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How I Review My Microbakery Month: Revenue, Products, Systems | Episode 108

  • Nov 6, 2025
  • 8 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Most of us who run a microbakery roll straight from one month into the next without ever stopping to ask what actually worked. You bake, you sell, you clean up, you do it again. A year goes by and you still could not say which product carried your revenue or which process is costing you a whole afternoon every week.


I do a monthly review of my business, and it is one of the highest value hours I spend. Not because I love spreadsheets, but because it is the only way I catch the small things that are either making me money or draining me. Here is my October, laid out the way I look at it, so you can borrow the framework and run the same review on your own numbers.


The four questions I ask every month

My whole review comes down to four questions:

  • What worked this month?

  • What didn't work?

  • What did I learn?

  • How will I apply this moving forward?

I scribble notes as the month goes, both the wins and the flops, so I am not trying to remember everything at the end. Then I sit down for 15 to 30 minutes and go through it properly. Every three months I go a layer deeper and check that the business is still lined up with my mission and values, which is where you catch drift before it becomes a whole year of drift.


October's revenue, and how to read it

October had three bake days and one workshop:

  • October 4, a pre-order popup at my bakery space

  • October 11, farmers market

  • October 25, farmers market

The popup brought in $1,005.94 against a goal of a thousand, with $818 of that from pre-orders and $187.94 from people buying the extra product I brought along. October 11 came in at $1,764 against a goal of $1,800, with $240 in pre-orders and $1,524 at the table. October 25 came in at $2,000.42 against a goal of $2,000, with $440 in pre-orders and $1,602 at the table.


Add a workshop at $380 for four tickets, plus $91.95 in retail from the shelves in my bakery space, and October's total was $5,364.95. If I had squeezed in a fourth bake day, I would have landed at or above $6,000, which is typical for me in a four bake month.


Please do not hold your number up against mine. My capacity, my equipment and my season of life are all different from yours, and if you are baking in one home oven with toddlers hanging off your legs, comparing revenue will only discourage you. Compare product mix and ratios instead.


The pre-order lesson hiding in those numbers

Look at the pre-order line on those two markets. October 11 was $240 and October 25 was $440. The difference was the menu. On October 11 I offered the basics only because my week was tight, so original bread, sandwich bread, focaccia and my dozen cookies. On October 25 I added muffins.


Anytime I put muffins or scones on a pre-order menu it adds around $200 to the pre-order total and lifts my average order value. I sell scones in packs of eight and muffins in jumbo size and packs of six, so those items land at $20 or more every time someone adds one.


If you want to raise your average order value without adding a whole new bake day, that is where I would start. Muffins and scones prep in bulk ahead and bake from frozen, so they take far less out of your bake day than the revenue suggests.


Top sellers, and what they are teaching me

I pull my top 10 from Square, so this reflects my market table rather than pre-orders.

  • Original loaves were number one at $660 for the month, which is 66 sold at $10 each. With pre-orders included it was closer to 140.

  • English muffins came in second at $336. High demand, very labor intensive.

  • Sandwich bread was third at $320. I only bake 24 at a time because of my fridge and oven limits, so 72 across three bake days is the hard number.

  • Mini loaves were fourth. These are my inclusion loaves at 450 grams instead of 900, priced at $7 for one or two for $12. Customers told me the full size was more bread than they could get through, so I halved them and let people mix flavors.

  • Cookies in packs of two were fifth, which surprised me, and brand new English muffin bread was sixth at $252.

  • Brioche caramel apple buns came next at $240, and focaccia was $220, capped at the 16 pans I can proof and bake at a time.

  • Mini loaf two packs landed at nine, and granola in 300 gram bags at ten.

Two of those have a hard bottleneck built in. Sandwich bread stops at 24 and focaccia stops at 16, so no amount of demand moves those lines until my space changes. Knowing which of your products are capped and which ones have room is the difference between a real growth plan and wishful thinking.


The tweak that changed my most labor intensive product

English muffins are a top seller and a headache. People love them, and shaping them one at a time limits how many I can make.


I had leftover dough early in October and baked it in a loaf pan for my family just to see. It came out beautifully, with the same coating and the same crust, and we liked being able to control the slice size instead of getting six fixed rounds.


So I put a poll on Instagram asking whether people were attached to the round format. It came back nearly 50/50, so I brought half rounds and half loaves to both markets and told customers straight out that it was an experiment and I wanted their feedback. By the second market I had people coming back specifically for the loaves.


The same amount of dough that makes a six pack of rounds makes one loaf, so I priced them the same, and I can now do 60 English muffins in one oven round plus 10 or 11 loaves from the rest of the batch.


If you have a product people adore that you cannot make enough of, try changing the format before you decide the answer is more hours.


For the baker a few years in

Two things from October are worth stealing if you already have steady revenue.


First, browning butter in bulk. I browned 12 pounds at once and froze it in deli containers, so for the next month or so I pull it out and soften it instead of starting from scratch every week. Look at your recipes for any step you repeat weekly that could be done once.


Second, build a second opinion into your process. I use a small measured sample of dough to gauge the rise on my original loaves. I still trust look and feel first, because that is how I have always baked, but the extra data point keeps things consistent when I am juggling. As I move into a commercial space with more people involved, every system that removes guesswork is one less thing that depends on me being in the room.


What didn't work

My first three batches of homemade caramel were a disaster. One burned, one had the texture all wrong, and it took until attempt number four to get it right. The reason that failure was fine is timing. I was playing with caramel in a low stakes week, not in the middle of a bake I had already promised to customers. That is the right time to learn a new process.


The other one was rain. We had been in a drought for months, I did not check the forecast, and I walked into my second market having prepped the second largest amount of product I have ever made on a torrentially rainy day. People came anyway, and I sold out with an hour of market left. That says a lot about the shop local culture our market has built and about the regulars who now plan their Saturday around it.


And I was tired. I felt a cold coming on one Monday and worked from bed with a pile of supplements instead of pushing through. Protecting your body is a business decision in this season.


What I learned

Consistency pays, and it pays slowly. My granola is the clearest example. I decided it was a permanent product, brought it every single market for about five months and slowly increased the quantity. Now I have customers who come specifically for the granola. If I had brought it once, watched people hesitate and given up, that would never have happened.


Hyping a new product also works. I teased the apple buns on Instagram while I was still testing them on my family, and people came to the market specifically to try them. A couple of sneak peek stories will tip the customers who were on the fence about coming at all.


How I am moving forward

I am adding products strategically, which mostly means saying no. Winter is full of fun flavor combinations and trendy bakes circulating in the sourdough community, and I am giving myself permission to skip nearly all of them. Consider this your permission too. Save the post and come back to it in a slower season.


I am staying consistent through the change. November is when I move fully from home into my commercial space, and my customers have known me one way for two years, so how I show up should not shift just because my address does. That includes posting on my feed at least once a week through November and December, because that is the first thing I drop when I get busy.


And I am being clear on priorities. I think about it as bouncy balls and glass balls. Texting a childhood friend is a bouncy ball, she will be just as glad to hear from me in February. Taking care of my body, time with my family, paying the bills and answering messages in a reasonable time are glass. The holidays will hand you more invitations than you can hold, so decide now which ones are glass.


Final thoughts

September was hard and I was spread thin. October was not a bigger month, it was a better balanced one, and the only reason I can tell you that with confidence is that I stopped and looked.


Give yourself 20 minutes at the end of this month with those four questions and a pen. You will find at least one product worth doubling down on and one habit worth dropping, and that is a very good return on 20 minutes!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you like these monthly recaps, here are a few more where I open the books and talk through what a real month looks like.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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