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How to Run a Monthly Review of Your Microbakery | Episode 57

  • Feb 3, 2025
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


Most of us close out a month in the bakery with a vague feeling about how it went. It was busy, or it was slow, or it was fine. Then we roll into the next month and repeat every single thing we did, including the parts that were losing us money.


I started reviewing my own microbakery month by month because that vague feeling was not helping me make better decisions. January was the first month I ran a new schedule, and it handed me a humbling set of lessons. I threw away twenty four loaves of focaccia, I sold bread I was not proud of, and I still had one of my best market days ever.


Here is how I run that review, and what one real month can tell you about your business.


Start with the shape of your week

The biggest change I made in January was to my schedule, and it made everything else possible.


I used to do a porch pickup every Thursday, plus a market on the second and fourth Saturday. On market weeks my prep days and my bake days overlapped, and I was always limited on how much I could bring to the market because I was baking for the porch pickup at the same time.


So I split them. Market one week, porch pickup the next. That took me from about six bake days a month down to four, and it immediately felt more manageable.


The thing I was nervous about was losing a pre-order week, because my customers like to reserve their bread. My pre-order platform let me write a clearer description of each bake day, so I opened pre-orders for pickup at the market too. I had close to thirty orders placed for a single Saturday market pickup. Nobody minded the new rhythm at all!


If your weeks feel like one long blur of prep, look there before you touch anything else. Two sales days crammed into one bake cycle is a process problem, and no amount of hustle fixes it.


What it actually costs to bake past your capacity

I know my numbers. How much dough fits in my mixer, how many loaves I can hold at once, how much fits in my fridge. I have twenty four loaf pans, so twenty four is my sandwich bread capacity. My focaccia capacity is sixteen.


For my first bake of January I went past all of that on purpose, because I wanted to see how far I could push. Here is the bill for that curiosity.

  • I prepped more sandwich bread than I had pans for, so I had to hold some of it differently than usual. Those loaves came out heavy and dense, and many were already sold.

  • I mixed a very large batch of cookies by hand instead of using my stand mixer. They baked flat, flat enough that I would not sell them, and some of those were pre-sold too.

  • Ten loaves came out flat after a temperature swing in my brand new fridge. I put them in a basket labeled "flat but yummy," discounted them, and they sold fast.

  • I mixed twenty four focaccia, eight over my capacity, and forgot the salt. That one was not fixable, and all twenty four went in the trash.

I lost product, I discounted product, and I gave away replacements. That is what going over capacity looks like in dollars, and it is why I talk about knowing your capacity so often.


The happy ending is that I still brought one hundred and one loaves to that market and sold one hundred of them. I took one home for my sandwich.


Turn each mistake into a system

Feeling bad about a mistake will not protect you from it. What protects you is building something that catches it next time.


The salt was the clearest example. I had run out, I was waiting on a restock, and I put the flour in the bin knowing I would add the salt later. Then I mixed the dough the next day and never added it, because in my system the salt is always already in the bin with the flour.


Two things came out of that.


First, a running restock list where I can see it, so I reorder well before I hit zero. I keep magnetic dry erase sheets on my fridge now. One for my to-do list, one for my assistant's list, one for the week's menu, and a corner for restocks.


Second, a roll of bright yellow tape on a hook in my kitchen. Any time something is out of the ordinary in a process, my assistant or I tape it. Salt not in the bin where it lives, tape on the bin. It is a two second habit that stops a whole bake from going in the garbage.


When something goes wrong, skip the resolution to be more careful and ask what the process would need to look like for that mistake to be impossible. Then go build that.


How to tell a customer their order is not right

I had several of these conversations in January, and I have a way I do it. I tell them before they find out themselves, briefly, without a long apology and without too much detail. This did not meet my standard, I want you to have my best, so here are your options: a replacement next week, something else off my table today, or a refund.


Every single person was gracious. One customer came back later and told me the dense loaf really was too dense to get through, so I told her to grab a loaf off my table and take it home, and I sent her a coupon code as well. I want to love on my customers even when they are not asking me for anything.


Getting ahead of it protects the thing you cannot buy back, which is their trust in your product.


Count your hours for one week

For my porch pickup week I tracked my time on one of those dry erase sheets. Sixteen hours, including a thirty minute drive each way for a supply run and the evening I spent prepping my starter. Market weeks are heavier, closer to thirty or forty hours across two prep days, a bake day and the market itself.


Sixteen hours is only sixteen because I have help. My assistant pre-measures ingredients, washes dishes and packages orders, and before I hired her that same week would have been well over twenty hours.


If you think you really need help, look at what four or five hours a week would do for you. Even someone to sit on the floor and play with your babies while you push through a few hours of work can pay for itself, and you do not have to spend the freed-up time expanding. Lower stress is a perfectly good return.


For the baker a few years in

If you already have real revenue, the monthly review is where your optimization comes from. Sit down at the end of the month with these questions.

  • What did I actually sell out of, and what lingered on the table?

  • What did I throw away or discount, and what was the dollar value of it?

  • How many hours did I work, and which day was the heaviest?

  • Which items raise my average order value? For me it is English muffins, cinnamon rolls and scones, and any week those are on the menu is a bigger revenue week.

  • Which items are underpriced for the labor they take? Bread bowls take the same effort as a full loaf and I can fit fewer in the oven, so I kept the price the same and made one fewer per order until the math worked.

  • What is one system I could build this month so last month's worst moment cannot repeat?

Small batches are how I test anything new. I brought pizza crusts and brownies to a market for the first time in small quantities and both sold out fast, so they are staying. If something lingers and people seem unsure, I either try it once more or let the idea go.


Final thoughts

I am not writing this from the finish line. There is no point of arrival where the flat cookies stop happening. What changes is how fast you turn a bad bake into a better process, and that only happens when you look at the month on purpose instead of letting it blur past.


So pick a date at the end of each month. Half an hour, a notebook, your sales numbers and your honest memory. Write down what worked, what did not, and the one thing you are changing. Do that twelve times and you will be running a very different business a year from now.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this way of looking at a month is useful to you, these three are worth your time too.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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