How to open a pastry shop: personal experience

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

About the importance of professional education, good ways to save money and the intricacies of recruiting employees.

My path to opening a pastry shop is not at all trivial: I am a lawyer and have served in law enforcement agencies for over 15 years. And besides, I am a mother of three children. At some point, I realized that I simply cannot combine caring for the family and service: after all, I had to participate in operational activities, sit in ambushes … and at the same time control the children. And I decided to turn my favorite hobby - baking - into a business.

I will share some tips that helped me a lot.

First, learn

I have an excellent pupil syndrome: I believe that you cannot do what I have not studied. Therefore, together with yesterday's high school graduates, I became a student at the food college. For my excellent academic performance, I was sent to a six-month practice in a Moscow confectionery, where all the chefs, including the chef, were French. I was really inspired and began to understand how you can use your knowledge in practice.

Don't be afraid to start learning from scratch. It is the return to school that can "charge" you much better than motivational workshops. You will feel confident in your chosen field, and you will acquire connections with professionals and like-minded people. This will help you create a real business plan and stick to it, rather than hovering in the clouds.

My example shows that you can study in state institutions without big names: there you can get not only an excellent academic base and a state diploma, but also unexpected opportunities, such as my internship.

Find your top benefits

Finding premises for production is a matter of technology. A more important, fundamental question for the confectionery is to find distribution channels. To understand who we can supply products to on an ongoing basis, I conducted a competitor analysis.

On the one hand, there are large confectionery factories that cannot quickly respond to changes in demand and market requirements. Their products will be irrelevant for cafes serving trendy young patrons. On the other hand, home confectioners: they can create freely, but they are outside the legal framework. And we just can offer trendy desserts in trendy packaging and cooperate with restaurants and shops without any problems.

Look for your pros and use them. It would seem an obvious advice, but many forget about it, trying to repeat someone else's path, and go nowhere.

Don't skimp on clients

I have chosen for myself the demanded and close to me concept of using only natural ingredients and environmentally friendly packaging: no plastic! Obviously, this is also a more costly path. But I realized that you cannot save on your principles and the client's comfort.

Of course, there are certain tricks that can help you cut costs.

For example, we use reusable packaging - reusable packaging. Comes out cheaper. And we recommend that our customers (coffee shops and cafes) explain to customers that they can become part of the big movement for the cleanliness of the planet (no matter how pretentious it may sound) if they return glass jars, receiving a pleasant discount on every next purchase.

Look for an opportunity to save money on the provision of services, but do not save on customer service.

It is important not to hurt yourself by trying to save. For example, confectionery shops often try on their own to draw up the documents necessary for work: sanitary-epidemiological and others. I can say with full responsibility - this leads to big expenses. Engage intermediaries. This will really save you a tremendous amount of time and nerves. For example, we also provide acquiring through a special company - a payment service provider - which acts as an intermediary between us and the bank. This model of work is still new for Russia.

The same can be said about the purchase of equipment. Attempts to save money with used equipment are a complete failure. You will endlessly receive unpleasant surprises in the form of hidden defects, breakdowns, and more. Want to keep costs down? Buy new equipment from untreated brands. It is better to purchase a new planetary mixer of an unknown company and get warranty service than to spend energy and money on repairing old equipment and ordering spare parts for it.

Look for experienced people

A team is one of the key components of any business. Our team consists of nine people.

We now employ five confectioners. I did not use any special life hacks: I looked for them on specialized sites for personnel search. But on the basis of experience, I formulated several important points that should be paid attention to when hiring a job in a pastry shop.

Do not immediately hire a technologist or pastry chef for a large salary. Hire a specialist one-time to develop technological maps and create samples. Instead, focus your efforts on recruiting a team of good, professional and experienced pastry chefs.

Take people with experience in manufacturing for key positions. Young specialists and “home” confectioners who decide to “gain experience in the shop” are huge losses of your time spent on training. As a rule, people who have never worked in production have a very distant idea that the everyday life of a pastry chef is not a magic fluttering around the stove in a cloud of vanilla and cinnamon, but rather hard, sometimes monotonous physical labor without the right to make mistakes.

We were faced with the fact that people who were not ready for such work simply left, could not stand it.

When we understood why this was happening, we formulated our selection principles and were able to form a strong team, which is now working.

In addition to the production staff and the courier, we of course have a management team. It includes me, an IT specialist and a manager who deals with organizational issues. The three of us have known each other for a long time and have come together to create our common cause. In my opinion, it is very important for a small business to be like-minded and strive to complete one common task.

Don't forget about promotion

We promote ourselves mainly through the Internet. This is contextual advertising and a website; we are also actively developing an Instagram account. This is exactly what our IT specialist does - in fact, he is a specialist in everything related to the Internet, including promotion.

Of course, we don't neglect classic marketing either. For example, we offer free trial sets of products and use the aforementioned competitive alignment.