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How to Plan One Bold Move for Your Microbakery This Quarter | Episode 74

  • Apr 3, 2025
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


When I was first building my bakery, I spent hours and hours scouring Facebook threads looking for real answers about how to run this kind of business. I was not looking for help shaping a boule. I wanted to know how to price it, how to handle the volume, and how to build something that actually paid me.


There was not much out there. Most of what I found was either baking technique or general small business advice written for someone with a storefront and a payroll.


That gap is the reason I started this podcast, and it is the reason I built the first Bread Winner Summit, a two day online conference just for sourdough entrepreneurs. I want to take you behind the scenes of how that came together, because the way it happened is something you can use in your own bakery this quarter.


The reflection session that started the whole thing

The Summit started in November, at a hotel, by myself, for my birthday. A solo hotel stay is one of my favorite things in the world. That morning I went down to the coffee shop, sat there for a couple of hours, and opened up ChatGPT.


I typed something like this: I want to reflect on the past year and look forward at the first quarter of next year, can you ask me some questions to help me reflect and look ahead. Then I answered the questions it asked me, one at a time, for two hours.


One of those questions was, what is a bold move you could make in the first quarter. My first answer was that I did not know, so I asked for ideas. One of the ideas was to host an online summit, and that is the one that clicked.


That bold move did not arrive in a flash of inspiration while I was shaping loaves. It came out of two protected hours, a list of good questions, and a willingness to answer them honestly instead of vaguely.


You can run that same session before your next quarter starts. Get out of your bakery, take two hours somewhere that is not your kitchen, and work through questions like these:

  • What worked in my business this year that I want to keep doing?

  • What did I do out of obligation that I can stop?

  • What is my revenue actually doing, month by month, and what drove the good months?

  • Where did I feel the most stretched, and was that a process problem or a pricing problem?

  • What is one bold move I could make in the next 90 days?

Most of us never sit down with our own business as a subject. We just work inside it. Two hours a quarter changes that. I go deeper on annual planning in Episode 114 if you want a fuller version of this.


Why generic business advice does not fit a microbakery

The reason I wanted a sourdough specific event is the same reason I keep making this show. When you take advice built for a coffee shop or an online boutique and try to apply it to a home based bakery, half of it does not translate.


Your inventory is perishable and made by hand. Your production capacity is limited by your oven, not by your marketing. Your cottage food rules decide what you are legally allowed to sell before you decide what you want to sell. Your busy season is other people's holidays.


So when you go looking for help, go looking for help from people running your kind of business. Advice from bakers who are one or two steps ahead of you is worth more than advice from a business coach who has never planned a bake schedule.


The six pillars I built it around

I wanted the Summit to be well rounded and practical, so I built the schedule on the six pillars I use for a sustainable, profitable microbakery:

  • Sales: how orders actually come in, and how many.

  • Marketing: how people find you and decide to trust you.

  • Processes: your bake schedule, your systems, your week.

  • Products: your menu, and whether each item earns its place.

  • Lifestyle: your hours, your energy, your family, your rest.

  • Cash flow: what comes in, what goes out, and what you keep.

Every topic got at least two speakers. Pricing for profit, content pillars and social media, deepening your knowledge of the science and the art of sourdough, building a strong business, bartering and connecting with other bakers in your own town. That was only scratching the surface of it.


These six pillars are also the fastest self audit I know. Rate yourself one to ten on each one this week. The lowest number is where your next 90 days should go, and it is almost never the pillar you were already worried about. I break all six down in Episode 20.


Asking for things is a business skill

The part of building the Summit that stretched me most was the asking. So many emails, so many Instagram messages, reaching out to people I had admired in the sourdough space for years.


Some of them said yes and told me they got the vision, and I still have not fully recovered from those pinch me moments! There were also plenty of gracious nos, and plenty of messages that simply never got answered.


Contacting people does not come naturally to me. I grew a lot through that process, and it is the same skill your bakery runs on. Asking a coffee shop if they will carry your loaves is the same muscle. So is asking a farm stand to split a booth fee, or asking a local business to collaborate on a bundle. I walk through ten of those asks in Episode 69.


A no costs you nothing at all, and a single yes can change your whole year!


If you are a year or more in

If your bakery already has real revenue, the version of this that matters for you is the calendar. Put one reflection session on it per quarter, before the quarter begins, and treat it like a market you committed to.


Then commit to exactly one bold move for those 90 days, and let it be only one. It might be a wholesale account, a price increase across the menu, your first hire, a move to a commercial kitchen, or a product line you retire completely.


The bakers I see stalling out are usually working very hard on eleven small improvements at once. The ones who grow pick a single move each quarter and let it be uncomfortable for a few weeks.


Your bakery matters more than its size

What I hoped for most from the Summit was that bakers would leave feeling connected. Connected to each other, and connected to the significance of their own business inside their own town.


You are a local food producer. The role you play in turning the tide back toward locally made food is real, no matter how small your operation is right now. You are not only baking bread. You are holding space for connection, for nourishment, for the small weekly joy of somebody picking up a warm loaf from your porch.


That is worth building carefully, and worth building in a way you can sustain.


Final thoughts

The Summit began as one honest answer to one good question, asked on an ordinary morning in a coffee shop. Everything after that was just work, one email at a time.


Your next big thing probably works the same way. Give yourself the two hours, ask yourself the uncomfortable question, and then start sending the messages.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


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