Hot take: my neighbor's tiny bakery made me rethink my whole business model

So I was talking to my neighbor Carol last week at our local farmers market in Portland. She runs a small pie business out of her home kitchen, just selling at two markets a week. I've been trying to scale up my candle business for months, buying bigger batches of wax and jars, stressing about storage space. Carol told me she specifically limits how much she makes each week so she never has leftovers. She said "I'd rather sell out in two hours and go home happy than sit there all day with boxes of unsold pies." That hit me different because I've been obsessed with growth when maybe I should focus on selling less but smarter. She makes about $400 each market day with maybe 20 pies total. I'm sitting on 50 candles that aren't moving because I bought too much inventory. Has anyone else deliberately scaled back instead of scaling up and seen better results?

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evan29512d ago

I mean, you're comparing a candle business to a pie business. Apples and oranges, literally. Pies go bad, candles last forever so your inventory problem is totally different from hers. Selling out in two hours sounds great until you realize she's leaving money on the table because she could bake a few more pies and still sell them. You're talking about maybe $400 a market day? That's not exactly empire building money. I get the appeal of not dealing with leftover stock but calling it a "business model rethink" feels like a stretch. Maybe you just need better shelf placement or marketing, not a complete overhaul of how you operate.