4 Tips to Streamline Your Home Baking Business to Make More Profit

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When I was running my small and humble home baking business, it didn’t feel small and humble. The demands of working a full-time job, family life, and other obligations were piling up while I was throwing myself into baking. It was overwhelming and I wasn’t really charging what I needed to because I didn’t know better.

I realized I had to do some reflecting. What was my main goal?

Overall Goal: Streamline your home baking business to bring in profit, give you control, and let customers know exactly what you’re about.

Per merriam-webster dictionary: streamlined: to make simpler or more efficient (a system that streamlines the process) (Source)

Tip #1: Decide What Products to Sell on Your a Menu

Do you like baking cupcakes? Macarons? Cookies? It’s okay to start small and focus on selling 1 product. You can always grow from there. I started by only selling custom royal icing sugar cookies. As my customer base grew, I thought I could do it all and made the mistake of taking on too many different types of dessert requests.

I’d make a tiramisu cake for one customer and cookie bars for another. It started getting overwhelming when I had to start buying new pans, different bakery boxes, test new recipes and figure out where to store all the supplies. I knew I was working out of a home and not a full scale bakery, but yet I still thought I could do it all.

I’d get frustrated and confused because my customers saw me as the cake girl, cookie girl, and even the crêpe cake girl. I had taken on any order because I thought that’s how you grow. I’m here to tell you right now – one product can be more than enough! If you do sell different baked goods, it’s so important to sit down and make a menu, eliminating anything that doesn’t fit your vision.

Creating a menu was what really got the chaos under control. I decided I wanted to offer only 6 & 8 inch cakes. I didn’t have space for larger cakes and the majority of my customers didn’t want large cakes anyways. The menu was clean and straight to the point like the image above. I saved it to my phone so anytime customers asked me, “what do you sell?” I’d send them the menu. This saves time and confusion for both you and the customer.

Honest Advice

The most difficult transition in a home baking business can be learning the business side. It would be lovely to bake cakes, get paid, all goes smoothly, but that’s not the reality. If you want to make good profits and live on your baking income, you have to learn how to be a business person.

You may be asking yourself if you should cater to everyone’s order requests? If you should learn how to bake pound cakes and pies? But how many things can we truly offer?

Commercial bakeries don’t offer everything. Chances are, if you’re reading this post, you may have run into these thoughts. It’s okay, but remember just because you can bake everything, doesn’t mean you should. You want to remember you are a niche and people will order from you when they know exactly what you’re about.

Tip #2: Make Your Social Media Make Sense

If you strictly sell cakes but like to post about cookie recipes you try, your customers might be a little confused about what you offer. I write from honest experience. I was so excited to share the new pie recipe I made but then I got a message asking how much I sold pies for.

When I explained it was just a personal recipe that I wanted to share, the customer thanked me but never reached out to order from me again. Unfortunately, it’s really easy to confuse customers when we aren’t being completely clear about what we offer.

Streamlining your social media will give you your aesthetic (if that’s what you’re going for) but it will also make it very clear to the customer what you sell. Most customers will check out your socials to get a feeling of what kind of style you offer. When it’s clear and to the point – this can lead to them ordering from you!

Tip #3: What’s Your Artistic Medium?

Artists work in mediums from watercolors, oil paints, clay, etc, and I’d say bakers have mediums too. We are artists. We create beautiful custom temporary art that just happens to get eaten. A home baking business can bring you and your customers joy. It really is amazing to be a part of their special events or just an everyday occasion.

Everyone creates desserts differently which is a very cool thing. My style cakes were different from the girl selling in the next town over and that’s good. My baking medium: buttercream/icing decorations & smaller cake sizes.

You don’t have to get wrapped up in what your medium is, it’s more about finding what you excel at. Some people excel at fondant cakes. I’ve meet a small business baker that only sold painted macarons and does very well. Whatever your medium is – painting on sugar cookies, fondant work, chocolate work – hone your skill.

When you love what you do, it will show in your work.

Tip #4: Limit Your Flavors

You may not agree with this tip. But what I’m advocating here is that we don’t always have room in our homes to be stocked like a commercial bakery.

And to be honest, when I worked at a commercial bakery, they sold limited cake flavors, fillings and frostings. But they sold a lot of cakes which meant that their limitation wasn’t hurting them.

When you sell cake/frosting/fillings that require a variety of ingredients, you need room to store ingredients and money to buy them. Or you may spend time running around to get supplies that cannot be easily stored. This all contributes to your time getting stretched thin and your money going to waste.

Time is money. A tried and true statement that I learned the hard way. There’d be certain flavors that would only be ordered every blue moon. Since I didn’t make these desserts often, I’d run around getting all the ingredients. This meant I couldn’t take on other orders during that wasted time. There goes profit. Plus, I just bought a whole big container of something no one even orders!

To Sum It Up

When you have a streamlined menu, social media straightforward, and time to perfect your best skills – then you will be rewarded with energy, space, and profit.

Running a home baking business is a journey. You have to do what makes sense to you. If that doesn’t quite work, learn from it and try something different but don’t give up. This business had so much trial and error but eventually I pulled it together and felt more confident than ever. 😊

Check out these recipes that made my business successful