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How to Run a Monthly Check-In in Your Sourdough Microbakery | Episode 116

  • Feb 5
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Most bakers I know do not have a planning problem. We love a fresh start, a clean page, and a new plan for the month ahead. We make the plan, we bake it, we sell it, and then we roll straight into the next plan without ever stopping to ask whether the last one worked.


That missing pause is expensive. It is how a product stays on your menu two seasons after people stopped buying it, and how you end up making the same tired decision over and over because nobody ever wrote down a rule.


So here is the monthly check-in I run in my own bakery. It takes me under twenty minutes, I ask the same questions every single time, and it has become one of the most useful things I do as a business owner.


The purpose is awareness, not optimization

I am not trying to overhaul my business every thirty days. I am answering one question: is this still working?


Without a check-in rhythm, most of us land in one of three habits. We avoid the numbers and the systems entirely, or we look at them constantly and overreact to every wobble, or we run on autopilot and hope it turns out. A monthly check-in handles all three, because it gives you a set time to look and a set permission to stop looking the rest of the month.


The four questions I ask every month

These are my big-picture questions, and they have not changed in a long time.

  • What worked?

  • What didn't?

  • What did I learn?

  • How am I moving forward?

I ask the same four on purpose. Asking different questions every month makes it almost impossible to see a pattern. Asking the same four means that by month three you are reading a story instead of a snapshot.


Underneath those four questions, I look at four specific areas.


1. Products: what sold, what stalled, what caused friction

I am not rewriting recipes every month. I am noticing.

  • Which products sold steadily all month.

  • Which ones stalled or dropped off.

  • Which ones created friction in my prep day, no matter how well they sold.

If a longtime favorite stops selling for a couple of weeks, that is worth writing down. It might be seasonality. It might be that something in your process shifted and the product is no longer consistent. Do not go fix it yet. Just notice it.


2. Capacity: did the work match your energy?

This is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether you are still doing this in three years.

  • Did the workload match my energy this month?

  • Did prep feel smooth or frantic?

  • Where did help make the biggest difference?

  • Where did I need help and not have it?

Those answers tell me whether my systems are supporting me or draining me. Burnout does not come from working hard. It comes from working hard without support or structure.


3. Revenue direction: trends beat totals

You do not need exact numbers for this. You need direction.

  • Did revenue go up, go down, or hold steady?

  • Were the sales repeatable, or was it a one-off spike?

  • Did the highs and lows follow a rhythm, like market weeks or pre-order days?

This gets genuinely interesting after a few months. You start to see that the week after a market is always quieter because everyone already has their bread, or that a certain month softens every year. Once you can see the rhythm, you can plan around it instead of being surprised by it.


4. Decision friction: what are you tired of deciding?

This is the easiest category to miss and probably the most important one.

  • What decisions felt heavy this month?

  • What questions kept coming up, from customers, from helpers, or in my own head?

  • What am I tired of deciding again and again?

Repeated friction is a signal that a rule or a system is missing. This is exactly what pushed me to rebuild my menu planning. In December I realized I was re-deciding the same menu every single month, and it was eating far more energy than it deserved. I walked through the system I built to fix it in How I'm Planning My Weekly Menu in My Sourdough Microbakery in 2026 | Episode 115.


What I do not change month to month

This part matters as much as the reviewing. I love a good no as much as I love a good yes, and these are my standing nos.

  • I do not add new offerings impulsively. One customer asking for a special flavor is not a reason to put it on the menu.

  • I do not scrap a system after one bad week. If your fermentation went sideways once, one thing was different. Find that one thing instead of watching twelve videos and changing everything at once.

  • I do not chase feedback. Think about how rarely you tell the coffee shop that your drink was perfect, or tell the grocery store that a product let you down. No news really is usually good news.

A check-in informs your decisions. It does not demand action.


The one, two, three rule for when to actually change something

Here is the rule that takes the emotion out of it.

  • One month is data.

  • Two months is a trend.

  • Three months is a decision.

Say a product slides for three months running. That is when you decide whether it stays, or whether you take it off the menu and bring it back when people want it again. Or say your mixing step is the bottleneck. Month one your energy says this is exhausting. Month two the orders are growing and the mixing is swallowing your day. Month three you buy the mixer.


Now, if you are genuinely desperate for that mixer in month two, buy the mixer, my friend! Do not wait on my timeline when the bottleneck is already obvious. This rule is for the times you are not sure.


The question that changes the most

At the end of every check-in I ask one more thing: what would make next month easier?


Not bigger. Not more profitable. Easier. Ease is a leading indicator of sustainability, and it is what it looks like when your systems flow, your marketing brings people to you, and your customers keep coming back on their own.


This is not an easy business and I would never tell you it is. I am asking where you can take friction out so there is more ease inside hard work. For you that might be hiring a mother's helper for two hours on Wednesday so you can get everything baked and packed. It might be paying your teenager to wash the dishes. It might be taking one product off your menu because you dread making it, put it off to the end, and then scramble.


If you are one to three years in

The check-in gets more valuable as your business gets bigger, because the cost of a bad habit compounds.

  • Run the four categories on each revenue stream separately: retail bakes, markets, wholesale, workshops. One of them is probably carrying the others.

  • Write down every decision you made twice this month. Each one of those is a rule you have not written yet.

  • Look at where your helper time went, and check whether you handed off the easiest things to teach or the things you liked least.

  • Keep three months of check-ins side by side before you change anything structural. Structural changes are expensive when they are reactions.


Final thoughts

You do not need to constantly re-plan your bakery, and you do not need to react to every fluctuation. Twenty minutes, the same four questions, written down where you can find them next month. That is the whole practice.


A plain notebook is all I used for a long time, and it is genuinely all you need. Sit down at the end of this month, answer the four questions, and then go back and read them at the end of the next one. That is when this starts to pay you.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

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