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October Microbakery Recap: Hiring Help and Cutting the Menu | Episode 34

  • Nov 12, 2024
  • 8 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


When I was starting out I read every thread in the sourdough microbakery Facebook groups, and I remember exactly where I was when I saw someone mention doing $1,000 weeks. It had never occurred to me that you could make that kind of money baking bread out of your house. I have met and passed that goal since, and I am not sure I would have aimed for it if I had not watched someone else do it first.


That is why I pull the curtain back on my own months. Not so you copy my business, but so you can see what the decisions look like from the inside. Here is my October, about 14 months in.


What my week actually looks like

I run weekly porch pickups on Thursdays. The menu opens Saturday and closes Tuesday morning. My assistant comes Tuesday, when we mix dough and she preps inclusions, packaging, and dishes. Wednesday is my admin day. Thursday I am up at 3:30 or 4 to bake for an 11am pickup, and she comes again to help package and clean up.


On top of that I do a market every second and fourth Saturday, so those weeks I start Saturday's dough on Thursday morning while I am still packaging Thursday's orders, then bake all day Friday.


It flows. It is also a lot, and by the end of October I could feel it.


Hiring my first assistant

Melissa started in early October for 10 hours a week, and she is the highlight of my month.


I hired her because I had run out of hours. There were not enough of them to bake what I was baking, clean the kitchen, be present with my family, be a decent friend, and make a podcast. That is a capacity problem, not a discipline problem.


Delaney gave a metric on this show that I keep repeating: if you are working multiple 12 hour days a week, it is time to invest in help. Maybe that is a few hours of childcare so you can do deep work, maybe it is five to 10 hours of dishes and packaging. It is a real business expense, and it is the right one once you have hit your own limit.


My menu got too big, and my sales were great anyway

I set my entire month's menu at the start of the month and share it with my customers so they know what is coming. In October that was my staples, sourdough, sandwich bread, focaccia, and chocolate chip cookies, plus a rotating sweet inclusion bread and a savory one, a rotating scone flavor, English muffins on the weeks I did not have a market, and a new muffin on the weeks I did. I even solved the muffin timing by scooping the batter into liners, freezing them in the liners, and baking from frozen.


September and October were two of my highest porch pickup months ever. And I felt tired for basically all of October.


That is the part worth sitting with. Higher revenue does not automatically mean the menu is right. If holding that level of output for a few more months would burn me out, then it is the wrong level for me, no matter what the sales say.


So November gets a scaled back menu. Staples, a rotating scone, probably English muffins, no extra muffins, and I am considering one inclusion bread instead of both sweet and savory. Lower quantities across the board too.


I try to offer as much as I can because I hate for people to miss out. I also cannot bake for everybody in my community. Missing out is not the disaster it feels like either. The customer who did not get bread this week is the one who orders the moment the menu opens next week.


Planning a smaller holiday season on purpose

Last year was my first Thanksgiving pre-order and I offered too much. Multiple breads, dinner rolls, a cinnamon pull apart bread, cookies. As a solo baker with my kids home that week, it flattened me, and I was so burned out that I barely offered anything for Christmas.


This year I am offering about half as many product types: a regular bread, dinner rolls, chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls, and a pumpkin shaped sourdough for centerpieces and hostess gifts. That is it, and I feel good about it. I am rationing my energy so there is some left for my family in December.


I also built a week off into my calendar at the end of October and took it. No porch pickups. I slept, and Melissa and I used the time to get ahead: she shredded a mountain of cheese and butter, and we rolled 150 dinner rolls, about half of what I will need for Thanksgiving, straight into the freezer to rise and bake in their pans later.


If you take one thing from my October, take that. Schedule the off week before you need it, and use part of it to bank work for the busy weeks.


The equipment I bought and the one I did not

We are in Texas and it is still in the seventies, but the house gets chilly in winter and my dough will move much more slowly than it did in July. That is a scheduling problem, because slow dough means I am shaping in the afternoon when my kids get home. So during my off week I swapped my counter height shelf for a bakery speed rack that holds 20 sheet pans. Dough goes on the pans, a plastic cover goes over the whole rack, and a warming pad or a space heater on very low holds a steady temperature inside it. My big bins just barely do not fit, so I will use smaller ones. Scrappy problem solving is one of my actual strengths!


The purchase I did not make is a bread oven. I still bake in a residential double oven, two baking steels per oven, 16 loaves at a time, and it has been an excellent solution at a fraction of the cost. Mine is freestanding on a pallet, so it does not have to be built into cabinetry. My husband and I decided that for 2024 my income would go toward other household priorities, and I have no regrets.


A residential oven is not designed to run at 450 degrees for hours at a time, several times a week, though, and mine feels like it is starting to run hot. It has an expiration date. So 2025 is the bread oven year, hopefully in the first half, and I will start saving toward it more aggressively after the holidays.


What I am weighing for next year

Here is the bigger decision on my mind, and it is worth thinking through if you are a year or two in and your current model is at its limit.


I am considering leaning much more heavily into my market and either phasing out porch pickups or reducing them to a minimal subscription of sandwich bread and regular bread. My market is three minutes from my house, everyone there is hyper local, and I have regulars I love seeing. Right now Thursday pickups eat the prep time and the fridge space I would need to bring more on Saturday. If I shifted, I could add things that have to be made close to when they are sold, like pretzels, donuts, and baguettes, and run a local pop-up with other businesses on the opposite Saturdays.


The catch is the math. I currently sell out with an hour or two left in the market, so if I bring significantly more product I need significantly more people, which means my local marketing has to grow first. Today I post in one local Facebook group most weeks plus my bakery Facebook and Instagram. That would have to become Nextdoor, more groups, and a real effort to be visible to the whole community. The product change is the easy part.


The fail

I lost a batch of sandwich bread this month. I did not stagger my timing well, so the fridge was already full of cooling dough when the sandwich loaves went in, and then the fridge stopped cooling. I caught it a couple of hours later at about 60 degrees inside. Those loaves had over proofed into a sloppy mess and some of them went in the trash.


I could not have prevented the equipment failing. I could have staggered when the dough went in, or dropped some loaves in the freezer briefly to pull their temperature down first. That is the version of the fail I can control, so that is the one I am fixing.


Writing it down before I need to

I expect to go commercial in some form on a two to three year timeline, whether that is rented space, a food truck, or a small brick and mortar. I am holding that loosely.


What having an assistant made obvious is how much of this business lives only in my head. I know exactly how many grams I shape my cookies, dinner rolls, and English muffins to, and that number is written down nowhere.


So I have started building the record. Melissa photographs packaged products so we have an index of what a finished package should look like, right down to where the sticker goes. Next is customer service, with templates for the conversations that happen over and over, so any future staff member gives a customer the same experience I would. None of this is urgent, and starting now means it will not be a crisis later.


Final thoughts

October was a good month with a real lesson in it. My highest sales and my most tired weeks were the same weeks, and the right response was to make the menu smaller, not to push harder.


Look at your own last month before you plan the next one. Where did the revenue come from, what wore you out, and what could you take off the menu without anyone really noticing? That question has saved me more than any new product ever has.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

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