The Community Of Doers
At Starter Story, we search the internet for the doers .
These hard-to-reach, low-key, founders are in the trenches building real businesses right now.
And we get the lowdown on the most essential, hard-hitting parts of building their business:
How exactly did you find this opportunity? What were the exact steps to build it? To launch it? How did you get to 10, 100, and 1,000 customers? How much money are you making?
^ Yes, we asked 3,104 founders these questions. And we are asking more every day.
Registering Your Cake And Baking Business
You need to register your new cake business with your local authoritys environmental health service at least 28 days before you start trading. It doesnt cost you anything and your registration cant be refused. An inspector will come to your home to check your food preparation area. Don’t panic though, they are unlikely to just turn up at a personal address and are more likely to arrange a time to visit.
It’s this inspection that will determine your food hygiene rating, so make sure your records and documentations are as good as they can be.
Tips For Starting A Cake Business At Home
So, you?ve finally made the leap to start your baking business and satisfy your friends and family?s love of your signature cupcakes. To cut costs and decrease risk, you realize it?s a good idea to start the business out of your home. You have the kitchen, equipment, tools, and secret recipes to do it.
We know what your thinking, ?If Martha Stewart started her wildly successful catering business from her basement in the 1970s, what is stopping me?? Nothing, now what? Well, we?ve provided a few tips for starting a cake business from home that will help you bring your dream to life. As a beginning entrepreneur, you probably have a lot of questions, and we at Medina Baking & Supply are here to answer them.
Below are few things to consider before you dive in head first.
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Starting A Cupcake Business From Home
Starting a cupcake business from home can be very easy with this how-to guide!
One of the most exciting and creative businesses to start from home is a cupcake business. Everyone loves cupcakes! This is a fantastic small business that you can run right out of your kitchen, and its perfect for someone who has a passion for baking.
If you love baking and cake decorating, keep reading, and learn everything there is to know about starting a cupcake business from home.
Kitchen Requirements For Home Baking Business
Once you have made your business plan and you are committed to starting your new home baking business, there is just one more hurdle to completing your plans. You need to know your city, county, and state kitchen requirements for home baking businesses.
You’re in luck. Home bakery rules and regulations are not hard to follow, as long as you make cakes that don’t contain so much moisture that they have to be constantly refrigerated to be safe to the public.
Read Also: Wilton Cake Size Chart
How To Start A Bakery At Home: Laws Licenses And Marketing Tips
If you love to bake and are interested in turning your passion into profit, you might be interested in starting and running a bakery business out of your home. In this article, we look at what you need to start an in-home baking business, the steps you will need to follow to create your business and tips on how to help your baking business grow.
Related: Work-From-Home Jobs That Pay Well
How To Start A Cookie Business In India
Before jumping into the technical part of it, here is a story of a successful cookie startup to give you a hint of the cookie business.
If you are a cookie fan, you might have heard of The Cookie Co. But do you know the person behind the start-up and her beautiful story?
Kshiti Jikar Mehta began The Cookie Co. in 2019 in Vadodara. She is an alumnus of Harvard and Purdue college, who found comfort in cookies during her college and working days in America.
After working for six years in the US as a finance professional, Kshiti returned to Vadodara in 2017 with her husband. It was at this time that the idea of a food venture came to her mind.
She mentions, âIn a 9-5 job, the mind was in there, but not the heart, and I always wanted to do something which was passion-driven.â She began by deeply analyzing the Indian Cookie industry.
She discovered that the demand for cookies was growing in India, particularly among Gen Z. Moreover, she noticed that cookies have crossed the geographical limitation and reached locations outside metropolitan cities.
She took advantage of the unorganised cookies segment that was then full of home bakers and no company solely delivering cookies to pan India. Initially, she also began by making cookies in her mother-in-law’s kitchen.
Here is a step by step guide you might use to start your cookie business
Also Read 70+ Small Scale Business Ideas.
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Butnot Everybody Has The Time To Bake Their Own Goodies
When looking into small business ideas, you may come across home baking.
Why the growing need for home baking businesses? Plenty of people like to eat freshly baked food, but unfortunately, not many people actually like or have the time to bake themselves. This is where a home baking business would come in extremely handy.
How Much Do I Make With A Cake Business
Its a very irregular income.
People seem to get married in batches, so I might do five wedding cakes one year and then none the next. I once created two wedding cakes in a month and made about $400.
Last year, I was in the middle of a horrible pregnancy, so I only did a few cakes and made about $500. I could have done several more and maybe made $1,200 if I hadnt been fainting all over the place.
Ive never made a killing from cakes I have too little time because of other side gigs and too many children to take on as much work as Im offered.
But my kitchen table currently boasts a simple one-tier fruitcake a 100th birthday cake for a friends fathers coworkers mother which is about to net me a profit of $120. Not too shabby.
Read Also: Sams Club Birthday Cake Book
How To Start A Cake Baking Business From Home
Are you a great baker whose friends are always asking you to “bake just one little cake, please?”
Are you the cake decorator that makes everyone ooh and ah with your beautiful cake designs?
Or maybe you don’t do cakes, but you understand cake business ideas inside out making you a natural expert in how to start a baking business from scratch, as long as you don’t have to do the actual baking.
In this article, we will go over the essentials of how to start a cake business from home. But before we go any further, we need to remind you of a common theme of all successful cake business stories:
Successful cake businesses make money.
Is the cake business profitable? It absolutely is! But you have to treat the hobby you love as an opportunity to make more money than you spend if your cake business is going to sustain you to reach more people with your scrumptious, eye-popping cakes.
