A small fortune if you start out with a big fortune.
I've seen several of them come and go, minus their money.
It usually starts when they listen to some fool who tells them "you should open your own bakery".
Home cakery's can do very well, but commercial bakery is a fools game.
Most of them are surviving by selling coffee , light lunch and sandwiches.
I know from direct experience of many who look like they're very busy but aren't making profit.
Spoke to one owner who was doing $20K just on sat and sunday but still not making any profit, he was injecting $50K every 3 months.
He sold out after dropping $2M into the place.
A woman who bought one of my locations now has 15 cafes, she was a movie producer in Israel, she isn't making money but keeps expanding, I've seen that play out before, they believe if they can just get to a critical mass they will begin to make a profit, it doesn't work.
A guy I met told me he had a sourdough bakery in western MA, made nice bread and kept expanding but in the end couldn't make his loan payments, the bank called the loan in and that was that, he was an experienced baker. What he failed to see was the bigger volume of accounts meant he needed more vans, delivery drivers etc etc. But then he needed more volume to pay for the vans and drivers, in the end the balloon popped.
My brother worked for a woman who made great bread from home, everyone told her she should open a bakery, her husband is a doctor so they had cash, 4 years and $250K later she offered to sell it to my brother for $40K , he declined. It wasn't making money and never would, its gone now.
After that he worked for 5 lawyers who thought it would be a great idea to open a big gourmet food mkt and bakery.
They're going broke, hope they sell it.
My last job before I retired was a chinese woman who came to America on the chinese olympic gymnast team, she didn't go back.
I told her to de-emphasize the bakery side and push hard into the cafe business, it worked out good, I was working 4 hrs a day .
I taught her to make croissants and we sourced suppliers for wholesale brownies etc.
5 yrs ago I was pastry chef for a place that was opened by a rwandan who imported fair trade coffee beans from Rwanda, his lease was $25K a month rent. My formula for rent is it should be 10% of gross sales, there was no way he could do $250K a month selling cups of coffee and muffins. I left to work at the Hilton ( just to get health Ins) , he ended up shutting down. Nice man but he really had no business signing a lease like that, it was doomed. It was in Union square NYC and a typical NYC rent.
These are some typical examples, I know lots of them, they all end up the same.
But if you sell cakes from home, thats another kettle of fish, theres a lot of money in doing that.