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How to Plan Your Q4 Schedule Before the Holiday Rush | Episode 25

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


October, November and December are the busiest three months of the year for almost every retail business, and a microbakery is no exception. Holiday orders stack up, Thanksgiving arrives, teacher gifts and hostess gifts and seasonal events all land in the same few weeks.


My first year in business I took on far more than I should have for Thanksgiving. My menu was enormous, I was doing every bit of the work myself, and I was still baking out of my home oven. I got it all done, and it was chaotic, and I came out the other side burnt out. December arrived and I had nothing left, so I offered a very limited menu and let a lot of good opportunities go by.


The schedule is the thing you build first, before the menu and before the events.


Put the immovable things on the calendar first

Pull up your calendar right now and start blocking space.


If you were in business last year, think back on what worked and what did not, and be honest about how you felt when the season ended. If this is your first holiday season, decide now how you want to feel in January.


Then find your non-negotiables and get them in first. Family traditions, holiday commitments, church activities, school events, anything that cannot move. Those go on the calendar before a single bake day does.


Block your time instead of running on adrenaline

Time blocking has never come naturally to me. I thrive under pressure and a deadline motivates me more than anything else, which works fine right up until you are living that way every week of the year. So I have been building the muscle.


Time blocking means setting a specific time for each kind of task, and it works for family time as much as it does for bake days. Start by marking your bake days. In a market week, I bake all day Friday for a Saturday event, which makes Wednesday and Thursday my dough days. I could get all the dough done in one day, and it is a brutal one, so splitting it across two feels healthier and keeps me from working through the hours my kids are around.


Then add two kinds of blocks that most of us skip:

  • An admin block. Thirty minutes a day is enough. Baking tasks have hard deadlines and feel urgent, so posting on social, replying to a customer text and checking your bookkeeping all slide to the bottom of the list. Put a block on the calendar, pour the coffee, and do them.

  • A rest block. A Sunday afternoon or one evening a week, whatever fits your life. Make it non-negotiable. Having it blocked in lets you sit down without that low hum of guilt about what you could be doing instead.

Be realistic about what fits in a day. My business coach told me to schedule 50 percent more time than I think a task will take, and she was right. The unexpected shows up, and that buffer keeps you from playing catch up all season.


Get ahead of the peak weeks

Thanksgiving week and the week before Christmas are their own animal, and they run on work you already did. Look ahead and pull what you can forward:

  • Print all your labels the week before.

  • Confirm a couple of weeks out that you have the ingredients you need, or get a grocery order scheduled.

  • Order bags, business cards and any printed marketing early so you are not placing a panicked overnight order.

Then prep what you can freeze. Dinner rolls are the perfect example, because you can mix the dough, shape them, pan them, let them rise and freeze them, then bake them off during the week of orders. I pulled together freeze-ahead ideas from over a dozen bakers if you want a list to work from.


Batch everything you can

Batching means doing all of one task at once instead of scattering it through the week. If you have several orders of the same product, make them together.


Lately I multiply my scone recipe by six every time I mix it. I might offer twelve packs for a weekly porch pickup, and if only eight sell, I mix twelve anyway. The extra four go in the freezer for a farmers market, or for the week a neighbor needs a meal or a teacher deserves something nice.


I batch packaging the same way, sitting down to put logo stickers on a whole stack of brown paper bags at once so it is handled for the next couple of weeks and I never think about it on a bake morning.


Take the pressure off your inbox

Your phone gets louder in November, so decide now how you want that to go.


Tell your customers what to expect: which channel you answer on, and how long a reply takes during the busy season. Something as simple as "give me 24 hours to get back to you, and please text rather than message me" saves you dozens of small interruptions.


If you are still taking orders through DMs, texts and a spreadsheet, get an ordering platform set up before the season starts. Hotplate or the Simply Bread app takes the order and processes the payment, and having everything on one page makes fulfillment far easier.


Look at pickup and delivery too. Make pickup more self serve where you can, and streamline delivery, hand it off, or take it off the table this season.


Get some help, sooner than you think

I did not hire anyone my first holiday season and it would have made such a difference.


Help can be a family member doing packaging, or a few paid hours a week for dishes and labels. I hired an assistant recently and it is already one of the best decisions I have made. She does dishes, packaging, pre-measured ingredients and scooping cookies, the things that are easy to teach and hand off. I still mix the dough and handle the bread process myself.


If you are on the fence, run the numbers. If you pay someone $150 a week and that frees you up to produce another $300 of product a week, the decision makes itself. Do that math with your own figures. My episode on hiring an assistant walks through bringing someone on without it feeling like a huge leap.


Schedule your rest week now

We cannot grow a thriving business while running ourselves into the ground, so block rest the same way you block a bake day.


Schedule the family things specifically. A weekly game night, your kid's holiday program, the movie nights that are the heart of the season at our house. Those get brushed aside first when orders pile up unless they are written down.


Then take a rest week. Somewhere mid season, or the week between Christmas and New Year, or both. No orders, oven off. Bake something just for your family if it brings you joy, or do not bake at all and let the inspiration come back on its own.


I already scheduled mine for the last week of October and put it on the October calendar I hand my customers, so they have four weeks of notice and can order extra the week before. Nobody gets blindsided, and I walk into November rested.


If you are feeling stretched thin, it is fine to say no to an opportunity, close ordering earlier, or limit how much you make available. Your business is supposed to serve your life.


An audit for the baker a few years in

If you have run a holiday season or two, open last year's calendar next to this year's blank one before you block anything in.


Find the weeks you worked more than 50 hours and ask what caused it: a menu that was too big, a market you added late, an order deadline that ran too close to pickup day. Fix that one thing structurally this year instead of promising yourself you will work faster, then set your order cutoffs and your rest week around it.


Final thoughts

I hope that when I look back on this season I remember the traditions we kept, the food we ate together and the memories my kids made, rather than the money I made selling bread. A calendar built on purpose makes room for both.


Grab a pen and your calendar this week and map out your November. Planning now will save you so much stress later, and you will feel it every week of the season.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you are setting up your fourth quarter, these will help you build the rest of the plan.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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