We have to add one more principle to our rule for success in the cake business:
You must take rules and regulations seriously.
Even if you don’t like them.
Nothing sabotages more cake businesses than trying to run a cake business from home with pets. Keep Fluffy, Fido, and Izzy the Iguana separate from your cake kitchen. Many states won’t make you get a license. They won’t make you get a permit. They won’t make you get a kitchen inspection or send in samples of your cakes to the health department.
Now let’s consider how much money you need to get into the cake business.
How To Start A Cake Business On Instagram
We are sure that you will agree that seems like it was made for displaying photos of beautiful cakes. No social media tool will bring more images of your amazing baked goods to more people than Instagram.
But knowing how to start a cake business on Instagram and how to promote a isn’t the same as knowing all the answers to “how to advertise my cake business” and how to get customers for cake business who buy, not just look.
As a future specialty baker, you will want to reach as many people as possible with as many beautiful shots of your cakes as possible. Just realize that every post for your cake business reveals something about your business to your competition.
You want to strike a balance between reaching new customers and giving away all your beautiful designs and all your creative kitchen designs. You can’t copyright a recipe, and unless you make just one unique, extraordinarily delicious cake, you don’t want to spend your time and money on a trademark, either. Use social media to get new customers, but rely on customer recommendations to make more sales.
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Create A Business Entity
With a business plan in place, its time to create a legal company. Register your business at the federal and state levels and establish a legal structure. Its possible toregister online.
Choosing a business structure can be complicated if youre not familiar with the process.
TheSBA andIRS have extensive resources on business structures. But work with an accountant and/or business attorney to maximize your legal and tax benefits.
Typically, a bakery will be set up as a Limited Liability Corporation to avoid exposing the owners personal assets to legal action .
Book A Domain And Create Email Id
Online presence is one of the most important thing in todays place. Just a one page website is enough for you to show your presence and appear more legit business which position you above then the other business who do not have a website. Along with website you also create a professional email id like . This affirms the people interacting with you to believe that they are talking to an established and strong business identity.
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How To Protect Yourself Against Lawsuits
The information youll learn in this brief is crucial for any type of entrepreneur, but its especially important for those who are new to the game. Even if you have everything in place legally and you have the best intentions in the world, a smart attorney will be able to find a way to trip you up. If youre not careful, a lawsuit can cost you far more than the original claim. Read this brief carefully and pay special attention to the sections about insurance and discovery.To protect yourself from lawsuits in the cake baking business you need to be extremely careful about what you say and write. Its easy to accidentally commit the sin of speaking ill of the dead or writing something which might be interpreted as defamatory . You should also make sure all your agreements are in writing. Even if everything you agree to is perfectly legitimate and above board, an unscrupulous attorney will use discovery to trip you up. Theyll try to get you to admit to things you dont remember saying or writing, or theyll find some way to twist your words so they appear to be incriminating. In any case, its better to be safe than sorry.
Draft A Solid Business Plan
Start your home-based cake business by creating a solid and actionable business plan. Everybody wants to skip this step and go right to the baking, but it is indispensable. In doing your business plan try to answer essential questions such as
- How much did it cost you to produce the product, and how much would you charge for it? Where are you going to sell?
- What strategy would you use to promote yourself?
- Is your product in high demand in your area?
- What kind of rivalry would you face?
- In terms of price and consistency, how do your goods relate to those of your competitors?
- How long would it take you to break even?
Remember that your business plan can determine the viability of your business. So, rather than banging your head into a brick wall for months questioning why your company isnt running, make a plan. Doing it better, not faster, is the way to go.
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How To Start A Successful Cake Business
Blog > How To Start A Successful Cake Business
22 October 2013
Want to start your own cake business? In this blog post Ella Harvey, owner of Strawberry Lane Cake Company, shares her tips on running a successful baking business.
Here are some of the key things she recommends when starting a new cake business:
Charge A Decent Price
Do you have any idea how much a professional wedding cake costs?
Phone a few of your local bakers for quotes. The average wedding cake cost $582 in 2016 not exactly cheap.
So, I undercut the competition. But I dont go too crazy, because wedding cakes arent cheap to make.
A three-tier cake might use eight recipes worth of ingredients which could easily be, say, 16 blocks of butter plus eight bricks of almond paste and fondant, three cake boards, three cake tins youll probably have to rent, wooden dowelling and a significant amount of electricity.
Add on gum paste, edible glitter, ribbon, gel colorings and so forth. Plus, tool fund money for buying handy things like cake levelers and tilting turntables. Then, factor in labor, which will be significant.
My rule of thumb is to charge 250% of the ingredient costs, including nonreusable supplies like cake boards. I may charge more for a time-consuming cake, such as one covered with gum paste roses.
I generally net a profit of about $150-$200 per wedding cake and Im still cheaper than the professionals.
Read Also: Wilton Wedding Cake Recipe
Create A Financial Plan
Once all the formalities of the business are taken care of, the next step is to price your products. Pricing your products is the most influential factor that you need to take under consideration. This stage would determine everything related to your businesss finances, including cash flow, profit margins, as well as the expenses that you need to cover.
Most individuals make the mistake of delaying their launch when they are unable to create a price strategy. However, it is crucial to proceed with the business inauguration and test out the prices in the market. Effective pricing is only determined after your products are available to customers for purchase.
You can also check your competitors pricing strategy to gauge an idea about the market price. This would give you an insight about what your target customers are willing to pay.
Once your pricing is finalised, the next stage is to manage the costs. Make sure that the income generated is greater than the costs of purchase.
Like any other business, it is possible that you may lose money in the initial months, however, with effective marketing, your business can benefit from a high return on investment.