Hi, after graduating college I decided to open a small at-home bakery. I have only sold to friends and family so far. I have made a profit of about $150 in one month. Is this good for starting out? Is there any advice on how to grow?
Nice! Any profit is a good start! here’s some ideas.
Put on a business casual outfit get cards and flyers made go around to every small local owned coffee shops and offer samples and send follow up emails about possibly carrying your baked goods. You can get all of the custom packaging on Amazon.
Really any small mom and pop shop would also be good as well. Even independently owned gas stations is a possibility.
Find local makers markets, farmers markets and set up booths there.
Maybe start a subscription box in your local area where people can subscribe and get a box of baked goods every week, 2 weeks or month.
Post on your instagram/ facebook and TikTok every day and offer shipping and the subscription box. People love home made things!
Thank you, these are all such amazing ideas! I will definitely start implementing them.
Set up your website if you’re not good at that kind of stuff find someone on fiverr to do it for you you can find quality work for inexpensive on fiverr
Contact these guys: https://www.feedapp.com/
They might be interested in distributing your products. At least in California.
I would assume other cities and states have similar entities too, but I don’t know them.
Before I can answer this I need some more info.
What’s your goal? Is this a side hustle or something you’re trying to scale into a full-time gig?
Generally though, since you’re doing this out of your home, and just beginning I’d say yes. Any profit right now is worth it. Now you need to scale, get more clients, get your product into stomachs. Once you do that you need to then make your business more efficient (more orders, pre sales and set delivery dates etc) so you’re able to cook more batches in one sitting vs 3 batches a week on 3 different days as an example.
My goal when starting something in my free time is to look at it as “Profitable enough to pay 1 bill. Then find a way to be profitable enough to pay 2 bills. Then 3, then 4 then hopefully be able to just do it full time and replace my day to day job.”
For me, I have a small side business. I have a very good 9-5 that I’ll retire from most likely so my small business is about paying my phone bill, car payment, car insurance, home utilities and put $500-1000 into separate savings… I don’t buy anything I can’t afford on my Regular job, for example, I wanted a car, I could afford an $300 a month car payment if my side business were to disappear, so when looking I found what I wanted then used my savings from the side business to pay the difference up front to bring that monthly cost to $300.