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How to Run a Planning Week in Your Microbakery | Episode 14

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Most microbakery owners never stop. You bake, you deliver, you restock, you open the menu again on Sunday, and the whole thing rolls forward on momentum until something breaks or you burn out.


Somewhere in there, the decisions that actually grow a business stop getting made. Not because you do not care, but because there is no room in the week where you are not baking.


So here is what I do instead. I take one full week off orders at the turn of a season and I spend it planning. My kids went back to school, I closed the menu for a week, and I used that time to lay the foundation for my fall and winter.


Once you have run one of these, you will want it in the rhythm of your business every season. Here is exactly how I structure mine.


Start by asking your customers, not guessing

The first thing I do, before any journaling or dreaming, is send a survey to my customers. Everything else in the week goes better when you have their answers in front of you.


I sent mine through the text message my customers already get every Sunday. Normally that text says the menu is open, click here to order. That week it said there are no bread orders, but I would love to hear from you, click here to fill out the survey. If you already have a list on Hotplate, the Simply Bread app, or wherever you take orders, use that list. If you do not, push it out on social a few times.


Give people a reason to click. I offered a giveaway, five customers chosen at random to receive a free loaf of their choice. And share the link more than once. I scroll right past survey links from other businesses the first two times I see them and only click when I actually have a minute. Your customers are the same.


Here is what I asked:

  • Which items on my menu are your current favorites?

  • What do you want to see more of, and are there specific flavors you want?

  • What do you value when you are buying food for your family? All organic, organic when it makes sense in the budget, value with organic not being important, flavor with organic not being important, or something else I have not named.

  • How is the ordering process working for you? The pickup day, the time window, anything you would change.

  • Anything else, good or bad. Praise, feedback, ideas.

That third question is the one I had been wondering about for a year. I have wanted to move toward organic freshly ground grains, and the responses told me there is enough demand to support a small part of my menu going that direction, not the whole thing. That is a menu decision I would have gotten wrong on instinct, and it cost me nothing to find out.


I had about 40 responses in a day. The other thing nobody warns you about is how good it feels. The feedback was overwhelmingly kind, and reading it gave me a real jolt of energy going into a big season. That alone is worth sending it!


Get clear on what your bakery stands for

Once the survey is out doing its work, take a notebook somewhere that is not your kitchen and spend time on your mission, vision and values.


Check whether you are still aligned with where you said you were heading. Are the decisions you have made this year the decisions your stated values would have made? If you have drifted, is it a direction you feel good about, or do you need to course correct?


If you have never written these down, write them now, with your customers' feedback fresh in front of you. You want a short, clear statement of what your business says yes to and what it says no to.


If you get stuck, ask ChatGPT to interview you. I ask it something like, please help me write a mission statement for my business, ask me 10 questions to get the information you need. Answer the questions, take the draft it gives you, then rewrite it in your own words. The draft is the robot version. Your voice is what makes it usable.


Please do not skip this part. It is one of the things that will set you apart from every other baker in your area, because you will be clear on exactly what you stand for and what you turn down. The businesses that stick around all have that clarity.


Review the last season honestly

Stay in that notebook. Look back over the past year, the past six months, the past three months, and answer plainly.

  • What worked well enough that you want to repeat it?

  • What did your customers respond to most?

  • What did you try that landed flat, with few sales and no real feedback?

  • Where did you take on more than your capacity and end up close to burnout?

  • Where could you have grown if you had marketed more consistently?

Be honest with yourself, and give yourself a lot of grace while you do it. You are doing a really good job. This is not a performance review, it is a way to point your energy at the things that bring the best results and the most joy, which is what makes a business sustainable season after season.


Put the next season on your radar

You do not need a full holiday plan during planning week. You just need the shape of it in your head.


Look at what is coming and start thinking about your capacity. How many markets do you actually want to do, not how many you could technically survive. Whether you want holiday specials on the menu. What you can comfortably manage.


Q4 is the biggest season of the year for most retail businesses, and it can also be the one that wrecks you. Naming your limits now, while you are calm, is how you get the revenue without the wreckage.


Bake without deadlines

You are not taking orders this week, but you should still be baking, for two reasons.


First, bake a small quantity of every staple item on your menu. You are baking these under zero pressure so you can take real marketing photos of them. If you are like me, you bake the orders, you send them out the door, and you never get the picture. This is your chance to get a beautiful photo of every product you sell.


Second, recipe test. Pull up the flavor requests from your survey and the recipes you have been saving, and have fun in the kitchen. My customers surprised me by asking for more sweets when I expected them to ask for more staples, so I went into muffins, cookies and pastries.


While you are baking, prop your phone against a coffee cup and let it record. Little clips of mixing, weighing, shaping, pulling things out of the oven. Do not make it perfect, and do make sure your face is in some of it, because the reels that show you consistently do better than the ones that only show your hands. Those clips will sit on your phone and feed your content for the entire season. If you want the simple way to turn them into reels, that is Reach the Right People with Social Media for your Sourdough Microbakery | Part 2 | Episode 10.


Turn the extras into feedback

You are going to end the week with more baked goods than your family wants to eat. You can freeze some of it, but the better move is to put it in front of customers.


Post on social that you have been recipe testing for fall and the first five people to come by can taste and give you feedback. It builds excitement for the new season and it gets you honest reactions to the items you are considering adding, before you commit them to a menu.


Close the week by talking to your customers

Finish by communicating. Draw the winner of your giveaway, thank people for the survey responses, and tease something new that is coming.


The thing I added last season that worked best was a physical menu handed out at pickup. I was inspired by Sarah Does Sourdough, who gives her customers a little printed piece of paper each month. Mine is a simple rectangle designed in Canva with my staples, the weekly specials, a QR code to my ordering form, my number for questions, and my address. I print four to a page on cardstock on my home printer and cut them out, so they are sturdy enough to survive the bag.


It goes on the fridge, and that keeps you top of mind all month. It also lets customers plan ahead. When they know the flavor they love shows up in week three, they are watching for that menu to open.


If you are a year or more in

The bakers who get the most out of a planning week are the ones with enough history to actually analyze. If you have a full year of sales behind you, add one thing to the week that a newer baker cannot do yet.


Sit down with your numbers and rank your menu items by what each one earns you per hour of your time, not per unit. Then look at your survey favorites next to that ranking. The items that show up on both lists are the backbone of next season's menu. Anything that customers love but that quietly eats your whole Saturday is the item to reprice, restructure, or take off the menu.


Final thoughts

A planning week does far more than get you organized. It lets you walk into the next season on purpose, with your values clear, your capacity named, and your customers' actual words in front of you instead of your best guess.


Your customers notice too. When people feel like they have a voice in what you make, they get more invested in your bakery.


I am proud of you for taking the time to do this. You are running the business instead of letting the business run you.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If you want to keep building the planning muscle, start with these three.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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