top of page
Search

How I Grew My Sourdough Microbakery Without Burning Out | Episode 48

  • Dec 23, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


There is a point in every microbakery where the thing that got you here stops working. You are mixing dough in bins for two hours with your arms buried to the elbow, printing labels on your home printer and cutting them out with scissors, staying up too late and getting up too early. The orders keep coming, and you keep absorbing them with your own body.


That is the season I want to talk about, because I lived in it, and getting out of it is what turned my bakery into a business that actually works. My baking assistant Melissa turned the tables on me for this one and put me in the hot seat, so what follows is the honest version of how the growth happened and what I paid for it.


I did not set out to build a bakery

I have a gluten sensitivity, and we were buying so much gluten-free bread that I got tired of paying for the preservatives and the extra sugar in it. Gluten-free bread is genuinely hard to bake and nothing I made turned out, which led me to sourdough, which snowballed the way it does for so many of us. It was never an inspiration where I saw myself as a bread baker. It was an answer to prayer that met the needs of our family in that season, because I needed a job and our schedule made a normal one hard to find.


The light bulb moment came from someone else. I was still sending out resumes and selling a few loaves on the side when I saw a woman in a Facebook community share what she was earning in a week. It clicked. If she could do that, so could I! After a particularly good week I sat down with my husband, handed him a chunk of cash, and we agreed on a plan with a timeline on it. I threw myself at the sourdough and treated it like the full time job we needed, and it became one.


You may not be short on ability. You may just not have seen anyone do it yet.


The turning point was equipment

People assume the growth came from working harder. It came from buying the right things at the right time.

  • A dedicated dough fridge

  • A larger mixer

  • A double oven

Those all landed around the same stretch, and every one of them removed a bottleneck that my hands and my calendar had been absorbing. If I wanted to keep growing, my systems and my equipment had to grow with me. Otherwise I was going to spend every week fighting bottlenecks and heading straight for burnout.


The next turning point was hiring Melissa, because time is my greatest resource and my biggest limitation.


Calculate the cost of your time before you flinch at the price tag

Here is where most bakers get stuck. We do not count our time as a cost, because no money changes hands. So count it. If you spend two hours mixing dough in bins with your hands stuck in there and covered in flour, unable to pick up your babies, that is a cost. If you print labels on the home printer and cut them out with scissors when a thermal printer would do it in two minutes, that is a cost. Find the task eating a disproportionate amount of your time. That is your bottleneck, and that is where the money should go.


The investment is going to sting. It always does. If you want to grow, you absolutely need to put money into the business, because the alternative is spending your time, and time is not a renewable resource. Staying up too late, getting up too early and spreading yourself thin is not a plan your business can survive.


Priorities work better than resolutions

I do not set many hard numeric goals, because we cannot fully control how much income comes in. What we can control is our output. So I set intentions instead, and a lot of my years start with a single word that becomes the theme and guides how I spend my energy.


Then I work in priorities. My top three for the week, my top three for the month, and the question of what I need to do to accomplish those. It is simple enough that I actually keep doing it.


Your story is the one thing nobody can copy

New sourdough businesses are popping up constantly, and it is easy to look at the baker one town over and decide you need to do everything they are doing. Start somewhere else. Sit down with paper, brain dump what is intrinsically important to you and your household, then write down what led you to start selling sourdough, and pull threads out of that for your messaging.


People do not buy from a brand. They buy from a person. Show up professionally and be relatable and transparent at the same time. Mine has worked well enough that customers walk into my booth at the market and say they can feel this was made with love, and I never had to say a word about it.


What actually brought customers in

Local Facebook groups, word of mouth, and the farmers market. My business took off from a couple of posts in a local Facebook group, and I have kept showing up there ever since, sometimes only once a month, just so people know I am still the baker in this community. I do the same farmers market every second and fourth Saturday, so people know where to find me, and from there I get them onto my text list. They hear from me every week when the menu opens and they can pick up from my porch.


The thread running through all of it is consistency. Same day, same place, same product people can count on. I am not popping up at a market across the city one week and a different town the next, or posting in one group this week and a new one the next. Predictable beats clever, and I think that has contributed more to my growth than anything else.


I also send a survey to my customers every few months, asking what they love on the menu and what they want more of. Then I use the answers.


Work and family under one roof

I will be upfront about my context. My kids are six and eight and at school five days a week, so I get most of my work done while they are gone. That is not everyone's season. If you have toddlers hanging on your legs, you are not going to sell a hundred loaves a week, and comparing your capacity to someone whose life you cannot see is a fast way to feel terrible for no reason.


On dough day they come sit next to me in the bakery, tell me about their day, do homework, draw. I used to wrestle with that, and I have made peace with it, because they genuinely take pride in being part of it. There is no true balance, no scale that sits perfectly even, and being intentional with the moments you do have is what makes the difference.


The practical piece is time blocking. I brain dump every task, household and bakery, and drop each one into an hourly block on a calendar. We do it as a family on the weekend, so the kids know chores run from ten to twelve and family time runs from twelve to four. Far fewer things slip through the cracks that way.


If you are a year or three in

Two things to audit this month.


First, find the task eating the most disproportionate share of your week and add up what it costs you in hours over four weeks. Compare that to the price of the tool or the help that would remove it. That comparison usually makes the decision for you.


Second, look at where you are showing up to sell. If it is more than two or three places, you are probably diluting the consistency that builds a customer base. Pick the ones that work, show up there every time, and move those people onto a list you own.


Final thoughts

The lesson I keep relearning is not to underestimate myself, not to put limits on my own ability or my own potential for impact. That is where I have gotten in my own way before, by not trusting that I had it in me.


So if you are standing at the edge of the next scary investment, or an opportunity that feels a size too big for you, say yes to it. You are almost certainly more ready than you think!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you liked this one, these three go well with it.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page