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Why Other Sourdough Bakers Are Good for Your Business | Episode 41

  • Jul 30
  • 5 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


Running a bakery out of your house is a strange kind of lonely. You are awake before everyone else, you are the entire operation, and the people who love you most still do not really understand why you are weighing flour at five in the morning on a Tuesday.


Then you notice the other bakers. There are three of them in your town now, their loaves look incredible, and one of them just got into the market you had your eye on. Something in your stomach tightens.


I have watched a lot of bakers sit in that exact feeling. The ones who go on to build something lasting all make the same turn at some point. They stop treating the other bakers as a threat and start treating them as the most useful business resource they have.


The people who got you here were mostly strangers

I once asked this community to send me notes of thanks for the people who shaped their baking businesses, and I read them out loud on the show. What struck me was that not a single person thanked a course or a book. Every single note thanked a person.


One baker thanked the very first sourdough creator she ever met online, the one who answered all of her questions and followed her back when she had no followers at all. Another thanked a mentor several states away who has stayed patient with her questions from halfway across the country and is always willing to share ideas. One said her entire year would not have been possible without a baker who was generous with what she knew about bulk baking and running a microbakery. Another said that watching one woman's videos took away the fear she had been carrying, and without that she is not sure she would ever have started at all.


Now read those back as a business owner instead of as a friend. That is free operations training on bulk production. That is market research you did not have to pay for. That is the difference between a business that opened and one that stayed an idea. Those relationships were worth real money, and every one of them started with somebody being willing to answer a question.


Connection beats competition, and the market is bigger than you think

At one of our Summits, a baker shared how she started a group chat with five local bakers. She reached out to the people she had been quietly counting as her competition, and that chat has grown into a community of more than sixty bakers in Arizona. They went from watching each other to actually helping each other.


Here is the part most bakers miss. Your real competition is not the woman baking sourdough two neighborhoods over. Your real competition is the bread aisle at the grocery store, because that is where the overwhelming majority of people are still buying their bread. The pool of people who have never tasted a properly fermented loaf is enormous, and every baker in your area who is out there teaching people the difference is warming up your market for you.


It also works because most towns can support more than one baker when each of you has your own lane. If she does giant focaccia and beautiful cinnamon rolls and you do sandwich loaves and Saturday pickup, you are not fighting over the same customer. You are two businesses who can send each other work, and that is how referrals start.


How to build this, starting this week

None of this requires a big following or a conference. It requires a few real relationships.

  • Find the bakers within about an hour of you and follow them for real. Not a hate follow, an actual one.

  • Send one specific message. Name the thing you genuinely admire about what she is doing. "Your holiday pre-order setup looks so smooth, how did you land on that?" beats "let's collab" every time.

  • Start the group chat. Five people is plenty. That is exactly how the Arizona group began.

  • Ask a real question when you are stuck, and be specific about it. Bakers love to answer a specific question!

  • Be the one who answers. When somebody newer than you asks something, tell her what you actually do, including the part that took you a year to figure out.


If you are a few years in, this looks different for you

Once you have real revenue, these relationships stop being encouragement and start being infrastructure. Three things are worth building on purpose.


Build a referral map. You should know exactly who you send an order to when it is too big, too far out, or not something you make. Every order you hand off well comes back to you, and the baker on the other end starts doing the same for you.


Line up coverage. Decide now who could bake your standing wholesale order if you got the flu the week of a holiday. That is a conversation to have while everything is calm, not the morning you wake up sick.


And be somebody's mentor on purpose. When a newer baker credits you publicly for helping her get started, that is the most credible marketing that exists in this space, and you cannot buy it. It also happens to be the best part of the work.


Tell them, because most of them have no idea

The thing that got me about those thank you notes is how many of the people being thanked had no clue. They answered a question in a comment section a year ago and went on with their day, and on the other end of it somebody built a business.


So if there is a baker who changed how you work, tell her. Send the message. Tag her when you post the thing she taught you how to make. It costs you nothing and it will make her whole week!


Final thoughts

You are not going to build this business alone, and you were never supposed to. The bakers who last are the ones with a couple of people they can text on a bad bake day and a couple of people who send them the orders they cannot take. Go be one of those people for somebody, and let somebody be that for you.


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this one landed, these three will keep you moving.


Links to things you might like!

 
 
 

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