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6 Months In: What's Working, What's Not, and What's Next | Episode 140

2 minutes ago
12 min read

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I am still the one doing every single 4 a.m. morning. I am still the primary production baker in my own bakery, six months after opening. And somewhere in the last six months, I realized I am not meant to be that person forever.


It has been a while since I did a real review here, my last one was back in Episode 117, covering January. So instead of one month, today I am pulling back to look at March through August as a whole, using the same four questions I ask every single month and that we use in the Inner Circle too: what is working, what is not, what did I learn, and how am I moving forward. I covered that whole system in Episode 116 if you want the full method.


Whether you are baking out of your kitchen right now or eyeing a storefront of your own someday, I want to pull out the pieces of this that are actually useful to you, not just tell you what happened to me.


A quick picture of what a week actually looks like right now

Before the four questions, here is the context everything else sits inside. My storefront is open to customers Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 9 to 2. Wednesday is dough day, roughly 8 or 8:30 to 3, when we mix and shape everything for Thursday and Friday and get it into the fridge. Thursday I mix a couple more batches to carry us through Saturday.


On Tuesday evening I go in and bulk up my starter from about 400 grams to somewhere around 1,600 to 2,000 grams, which gets us through Wednesday and Thursday's dough plus the cookies, muffins, granola and crackers we make earlier in the week. Thursday, Friday and Saturday I start around 4 a.m. and bake until 8 or 8:30, sometimes right up until we open. My team arrives at 8:30 to set up the front, and we open at 9.

That is the container all of the rest of this sits inside.


What's working: a team that grew in pieces, not all at once

In March, I had someone I had brought on in November and December, then added another person in January and February, mostly piecemeal, part-time hours scattered across the week. At one point I had up to four or five people on payroll at a time, and even with that much help, most of the actual production was still falling on me. I would pull something out of the oven, go help a customer up front, and never really finish anything during business hours. That stretched from November all the way through April, into May and June.


Here is the part worth taking with you even if your team looks nothing like mine: that piecemeal approach, messy as it felt, gave me real clarity on exactly how many hours I needed from people and which specific hours the support actually mattered. As the team naturally evolved, a high schooler went back to school, a college student went back to college, someone else's availability shifted, I used that information to restructure instead of just refilling the same shifts. We landed at two people plus myself: one working Wednesday through Saturday, the other on Thursday and Friday, our busiest days, with me there every single day.


If you are hiring right now, that is the real, unglamorous shape of it. People have lives, and your schedule has to survive that. By August, the right people were finally on the right days doing the right tasks, and after almost a year, the workflow started to feel genuinely smoother. I am still not as free as I want to be, I cannot sit down and write emails or work on marketing or get to a local networking event yet, but for the first time since opening, I feel less behind than I have ever felt.


What's working: closing for three weeks, and the workshop that paid for it

July is historically a slow month for me anyway, so when my family had been wanting a road trip for years, July was the window that made sense. We closed the entire bakery and took three weeks to drive to Virginia and back. Customers were not quite sure what to do with it at first, but they were genuinely supportive.


Here is the move that made it work financially. Right before we left, I taught a workshop, specifically because I know workshops give me a predictable revenue boost. They take real effort to put together, but that one workshop helped cover the month the doors were closed. If you know a slow stretch or a closure is coming up in your own business, a workshop ahead of it is a real way to build in a cash cushion before you need it.


I still felt the hit to revenue, and it took some time to ramp back up once we reopened. But our first day back, pre-orders were well above average, customers were excited we were back and stocking up again, and every week since has been a little better than the one before it!


What's working: a $40-a-month loyalty program and a hard call about the farmers market

Two smaller things worth naming. I turned on Square's loyalty rewards earlier this year, it costs about $40 a month, every dollar spent earns a point, and 100 points is free bread. Almost every customer signs up. I cannot cleanly prove it is driving new sales, but it gets people genuinely excited about their points, and at minimum it rewards the customers who have already been loyal to me. That alone has made it worth having.


