Hello Lovely & welcome back, I hope you are finding my content helpful on your journey & are being encouraged with my Instagram posts. Today I’m going to touch on how important taking baby steps are no matter how insignificant it may seem. My business’s success is literally built on the concept of baby steps.
I’ve always envisioned “expansion” as having a massive kitchen, a fancy pink KitchenAid, a 3 phase power industrial oven & a production line table. This was always so far out of reach for me because I had a full time job, kids & ofcourse staying in a flatlet. I’m not saying dreaming big is a bad thing but this can often deter your progress. Rome wasn’t built in a day & neither is success.
So, I started with an electric handmixer, a normal stove & oven combo, & a kitchen counter because I couldn’t afford a dining room table at the time. I left for work each day between 6 & 6.30am & got home anytime after 6pm. After helping my kids with their homework is when my second job would start.
My working hours for the bakery would be anything between 7pm in the evening until 4am the following morning. I could only bake 12 cupcakes a time so while getting larger orders were a blessing, it was also very time consuming. This went on for several years until I met Steph. Steph made the first cake I ordered since being disappointed with my son’s disaster. It was a substantial size Princess Sofia castle cake.
When Steph heard how I was running my business she offered to sell me her rarely used second Kenwood Titanium at an exceptionally low price & allowed me to pay it off. She also guided & coached me as I went into cake making. To this day, Steph shares so much of her experience & guidance with me, I’m so glad
to have had her on my journey.
I remember when I got my first corporate order, at that time friends were spreading the word like wild fire & whenever their companies needed treats, they recommended me. My first corporate order was for Cynthia, I believe it was for 100 spring themed cupcakes. She left for work at 5am every day so that’s when she would need them ready to take to work with her. I started at 7pm the prior night when I got home & I finished icing the final cupcake of the lot at 04.50am while my husband was packaging the rest. I even delayed her leaving at her normal time, but she was very understanding. I went to bed & tried to get a bit of sleep before needing to wake up for my day job.
My body must’ve been in shock because it just would not comply, 1hour later I was up & getting ready for work. I remember having a little nap in the car & then at work during a meeting with one of our sales guys at the time (Mauritz), he asked why my eye was twitching like crazy (I hadn’t even noticed or felt it) & he was like – you should get a good night’s rest, that normally happens when you don’t sleep. I said thank you for the advice & carried on.
This became a norm for quite a while longer & while it was taking a lot out of me, it was absolutely the best time of my life. Baking was my happy place, no matter the workload – it always brought me peace & calm. Being an enneagram #1, I was very tough on myself & demanded perfection with every bake. This often caused unnecessary stress & tension in my family so they didn’t enjoy my baking days as much as I did. I used to notice every tiny flaw & work myself up immensely into panic mode before client pick up. I tried my utmost never to deliver orders or be there for collection because I was scared of seeing the client’s expression & making myself feel worst. It’s strange how I had never received a bad review or a concern of something being out of place etc. It was all in my mind.
I’ve come a long way with many baby steps since then, I invested in a photo box to try & get professional photo’s done, also a dining room table which I used as my production line table. I found a standard supplier for some of my main ingredients & packaging albeit different ones for each. I invested in a steamer for the fondant cakes that use to drive me insane without having a “Cake Boss” finish. I bought a plastic storage drawer set to keep my gadgets in one place & it was starting to look like I was making progress. There were many baby steps in between that I can’t remember right now but they all led to the expansion & success of my business & where I am today.
Fast forward to the Covid years, they sprang on us so fast & times were
unpredictable especially for small businesses. With the limitation of movement
& any kind of gatherings, business dropped significantly. My normal job
moved to full work from home & so did schooling which was a major
adjustment. In treading through this unchartered territory, I tried to look for
innovative ways to help my business grow, these obviously didn’t work because
of the lockdown regulations & for a while I just accepted defeat. Those
Covid years were the best & worst of my life, I’m grateful for all the time
I got to spend with my kids – I literally watched them grow. I saved the 4hour
commute time to & from the office so I was a much happier person but then
there was also the slump in business which wasn’t great.
When the lockdown started easing – business picked up immediately. My thinking is that because people were deprived from celebrations for so long, they made every occasion a celebratory event! Working from home made it easier to manage my business & get more out in the daytime so I had a great balance.
In 2020, we got a rescue dog who we just fell in love with & the flatlet we stayed in was no longer sustainable. I had to think of getting a house to rent instead &
with the short notice, the one we found didn’t have all the trimmings I had initially
wanted when finally being ready to make that move but my adjusted focus on
“Baby Steps” brought things into perspective. We found a place that had a
massive yard but a tiny kitchen which wasn’t ideal. The idea was to build on
the property & work out of a dedicated space. In the meantime, the tiny
kitchen was extended into the dining room to make a larger open plan area
(smaller than the space I had in the flat) but I made do. The momentum for
orders continued & through the distress of being in a new place I didn’t
like with multiple problems on the property – I persevered & made it work.
The massive garden helped quite a bit with all the stress, I got into gardening & spent a lot of time outside. After 2 years of really dark times, I had a mindset
adjustment. The money I had spent on dealing with all the issues on the
property meant that I wouldn’t be able to build my dedicated space & after
the experience I had, I was okay with not increasing the property value of
something that wasn’t mine.
In 2022, with the “Baby Steps” outlook in my mind, I decided that “expansion” didn’t
look the way I had always pictured it anymore. Baking 12 cupcakes at a time or
2 cake layers only at a time meant that I was losing out on precious time &
money doing things the old way. Expansion now looked like investing in a eye
level double oven – doing this meant that I could bake triple the amount of
product in the same time I was baking before. This meant saving money on
electricity & obviously saving on time. Being able to churn out 3x the
amount of orders meant needing more shelf space & storage so I got these
made for all my baking goods & tools built on the wall so that it wouldn’t
take up any more of my very tiny space. I did the shelfing in 3 separate stages
due to finances but had to keep adding more as I got busier. Having a social
media presence & creating brand awareness meant needing a “pretty”
production table for videos & photo’s which I then got made with drawers
that were able to store my regular used tools. Finally, I invested in a small
vlogging system so I could make better videos for social media. All these steps
were taken very slowly & as I made the funds, I continuously reinvested in
my business.
Eventually I bought a jojo tank as we have water issues here during the day which is a definite deal breaker for a cakery & then a generator to assist with bakes
during stage 6 loadshedding where we would only have power for 12-16 hours of
the day at very inconvenient times of the day.
All these baby steps helped grow my business exponentially. If I hadn’t changed my mindset about what “expansion” was supposed to look like by society’s
standards, I never would’ve made any kind of progress. Social media has also
played a big part in my growth & I’ve taken the baby steps approach on that
platform too. I’m still learning as I go & I am grateful for all the people
I’ve met on my journey who have helped me grow, who continue to guide me &
to all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there – the best advice I can give you
today is to use the social media platforms for research & development.
There are so many people sharing their stories & experiences out there who
you could relate to & learn from.
Until next time – be kind & bake people happy!