Forty-two Thursdays

Nobody in my family thinks of me as a businessperson, which is fair, because I got into it by accident and have never fully recovered. Here's what happened. Four years ago I got laid off from a marketing job in Minneapolis and moved back to the town in Wisconsin where I grew up, population 2,800, to "figure things out," which mostly meant baking bread at my parents' house at odd hours because I couldn't sleep. I'd gotten into sourdough during the pandemic like every other person with a kitchen and a personality. I was good at it. Reliably good. My mother, who cannot stand food going to waste, started giving them away. To the neighbors, to her book club, to the guy who plows the driveway. And then one day Deb from the book club called the house and asked if she could just, like, pay for one every week. "Pay what?" I said. "I don't know. What's a loaf of bread?" "Eight dollars?" There was a pause. "For bread?" "It's a two-day process, Deb." "Fine. Eight. Can you do Thursdays?" That was customer one. I did not, at this point, think I had a business. I thought I had a favor that was getting out of hand. By the end of that winter I had eleven Thursdays. Eleven people paying eight dollars a week for a loaf I left on their porch in a paper bag with their name Sharpied on it. My dad, who ran a small engine repair shop for thirty years and has opinions about everything, sat me down at the kitchen table. "You're doing a subscription," he said. "I'm doing bread." "Eleven people paying you on a schedule for a thing you deliver. That's a subscription. Do you know what your costs are?" I did not know what my costs were. "Figure out what your costs are." I figured out what my costs were. Flour, salt, electricity, gas, paper bags. It came to about two dollars and forty cents a loaf, not counting my time, which my dad said I should absolutely count and which I have still, four years later, not fully counted, because counting it makes me want to lie down.

Things they did not cover in my marketing degree: People will pay for consistency long before they'll pay for excellence. Nobody has ever complained about a loaf. Several people have complained about a loaf arriving at 10am instead of 8am. The schedule is the product. The bread is what the schedule is made of. Everybody knows everybody, which means marketing is not a thing you do, it's a thing that happens to you. I've never posted an ad. I've been mentioned at three funerals, which is the highest form of local advertising and not one you can buy. Your churn happens for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I've lost customers to gluten intolerance, to moving to Arizona, and once to a divorce where both parties wanted the subscription. I have forty-two Thursdays now and a Tuesday route I added when Thursday hit capacity for one oven. I bought a second oven. My dad and I built a rack in the garage. I got a business license and a food handler's permit and an accountant named Pat who is also my cousin and who charges me in bread. Last spring a guy from a food distributor in Madison called and asked if I'd thought about "going wholesale." I said I'd thought about it for roughly the length of the phone call. He said I could triple my volume. I said I could also triple my volume by not sleeping, and I'd tried that already. He didn't laugh. He sent a deck. It had a slide about "scaling the artisan proposition." My dad read it at the kitchen table, all nine slides, moving his lips slightly. "What do you think?" I said. "I think if you want to run a bread factory you should run a bread factory." He put the laptop down. "Do you want to run a bread factory?" "No." "Then what's the question?" The question, I think, was whether I'm allowed to have a business that just stays the size it is. Nobody in my old job would have said yes to that. Deb would. Deb's been on Thursdays for four years and she pays nine dollars now and still says "for bread?" every time I raise it, and then she pays it. It's Wednesday night. Forty-two loaves are proofing in the garage and I'm going to be up at four. My dad has left a note on the second oven that says "preheat 30 min not 20, you keep cutting it short." He's right. I keep cutting it short.