I'm writing this, I guess, mostly for myself; to remind myself that I can only only do so much. That I am good at somethings and not so good at other things. I have my strengths and my weaknesses. Yes, everyone does. Now, change "me" to "the bakery" and the story continues.
I'm writing this because the past 4 to 5 weeks have been extremely hard on me. Way too much stress for this time of year. The winter is normally a slower season and it gives us all time to rejuvenate from the busy holiday season which follows the busy farmers' market season. That all sounds nice but at the same time there are still the same bills to pay but less revenue. To remedy this the bakery took on a new client that asked us to do something that we weren't used to doing. In fact, something that we aren't very good at doing because of the type of equipment that we have. Our training and our equipment do an excellent job at baguettes, croissants, ciabatta, etc. The learning curve was steep and the hours were brutal. Throw in a streak of employees calling in sick and I was about to call in the towel. Previous to taking on this account we had made projections on material and labor cost. These approximations were based on a quasi similar product, but much more simple, that we have been making for years. I quickly realized that we were way off. You can imagine how I felt as I worked an extra 4 hours almost every day on this product knowing that I was running in circles. Things have been tough at the bakery before, especially early on, but I think this was the worst I have felt.
Something had to change. We analyzed more accurately what was actually going into this product and changes were made. This is actually a good thing to do every now and then on every product; to make sure everything is in line. Since then I have trained a baker to take over for some of the duties that I had early on. This has helped a lot and I've been getting more me and sleep time. Both of which make for a happier John.
In my perfect world, restaurants would be banging down the door for those things that we do well. Unfortunately, I live in a world where that doesn't happen often enough and I guess that's what I get for opening up an artisan bakery (But, I wouldn't want to be baking anything else!). So when I go off from our core product line I need to be very cautious. Yes, with every mistake I learn something new; but, I'm also afraid of how many mistakes are out there to make. It's more fun to learn from my successes!
Obviously, this client will remain unnamed and I hope that it will stay that way. It wasn't their fault. We told them that we could do it. The blame lies solely on myself .
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