{"id":100906,"date":"2025-10-20T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.honeybook.com\/blog\/?p=100906"},"modified":"2025-10-20T08:00:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T15:00:12","slug":"room-for-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.honeybook.com\/blog\/room-for-cake","title":{"rendered":"How this celebrity cake artist saved 20+ hours by streamlining her business with HoneyBook"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From a home kitchen to Hollywood clients, Laurie Petrolino built a thriving cake business while saving 20+ hours a week with HoneyBook.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laurie Petrolino didn’t set out to bake and decorate cakes for a living. Instead, cakemaking was something she loved to do\u2014and something that kept finding her throughout her life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From her high school years decorating ice cream cakes at Baskin-Robbins to working part-time at a bakery while attending UCSB, all the way to finding herself back in a local bakery post-grad.  \u201cI\u2019ve always loved the process of creating something beautiful that’s also something that’s eaten and enjoyed,\u201d said Laurie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Laurie, baking wasn\u2019t just a passion, it was a calling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, when the bakery she was working for was sold, Laurie knew she wanted to take baking into something long-term, and most importantly, hers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the encouragement of a friend, she launched Room for Cake<\/a> from her home kitchen in Santa Barbara, specializing in intricate wedding cakes and large-scale birthday celebrations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bakery quickly took off, so much so that she quickly outgrew working out of her home and moved all of her operations to a commercial kitchen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Laurie has grown her business at an astounding rate\u2014counting celebrities and high-profile clients among her clientele, earning features in Vogue Weddings and People Magazine, and scaling her business and revenue by 508% in the last 6 years\u2014all as a solopreneur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her secret? HoneyBook <\/a>helps her run all her business processes: contracts, invoices, payments and more . While everything is organized and running smoothly in the background, Laurie has the time and space to focus on her artistry and clients, without sacrificing her personal time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s how she makes it all happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Searching for the right solution to time-consuming tasks  <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Especially in the early days\u2014running Room for Cake came with plenty of challenges. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was working out of my home kitchen with my three-year-old son at home, so it was a chaotic production of cakes and chasing around a very energetic child,\u201d she said. Often, she would put off baking until late at night, when everything was calm and quiet. While it worked for a little while, she was ultimately sacrificing the time needed to grow her business and most importantly, the time for herself.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a mom, a baker, and a business owner quickly became overwhelming\u2014and Laurie was hitting her breaking point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was a painful process of sending clients back-and-forth emails, creating contracts in one specific format, invoices in another, and taking payments separately, too,\u201d she said.  \u201cwith all of the work that needed to get done running my business, a lot of the administrative and client work would constantly lapse.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The inefficiency frustrated both her and her clients. \u201cIt felt disorganized, and I knew something was missing that could make everything easier\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s when Laurie realized she needed a better system. \u201cI needed something that could act as my business partner and save me time so I could increase my revenue and propel my business forward.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How HoneyBook minimized daily operations and tasks<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As a solopreneur, Laurie needed every step for every client to be seamless\u2014from inquiry to project completion. In her search for the CRM \u2014only one stood above the rest, HoneyBook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s how. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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