Start a home bakery
If you're wondering start a home bakery, your timing is great. Demand for artisan, hand-made and locally produced foods including baked goods has risen dramatically, and continues to grow. Perhaps you want to deliver your Italian wood-fired breads to local B&Bs or restaurants. Maybe you want to take orders for cookies and cupcakes from neighborhood moms, bake "green" wedding cakes, or take online orders for your non-allergy home bakery goods to send around the country. Whatever your baking plans happen to be, here's a template for start a home bakery.
Instructions
1. See if you can make your home bakery goods even more green or local. You already know make home baked goods that may sell well from a home bakery and perhaps they already feature sustainable ingredients. But see if you can add more fair trade, locally produced, or certified organic ingredients to your home bakery recipes. This adds yet another popular feature to your products.
2. Practice starting a home bakery. This can sound like child's play, but this time honored step to start a home bakery makes it possible to work out the as-yet unknown kinks and missing links without tenseness and pressure you'll feel at first when you've become an actual home bakery business with your reputation on the line. So, set goals with your home bakery products beyond just making them when you feel like it. Create situations where the baked goods *must* be made and delivered on time. For example, promise to donate a specified amount to a fundraising bake sale. Tell yourself you'll deliver a specific baked product at a specific time to every business in town that ever did a good job for you as a thank you, and see if you can deliver on time. Send something baked with the next gift giving occasion. Notice people's responses, and if you have more than one home bakery item, notice which ones they like the best.
3. Create a temporary business name, logo and slogan, then make a single mock business card either by hand or computer. For example: LHB, Lisa's Home Bakery, Where Breads are Wholesome and Healthy. These are temporary and can change, so don't hire your logo artist yet. By creating mock ones upfront, an energy will begin to form around your home bakery and your intuition will start to go to work. Carry the business card with you and look at it now and then. After a week you can tweak it if you want, or just leave it as it is for now, then go on to step four.
4. Write a quick home bakery business overview. When you write a business plan before you start a home bakery, you discover your strengths along with the weak links that need to be strengthened before you begin. You can start with a quick overview business plan rather than a long elaborate one to help keep yourself motivated and better prepare for the more lengthy business plan later. At Score.org, find their Quick Start Business Plan then fill it out. You may be surprised at what you discover, and an even stronger energy will build up around your plan to start a home bakery.
5. Get a no-cost home bakery business coach. You may have noticed that Score.org lets you ask custom questions, and choose an experienced volunteer business mentor who helps you with specific concerns and will help you each step of the way as you start a home bakery. Find one with experience in home business or bakeries, or preferably, a home bakery. Ask your mentor if you should get extra liability insurance. And find out if your home bakery's situation should just operate as a sole proprietorship, an LLC, a small corporation, or another form of business entity that will protect you and your assets.
6. Finalize your home bakery business name and become legal. Make the final decision on what your business name will be. Get in touch with your county health department to see what's required to legally start a home bakery. If they say you must bake in a certified kitchen, find out what their rules are for such a kitchen. If it's something you can easily do to your kitchen at home, complete this step. If not, find a local church, university or school that allows you to use their certified kitchen on Saturdays for free or for a low price, and use this kitchen for your home bakery until you can afford to certify your kitchen at home. You can also contact your county extension service because they sometimes know of certified kitchens for farmers who want to make baked products from their crops to sell. Finally, contact your Chamber of Commerce to see what other local, state or federal business permits or licenses are required to start a home bakery from your location, and complete their requirements using your new home bakery business name.
7. Get financing if you think it's necessary. Some people prefer not to finance with loans for home business such as a home bakery. They like to start from the bootstraps by saving their change and shaving off a little grocery money to bake and sell their first home bakery product. With that profit they purchase what they need to make and sell even more. With that profit they upgrade their inventory and marketing strategy, and so on. But if your home bakery needs financing, go to Score.org's how-to page and look under financing your business and you'll find ways to finance when opening a small business such as a home bakery. If you need formal bank financing, this same website gives you tutorials for writing a more detailed business plan which is needed to show bankers.
8. Open a bank account. With your proper business license for your chosen business entity, open a separate bank account for your home bakery.
9. Complete your home bakery promotional printed items and website. With the help of your Score business coach, finalize the look of any business cards, fliers or brochures you'll hand out, and set up a website, the name of which should be on all your print material. Even if you don't plan to sell online, you need a simple one page, attractive description and contact information on the web. If you need a free website hosting service and you're not computer savvy, www.Yola.com is a good place to set up a site for your home bakery business.
10. Market your home bakery and begin. For a home bakery, unless you're only selling online, make sure you get your marketing materials to everyone who may be interested: such as members of your local church, caterers, local restaurant chefs, B&Bs, personal chefs, gift basket businesses, and event planners. Help get yourself known by offering some of your home baked items as a fundraising drawing prize where many people will see it and your business described. Or, offer a baking workshop at your local parks and recreation. They will advertise your class to potentially tens of thousands of people for free, and your home bakery's name and website will be listed along with the class description.
Tags: home bakery, your home, your home bakery, home bakery, bakery business, home bakery business, start home