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How to Run a Microbakery While Working a Full-Time Job | Episode 46

  • Dec 16, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Almost nobody starts a microbakery in a quiet, empty week. You build it around a job with a start time, kids who need dinner, and one home oven that also has to make the lasagna.


That is exactly where Hannah Guzman is. She lives in Fort Myers, Florida with her husband and two little boys, she works a nine to five, and she launched her microbakery in March of 2024. Eight months later she was baking forty plus loaves a week alongside cookies and scones, running bread drops from her house, and showing up beautifully online.


Every bit of that growth came from a decision she made on purpose about her capacity, her menu, and her sales channels. All of them are worth stealing.


Answer the legal question before you answer the equipment question

Hannah was baking for her family, got good at it, and people started asking to buy her bread. Before she sold a thing, she went and looked up the law.


Under Florida's cottage food rules, she found she could sell up to $250,000 of product a year from her home kitchen with no special license and no LLC, as long as she followed the labeling requirements, listed allergen information, and put the cottage food disclaimer on every package.


That one hour of research is what let her promote the bakery in public. Your state's rules will be different, so go look up your own cottage food law, your sales cap, and your labeling requirements before you take a dollar.


Decide your capacity before it decides for you

When Hannah launched, she did what most of us do. She got excited, opened weekly bread drops, took orders every which way with no real system, and climbed to fifteen or twenty loaves a week.


Then she ran into the math of her actual life. She works a full day, so the mixing, shaping, and baking all have to fit between five and nine in the morning or late at night after the boys are asleep. Weekly drops on top of that were wearing her out.


So she set a limit. Biweekly bread drops instead of weekly, with an off week in between to rest, or one market and one bread drop in a month. That single change is what made the business sustainable.


Here is the part I love about that. She did not shrink her ambition one bit. She sized her operation to her real constraints, which are the oven she owns, the hours she has, and the recovery week she needs. If you want help doing that math for yourself, I walk through it step by step in Calculating Your Capacity for Markets and Pre-Orders in Your Sourdough Microbakery.


Stop measuring your business in loaves

This was my favorite thing Hannah said, and it is a menu decision with real money attached.


She kept comparing herself to bakers making one hundred loaves a week and asking why she could not hit fifty. Then she looked at the labor. Bread is the most time-hungry thing she makes, and her home oven limits how much of it she can produce in a morning.


So she runs about thirty loaves and fills out the rest of the order with items she can prep a day or two ahead and hold in the fridge. Brown butter chocolate chip cookies, funfetti and snickerdoodle cookies, maple pecan and pumpkin scones. Those are her best sellers, and they make up a good portion of her revenue.


Look at what that does to her business:

  • The prep happens in thirty minute windows instead of a four hour block she does not have.

  • Revenue per bake day goes up without another loaf coming out of the oven.

  • Her average order goes up, because people add a bag of cookies to a loaf.

  • Her bake day gets shorter, which is the whole reason she can keep doing this.

If you have been stuck at the same loaf count for months, look at your menu before you look at your oven. Find two items you can prep in advance and sell alongside the bread.


When a market is not the right sales channel

Hannah shared something she had never talked about publicly. She stopped going to her local market.


Some markets run on a scarcity mindset. They cap how many vendors can sell a category, so you hear things like "you can bring baked goods but not bread, because we already have a bakery," or "someone two booths down sells cookies, so cookies are out." Add the application, the booth fee, and the insurance, and you are paying real money for a channel that will not let you sell your whole menu.


Her alternative is worth copying. She runs biweekly bread drops from home with the occasional pop-up, so there is no booth fee, no application, and no overhead beyond ingredients and packaging. For pop-ups she looks past markets entirely and thinks about salons, chiropractic offices, wellness studios, and gyms, small businesses that want a reason for their clients to stop in. That channel is wide open and the host usually says yes.


A market can be a wonderful sales channel. Mine is. Just treat it like any other channel and ask what it costs you, what it lets you sell, and what it returns. If it does not fit, do not force it. More options in Succeeding in Sourdough Sales Without Farmers' Markets.


Marketing when you have zero spare hours

Hannah shows up constantly on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube while working full time, and it runs on systems.

  • She keeps a running list of content ideas in Google Keep and her phone notes, built from the questions people actually ask her.

  • She films during her bake and prep days, because she is already in the kitchen doing the interesting part.

  • She batch creates during her off weeks, when her energy is not going to prep.

  • She schedules posts ahead instead of posting live, so she is not on her phone during family time.

  • She saves B-roll and reuses it, because not every idea needs a brand new video.

  • Most of her videos are voiceover rather than talking to camera, since filming live with two little ones in the house rarely works.

It took about six months to gain traction, and she got there by leaving real comments and staying consistent back when her posts were getting four likes.


The mindset underneath the system matters just as much. Hannah runs on an abundance mindset, which she picked up from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. She does not treat other microbakers as competition. She sees a big market with room for all of us.


One tip of my own: try a fake bake day. Bake with no orders on the calendar, take all the photos and video you want, and reuse that footage for months. The pressure is off and the content is better!


If you are a year or two in, audit this

Two things Hannah does are worth an hour of your time this month.


First, she has never gone into debt for her bakery. She bought her bread fridge after a big bread drop, and that drop paid for the fridge. Her next purchase is a commercial mixer, which she decided on after hand mixing fifteen loaves at a time and once, memorably, twenty five. Let each purchase be paid for by the revenue that proved you needed it.


Second, she got creative before she got expensive. She worked out how to bake eight loaves at a time in her home oven using open baking and steam. My double oven still handles my volume, and a dedicated bread oven is something I am working toward rather than something I needed to start. If your oven is your bottleneck, I have more ideas in Baking More in a Home Oven, Growing Your Customer Base, and Saving Time.


One more note from her early days. Her first bread drops were inconsistent because bulk dough ferments differently than one or two loaves. Baking technique is not my lane, so I will point you where she pointed me, to the Sourdough Journey material on bulk fermentation. Get your product repeatable before you take money for it.


Final thoughts

What I love about Hannah's story is how ordinary every decision is. She looked up her state law. She capped her loaf count. She added cookies she could prep ahead. She walked away from a market that would not let her sell her own menu. She bought equipment only after the revenue showed up.


None of that takes quitting your job or finding hours that do not exist. It takes deciding what size your business is right now, then building the schedule and the menu to match.


Your business should be right sized for you and the season you are in. Eight months in, Hannah is proof that small and steady adds up fast.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

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