The bigger call was leaving my local farmers market as of June 1st, after selling there every other week for more than two years. I got a good question from another baker recently: does the bakery make meaningfully more, or is it just more spread out? My revenue per day at the market was actually higher than a single day at the bakery. But it took a disproportionate amount of effort to get there, and trying to bake for both meant I was shorting both, never able to make a full day's worth of product for either one.


Once I left the market, I could bake a genuinely full day's worth of product for the bakery across Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and my weekly revenue now far exceeds what I made at a market people only visited every two weeks. The per-day number went down. The per-week number went up. That is the actual math behind a decision that can feel purely emotional from the outside. There is a chance I go back to the market someday with more capacity, but right now, being in one place and letting people learn that this is where we sell bread is working.


What's not working: guessing how much to bake for walk-ins

My pre-order side runs like clockwork. The text goes out Sundays at 3:30 through Project Broadcast, orders close Tuesday afternoon, pickup is Thursday, Friday or Saturday, and I am still running the same menu rotation I have shared before. That consistency does a lot of the work for me, and we push people toward pre-orders hard.


Walk-ins are still a genuine guessing game. Some weeks I nail it, some weeks I overshoot, some weeks I sell out of things earlier than I would like. When I baked from home and sold at the market, I had real physical scarcity, there was a hard cap on how much I could make, and selling out consistently was actually a strong strategy that trained customers to show up early and order ahead. In the bakery, my limits are much higher, so the game has changed. It is no longer bake everything I possibly can, because it will not all automatically sell. Now it is figuring out the right amount, and that is a genuinely different skill.


Some things I already know cold, English muffins sell out every time, muffins and cookies almost always will as long as I do not overbake them. Beyond that, I am watching for patterns. I pull my sales data from Square and Simply Bread, strip out all customer information, and use Claude to look for patterns and help forecast. It is not perfect, I still get it wrong sometimes, but it is getting me closer, and I suspect some amount of this unpredictability is simply part of the job for good.


What's not working: I am the bottleneck for almost everything

I will be transparent about this one because I think it matters for anyone building past the beginning stage. I am the owner, the operator, the founder and the primary production baker, all at once. I make every decision and pay every tax, and there is a real pile of things that have not happened because of it. We still do not have a permanent sign on the building. It matters, but it is also out of sight and out of mind when I am elbow deep in dough at five in the morning.


I do not do well with a big pile of decisions. When things stack up and start to feel overwhelming, I get avoidant, I focus on whatever feels most urgent right in front of me, which is always the bread, and the rest falls to the wayside without me noticing. That is not me being hard on myself. It is just what happens, and I think it is worth naming, because if you are considering going commercial, or even just growing from home, this is a real challenge of being the solo operator.


The clearest example is workshops. I just told you a single workshop helped carry me through a closed month, and in January, workshops made up about a quarter of my sales. You would think I would have one on the calendar every month. I do not, because by the time the baking is done, I am too tired to stay and teach for three more hours, even though I genuinely enjoy it and it is profitable.


Marketing has the same tension, in a different shape. I can see a clear correlation between the effort I put into marketing, whether that is local Facebook groups or Instagram, and sales going up and new faces coming through the door. There is real room to push harder, and I am aware of it. But bringing in a lot more customers feels overwhelming when I am already stretched thin, so I have been throttling growth a little on purpose. Here is the problem with that now that I have people on payroll: when it was just me, I could ride out a slow week. With a team, I cannot. I am responsible for bringing in enough business to cover rent, payroll and ingredients, which means I have to get more strategic with marketing rather than just more busy.


Already running a team of your own? Use this as a gut check. Write down one decision that has been sitting untouched for more than a month, name plainly why it keeps getting skipped, and ask whether it is something only you can do or something you have just been holding onto.


What I learned: figuring out whether I am a baker or a business owner who bakes

This next one is not tactical in the usual sense, but I think it is exactly as important. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my own long-term trajectory, what the bakery and the podcast brand look like years from now, and what is becoming clearer is that I am not meant to be the only production baker forever, maybe not even for very much longer.


