Cake Decorating Business #2: What Kind of Business Do You Want?

Part #2: What Kind of Business Do You Want?

Once you’ve established that you’d like to be in business, you need to start thinking about the kind of business you would like to be in. Although we are all in the same field, there aremany different ways to set up your business, and this is where thinking about the details come into it.

The first thing to think about is what you are hoping to achieve with your business. Success is something that each person defines for themselves. One person’s version of success might be earning just enough to have some extra pocket money each month, while another person’s version of success might be having the financial freedom to buy what they want, when they want. For some people success is not at all about the money but about being able to teach their skills to their peers, inspire other people and get to travel internationally to do so. You need to make some decisions about what you want your business to achieve before you can decide what the details of the actual business might look like. For example, if you decide that you really would be happy with working part-time for just a bit of extra money each week, there would be no real need for you to consider renting out a shop front. If you decided that you wanted to create a legacy company that your children could take over someday, then you would probably need to consider a shop front and perhaps even a franchise. Having a home based business versus one located in a store front does not really have any bearing on what your success might be, but you’ve got to be clear about what success means to you in order to make those decisions. If for you success is driven by money, work out how much money that actually is. Is it enough for the equivalent of a part-time job or is it a lot more than that? Get very real about what success means to you and the details around that success.

Some of it is also about lifestyle choices – do you want to have to go to a shop each day, or would you prefer the flexibility of working from home? There are some negative aspects but also some positive aspects to both of those options. There are also options which don’t fit either of those examples, where people rent commercial kitchens to create their products but they meet with clients at home. When deciding what your business might look like, you also need to consider if you have children, what your finances are like and so on. Also within the lifestyle consideration is things like time – cake businesses nearly always work towards the weekend because that’s when special events take place. If you really treasure your weekends, then perhaps you are better off with a traditional bakery which is open Monday – Saturday but does not do custom work or deliveries so that you have your Sundays free and might consider being closed on Mondays. Another option might be to start up a bakery which services the corporate market and therefore really only needs to operate Monday – Friday. For as many different types of cake there are in the world, there are almost that many types of way to run your business!

Another thing to think about is having a long term goal but setting some smaller ones along the way. As an example, perhaps your dream business is to own a cake boutique but at the moment your family is young and your finances won’t allow for that kind of investment. In that case, the best option might be to start from home but build the business towards getting out of home. For the years while it’s at home, you work on establishing the brand and a loyal clientele base so that when the time comes to find a premises you are starting with orders already in progress rather than opening the doors and waiting for people to find you.

Many of us start out in this business ‘accidentally’ so we never really spend the time thinking about what we want our business to be or what it’s going to achieve for us. We spend out days going from order to order and never really step back at have a look at the bigger picture of what we are trying to achieve. Working out the kind of business you want to be in and setting up some goals to work towards really helps you make all kinds of decisions, from what size oven to buy all the way to where you should advertise. It’s well worth doing your research about the kind of business you would like because this then has an impact on the way you will do business and what steps you are going to take from here onwards.

Written by Michelle Green 2014, The Business of Baking