Five things we wished we knew before we started our cake business
Let’s start with the simple stuff first… time travel!
If we could sprinkle some magic icing sugar over ourselves, and teleport back eight years, what would we really want to tell ourselves?
Eight years ago you’d have found us full of enthusiasm, hope and (let’s be honest) mostly ignorant of how to run a small business. Since then we’ve been on an amazing journey from our first Vistaprint business cards, to building a customer base, making cake on TV and even delivering some international orders. It might look like effortless plain sailing from the outside, but our reality has been stuffed with highs, plenty of lows, and a bunch of hard won lessons to show for the journey so far. We’ve fallen into a bunch of gaping holes, and picked up a few bruises along the way. Our hope is that you’ll avoid the same ones we fell into.
Christine selling cake toppers at a local fair in 2014
Here are our top five lessons we wish we’d got our heads round from day one.
1. Don’t quit the day job
We jumped straight into our cake business. We’d some money set aside, and anyway, how hard could this whole cake thing be?...Turns out…really pretty hard. It takes time to start any business and some of the best advice we ever got was that starting a business looks like this:
· Year 1 – you pay for the business
· Year 2 – the business pays for itself
· Year 3 – the business pays you
That was exactly the pattern we experienced. So, whether you are starting your business as part-time or full-time it will take time for money to flow back to you.
If you have another source of income, keep it while you get started. Gradual growth is healthy growth. Establishing your cake business as a side gig is a perfectly sensible path, with the added bonus that your day job will keep you nicely afloat.
2. There are no silver bullets
There were several moments we thought “Wow, THIS is it!” We’re going to do; this event/work with this planner/make this cake/do this photoshoot, and it’s going to skyrocket our business!
Nope.
None of them were the silver bullet we were looking for. Even being on TV.
You’d think being on a TV would mean you’d just need to sit back and wait for an avalanche of orders to roll in. Not at all.
We’ve had some amazing opportunities, and what looks like some big breakthroughs. But each event/planner/cake/photoshoot was simply a shiny door opening into a new room of work, networking, and new possibilities for growth. Each one still needed us to expend effort in order to take advantage of the fresh bit of ground we were now standing on.
No quick fixes, no silver bullets, just persistence and creativity.
Phil puts the finishing touches to a scale replica of Stonehenge in 2018
3. Business skills matter more than cake skills
Oooh, getting a bit controversial now.
Of course you have to have good cake skills to have a good cake business. But… there are lots of people who can make amazing sugar flowers, create cake corners so sharp you’d cut your finger on them, and carve fabulous cakes. Lots of them. Lots… & lots & lots…and yet so many can’t make a sustainable business of it.
If you want to have a cake business, your problem is most likely not your cake skills. It’s your business skills that need proper attention. Why? Well great cakes don’t sell themselves. You’ll be a marketer, salesperson, administrator, courier, and all before breakfast! Your sweet sugarcraft skills can’t help with any of that.
Finding an experienced mentor, going on a business courses, getting help from small business government support, reading credible business books, practicing selling, learning about marketing, going to conferences. These are all ways to fill in the knowledge gaps and equip you for brilliant business. Choosing to fuel up on business courses - over cake courses - is a wise investment.
Business skills are what will make your cake business succeed, and with a deeper understanding of those, you’ll rock it for the long haul!
4. Don’t be too hard on yourself
We all screw up sometimes. With the best intentions, and careful planning the end result is sometimes failure. Don’t beat yourself up. Every business owner makes mistakes, and plenty of them. It’s part of the process of creating something new.
Each mistake is an opportunity to learn how not to do something! Sometimes, the failure is the soil from which a better idea or new approach grows. Some of our biggest mistakes have been the source of our biggest successes.
Our first few wedding fairs were a complete bust. We spent the money, did the marketing, but no orders, pretty much a complete failure. Taking a step back to review the situation, we talked to some more experienced suppliers, did the work, and now our wedding fair approach is totally and utterly different - and it really, really works.
5. Breathe
Our final stunningly insightful piece of advice is to breathe. It’s a scientifically sound, fundamentally brilliant idea.
There’s only one of you, and you can’t pour from an empty cup.
One of things we’ve learned is to schedule days off after big events, or particularly heavy few weeks of cake making. After Cake International we always book a couple of days off to recover from all the excitement! If you’re part-time you still need to plan in space, perhaps even more so because you’re juggling lots of things at the same time.
That is a hard won lesson. For the first three years we kind of forgot to breathe. It really wasn’t great for us, our health, our family or the business. You just can’t work every hour without it catching up and hitting you over the head.
That’s our top 5 takeaways from over 14,000 hours of caking.
Which one felt most true for you and your business? If you could do a bit of time travel, what are the wise words you’d tell your cake-business-beginner self?