What lights me up is supporting other entrepreneurs, connecting with people in my community, advocating for local small food producers. I love baking. But baking has been the vessel that carried me into entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship is the thing I actually love most. Sitting with that has felt strange, and I have wrestled with whether it even belongs on a podcast about running a sourdough business. But I think this is the tactical stuff at a certain stage. Scaling brings up exactly these questions, even if you are just starting out.


The question worth putting on your own radar, whether you are a beginner or years in, is simple: does the business side genuinely light you up, the strategy, the growing, the problem solving, or is it the craft itself, the art and the science and the challenge of baking? There is no right answer. Some people are bakers through and through, and that is beautiful. Some people are business people who happen to bake. Your honest answer might be both, or neither, or genuinely unclear, and that is fine too. But being honest about it changes what you build next, because it lets you ask what three, five or ten years actually looks like, and start building toward that now instead of drifting.


To be clear, I am not going anywhere. I am just thinking bigger about the shape of the bakery and this podcast, and how I keep supporting bakers like you.


How I am moving forward

If you are early in your business, your action step is simple: get excellent at baking in the season you are actually in, and pay close attention to which parts of the work light you up. Maybe marketing is the fun part for you. Look at what you could hand off, even something as small as paying a high schooler an hour to pre-label packaging, to buy yourself an hour of marketing time. Small trades like that add up, and that is a CEO-level decision you can make at any size.


If you are further along and the decisions are getting bigger, my encouragement is not to wait too long to bring on help. I know how scary it feels when the business lives entirely in your own head. The sooner you let someone else take pride in what you are building, the sooner it can grow past just you. Episode 111 goes deep on exactly this decision if you are close to your own first hire. And if you are somewhere in the middle, building but stuck in the weeds and not entirely sure what you even enjoy anymore, having other bakers to think out loud with is genuinely powerful, which is exactly what the Bread Winner Inner Circle is for.


For me specifically, here is what is next. First, hiring a baker who can take on most of the 4 a.m. mornings and free me up for quality control, recipe development and actually growing this podcast. I will admit it feels scary, and there is real imposter syndrome wrapped up in it, since I am entirely self-taught and never took a baking course myself.


Handing my recipes to someone who might genuinely be a better baker than I am feels vulnerable, but I think avoiding that fear forever is what would actually cap my growth.

Second, a real goal by the end of the year to stop working Saturdays and give my family a dedicated day back. Third, building out Q4 with gift boxes, bundles and a few new flavors, in a way that captures the busiest stretch of the year without losing the sustainability I have worked to build. Fourth, continuing to invest in my own education and rest heading into January, including the in-person retreat I am hosting for bakers who are ready to think bigger, and time at the Proof Bread Intensive myself.


And fifth, the one I actually want you to act on today. The Seen and Sold Sprint is coming back in October, timed deliberately right before the November and December rush, because the worst time to start building local visibility is the week before Thanksgiving, and October is the best time to build it. It runs 21 days in community, with a short daily video and three weekly live group calls, built by a working baker for bakers who are already busy, not another huge time commitment on top of everything else. The waitlist is open now, and you will get an email the moment enrollment opens!


Final thoughts

If you have specific questions about any of this, scaling from home, going commercial, hiring, the actual numbers, ask me directly. Leave a SpeakPipe voicemail, send me a message on Instagram, or send an email. It helps me build episodes and conversations around what you are actually curious about instead of guessing.


None of this is a finished story. I am still very much in the weeds of building this, learning as I go, and some weeks that means I have more questions than answers myself. But growth here has been slow and steady, which is exactly what I want it to be. I am not out here chasing a line out the door. I am building something that can actually last, one honest review at a time.


Cheering you on,

Caroline


Keep going

If this got you thinking about your own team or your own next stage, these three go further.


Links to things you might like!


Sourdough microbakery owner looking back at lessons from her first year selling bread

 
 
 

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