New pizza business a tossup

When life offered him lemons, Todd O'Connor made pizza.

These days, O'Connor is working hard to buy equipment, decide on vendors, hire wait staff and mark off the long list of tasks that will allow him to open the Baker's Pizza on the site of the former Linwood Pizza in Coon Rapids around the first of the year.

The 40-year-old East Bethel resident ran a painting business, Painting Plus, from the time he was 18. Good fortune followed him through the housing booms of the 1990s and early '00s, but by 2007, he found himself paying his crew and overhead out of his own pocket because $60,000 owed to him by four contractors seemed unlikely ever to come in, he said. "When that happened at the end of November [of that year], all of a sudden, boom, and there was no work," he said.

He enrolled in a four-week trucking program at Eagan Transportation Center and got a job with Anderson Trucking Service out of St. Cloud. For a year and a half, he was on the road six weeks at a time, leaving his wife, Lori, and two daughters at home. By last May, that life was too hard.

He left that job and banked on a promised economic recovery to try to get the painting business going again. He had some success over the summer, and October was especially good.

"Then October ended, and I couldn't even get a truck-driving job," he said.

Now, O'Connor is calling on his past as he looks to the future.

"I said, I'm throwing the dice on the table," he said. "I'm already going downhill, so I thought, why not? ... I know I'm taking a big risk, but if I don't do something, we're going to lose the house."

He's had advice from friends in the restaurant business, including the former Linwood manager.

So, armed with a $70,000 line of credit, O'Connor is making the place his own. He hosted a "soft opening" a couple of weeks ago for 30 friends and family members. It went well, he said. He's also using ambush pizza delivery to build a name; he makes a pile of pizzas, then he and Lori ring random doorbells and give them away.

His goal is to make pizzas a slice above -- gourmet choices include chicken alfredo, reuben, philly steak, gyro, veggie -- at a value. The sauces and dough are his own recipes.

He acknowledges that the process is overwhelming, the piles of paperwork, legions of vendors demanding time and allegiance, the tall learning curve.