacity.