The Big Picture — Mandi Lunan
Mandi Lunan has barely set foot past the vestibule and into The Manx when she offers a tip. “Spray your entire face with hairspray,” she says and waves a hand around her face to demonstrate. A smack of dark pink lipstick, free from aerosol residue, punctuates her wide smile and every word that escapes it, while she settles into Elgin Street’s underground sanctum. “It sets your makeup in place,” she continues, “so it’s perfect for those long days — if you have events later or appearances to make you’ll stay looking fresh.” She grins, adding a caveat, “just make sure to close your mouth.”
But Lunan isn’t keeping her mouth shut much these days and plenty of her fellow entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial hopefuls are eager to hear what she has to say. As a food business coach, Lunan has an arsenal of tips and tricks she keeps up her patched and pinned denim jacket sleeves — albeit only one that aims to avoid a mouthful of hairspray. From the playful to the practical, Lunan delivers her wisdom to food business entrepreneurs with trademark spunk and no shortage of heartfelt concern. She wants to ensure their business strategies are solid and that they don’t forget to look after themselves first.
“As an entrepreneur you’re supposed to seem strong and allpowerful,” she says sadly. “You’re not supposed to show any weakness.”
Lunan, who opened the first all-vegan bakery in Eastern Ontario in 2008, knows all too well the pitfalls of keeping up appearances. As Auntie Loo — the sassy, punk-rock, cupcake-kissing persona of Lunan’s alter-ego — she became the household name for crueltyfree indulgences in Ottawa. But behind the mask, Lunan, like so many entrepreneurs, was keeping secrets about her own mental state. “I had my head in the sand for a long time,” she confesses.
It’s under her new moniker, This Charming Mandi, that Lunan has revealed a truer identity. Still wielding plenty of sass, her weekends are now filled with business workshops, instead of wedding cakes, where she covers a range of topics that affect the food-business owners — everything from cash-flow strategies and which suppliers to work with (and which ones to avoid), to navigating the migraine-inducing permit protocols of the City of Ottawa and, of course, harnessing the power and perils of social media — the marketing juggernaut.
“Social media is such a bitch-goddess for the entrepreneur,” says Lunan, who started Auntie Loo’s Treats with only a MySpace account. MySpace became a digital dinosaur, but Lunan’s business evolved alongside the unprecedented rise of social media. And she juggled all of it — the multiple accounts, the nonstop requests, the unabated feedback, not to mention the crippling anxiety, that comes with its pervasive use.
“It’s created the age of the 24-7 entrepreneur,” Lunan says, “before you would lock your restaurant or bake-shop and leave. Now you have notifications, text messages and things popping up saying, ‘Oh my god, did you see so-and-so’s review?’”
That is why she coaches her clients to use it less. “Turn off your notifications,” she insists, “Get off Facebook, at least for a day or delegate it to someone else.” Instead, Lunan suggests using your phone as a mental health tool. “I’m loving this app right now called Headspace,” she says, explaining that relaxing techniques don’t exactly come easy for her. “I’m the most busy-brained person — I’m like a squirrel in a box. I literally need someone to grab my face and yell, ‘RELAX!’”
Headspace works by setting up a schedule of three to five minute bursts of guided meditation. It’s an effective strategy for people coping with anxiety and who, according to Lunan, have a tendency to find themselves owning a business.
“Anxious people are always really bored,” Lunan says, “and they are always expecting things to go wrong.” She explains how entrepreneurial-minded people bury their anxiety and the depression that often tags along with it, especially when they are in the perilously intense business of food.
“Whenever you have these horrible moments like a bad review or a fight with a staff member or customer, you don’t stop to process. You’re getting ready for service, lunch rush or filling orders — there’s not time to stop and unpack. You say, ‘Ok, f-this, I’ll just push it to the back of my mind.' And what do we have at the end of the day to deal with it? Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and a lot of sleepless nights.”
For Lunan, those days weren’t all that long ago. “I neglected my self-care and I lost my business because of it,” she cautions, “I don’t want anyone to go down the way I did.”
Most will remember Lunan when she was the reigning pastry queen of vegan sweets. She and her partner, Chris, moved to Ottawa from Belleville in 2002, when the vegan pastry niche was yet to be filled and found her natural talents for cake baking and her edgy, DIY-attitude were just the right combination. “I was making vegan food so I wanted a name that wouldn’t make people think of granola — or poop,” she quips.
The branding worked like a charm. After incubating for several years and working part-time, Lunan opened her first storefront on Bronson Avenue in 2008. “We were busy as soon as we opened the doors,” she recalls.
But even with business booming, Lunan kept doggedly reaching for an ever higher pinnacle of success. “I’m an ego-driven entrepreneur,” she acknowledges. “I enjoy being flashy, but I’m also hot-tempered and I do things to drive my ego.” That meant never refusing a request and eventually the flood of prestigious contracts coming through the doors of her busy retail shop was more than she or her space could handle. “We signed on to build a new bakery, but hadn’t considered all the logistics,” she says regretfully, “it was an absolute disaster.”
Lunan secured a space on Nelson Street in 2013, but it was almost a year before its doors would open. The City of Ottawa, not exactly known to pave the way for small business, had set the project back with perpetual delays. While her permits languished in purgatory, her bank account continued to dwindle.
“I was exhausted,” she says, “that’s when I started having my ‘Kevins.’” Lunan had struggled with anxiety since her teens and was quelling it with “wine, cigarettes and all that good stuff” as a busy entrepreneur, but now it had reached new heights. She started bolting up in the middle of the night in a panic, much like Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone, about a month before the new bakery was set to open. “I would wake up sobbing,” she remembers. But Lunan kept pushing forward. “I just thought I would fall in love with my business all over again,” she says sullenly, “but I didn’t.”
When the doors did finally open, many of her clients had moved on and the dynamic of her small team shifted in the new, unfamiliar space. “My leadership faltered and people suffered,” she admits, “Everyday I was just putting out a fire somewhere — be it in my bank account, with my staff or a vendor. It was absolutely exhausting.”
She went to see her doctor. Already on anti-anxiety medication, Lunan was handed a fistful of new prescriptions and a feeling of utter despair. “I sat in my car in the parking lot and just sobbed,” she says., “I thought, ‘I can’t control my own fucking head — how am I going to run this company without killing it?’”
Eventually, the barrel emptied and she had nothing left, financially or emotionally. “That’s when my trustee called me and told me I was in too deep. She told me I had to empty out and go. Like, right now.”
Lunan announced Auntie Loo’s imminent closure on Facebook, after over a decade in business. In no time, she faced a barrage of questions and accusations, so she ran. She disappeared into Prince Edward County, where her family waited for her, and collapsed under her grief. “I took away people’s jobs,” she says. “I took away an important part of the Ottawa community. I was selfish about that weight for a long time.”
When she returned to Ottawa three months later, a raw and exposed Lunan was soon spotted and the questions started up again. This time, though, the concern outweighed the vitriol. “A lot of people starting coming out of the woodwork,” she remembers, “there was a lot of interest and curiosity as to what had happened to me.” For the next two years, Lunan found herself telling her story and how she had neglected her self-care, over and over again. “People would say to me, ‘Oh my god, I have a food business and I have felt that way. That could easily have been me.’ That’s when I realized that we were all keeping secrets and that was a problem.”
From the cautionary tale of Auntie Loo came This Charming Mandi, Lunan’s humble, yet forthright reincarnation, who has pledged to keep her mask off so other entrepreneurs don’t have to feel alone. She continues to tell her story — to her clients, to the business start-ups she works with and to the large crowds she draws at her speaking engagements. She still feels the weight of dredging up the demons again and again, but with each retelling Lunan feels redemption is at hand.
“In helping other people, with their emotions, anxieties and problems with their businesses," she says, "I feel like I am giving back to the Ottawa community that I love so much and the food industry that I love so much.”
She’s found a defacto office space at The Manx, where she spends her time writing and coaching. It’s a safe space, she says, a rare find these days for entrepreneurs in the food world, who have become the venerable rock stars of pop culture, thanks to TV shows and the chef caricatures who star in them. “Everyone I know watches the food network — my friends, my grandmother,” she laments. The fallout of the “grumpy chef” stereotype is that food entrepreneurs are expected to shake off extreme stress and abuse.
“Some of my clients have even gotten death threats,” Lunan says, shaking her head. Her hope is that people will realize that entrepreneurs aren’t invincible and deserve to be treated better. “You don’t get to go alpha-5 nuclear because you got a stale cupcake,” she says. “Life doesn’t work that way.”
Lunan envisions another safe space, a club of sorts, where anxiety-ridden entrepreneurs could gather, out of the din of gawkers and gossip, and know that their secrets, both emotional and professional, would be kept confidential. “Kind of like AA,” she explains, “where we all know, we all go, we all talk, we all share and we all keep it to ourselves.”
In the meantime, Lunan isn’t keeping her ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression secret anymore. “I’ll be straight up,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn, “I haven’t left my house in four days…” It’s a very personal and vulnerable confession — such a contrast to the sass and spunk that she exudes, but Lunan knows it gives her and her community strength.
“I’ve started to look at my anxiety as less of an affliction and more of a superpower,” Lunan says. “When things go wrong, I already have my own horror fantasies about every which way they could go wrong. So I’m ready to spring into action.” Strength may be the symbol of the superhero or even the entrepreneur, but look behind the mask — that’s where you find the real heroes.
This Charming Mandi
thischarmingmandi.com, thischarmingmandi@gmail.com
