Hellosicles!
Happy Holidays to y’all! How’s everybody holding up? Man, this is a busy time of year.
Chris got 2 pairs of shoes Black Friday shopping. They were such a good deal.
This is a spot on representation of how our business planning is going. Kinda funky.
We spent some more time on popcorn, still working towards our never ending flow chart of money-in money-out, seeing how profitable this plan really is.
How should we price popcorn? To answer this question, we made more spreadsheets to calculate the cost that goes into popping corn. To start with, only including the tangibles, not the labor, or rent, or anything like that. Then found some bulk pricing for popcorn, toppings, butter... The bulk canola oil is the best deal, if we buy 4.6 gallons of it, it’s less than half the cost. We are going to need storage space.
How should we view popcorn sales? Should popcorn be looked at as a money maker or as only a means to sell more cider? If we want to make money off of it, we’ll have to charge more than we’d like. But if we see it only as a means to sell more cider, we can sell it for less and hope to make up for the lost potential income on the increased cider sales. Are our profit margins on cider great enough for that? We are currently trying to answer this question. Trying to price our products made me start seriously reconsidering happy hour. Is that necessary? Do we need one? Some taprooms we’ve been to don’t do it. But maybe it brings people in? Are special events better? Like doing special discount days or free popcorn bowls for so many cider pours?
These price tag decisions can really put our values at odds with each other. We want everything to be organic (which is more expensive) and we want our shop to be easily enjoyed by everyone (meaning low price tag). But, we really want to make a living. We can make it happen, it’s just taking some time to figure it out.
We are not near ready to open up shop, but to me, this all feels really close, final decisions stuff. So it’s kind of funny how much some of the first steps of creating this plan are really important now and need either strengthening or re-evaluating. I thought maybe I’d share a little more on how we even decided what was important to us to have in a business.
In 2010 I just thought starting a business sounded good. It sounded like a nice way to make money compared to any of the other job shadowing or paid jobs I'd ever had. We actually thought about starting a dog clothing store, like not a pet store with food, just the outfits. Pretty glad we thought better of it. Amazon, you know? I really loved cider though, and actually making something ourselves sounded way better than being a middleman. So we got a ton of business planning books from the library.
The one I ended up buying and using was “The Right-Brain Business Plan” by Jennifer Lee. It was perfect because it was non-intimidating and included all kinds of art projects to help me formulate my thoughts into a business plan. Perfect for me really. The art projects were very magazine collage heavy but still it helped me visualize what I was going to do. It also had all kinds of worksheets that I could print off online to help me make decisions.
This was the first thing I made from the book. It’s my “Big-Vision Collage.” I was supposed to go through magazines and find images that “speak to me.” What I made kind of surprised me because if you’d asked me if I cared about sustainability, I think I would have shrugged and said, “yeah.” I never actually spent more money for the organic version at the grocery store. But something about really making my own thing, I wanted to be proud of it and all of a sudden, it was like we have to be good to the environment. Chris was down.
The whole “thinking outside the box” was because I think we’d just finished making a rosemary cider, it was maybe just our 2nd or 3rd try at homebrewing, and it was like, Man! There’s so many more flavors than just apple and pear! (There were fewer producers and choices back then.)
The last panel is how I wanted the space to feel. I think a space can change an experience, and to us, the space is just as important as the cider. I want a space that feels good to be in.
This step was important and took forever to do. These are our top values. It was really difficult to figure out, I mean we all have dozens of them. Narrowing down your top few? And then compromising with a partner to come up with your top seven together? I didn’t really know what my top values were until I did this. The book had different exercises to help you discover them. One exercise revolved around times in your life you were happy, and one revolved around when you were very unhappy. If you are very upset, chances are you are not honoring one of your top values. This helped me understand myself and understand Chris. With our values we could then figure out what our business really was about. If we hadn’t done this step, it’s not that our business would have failed, it’s just that we may have discovered a few years in that our business wasn’t making us happy, that somewhere along the way a value had been compromised that we weren’t even really aware was there. This way, we have a better chance of actually liking the business we create. It’s odd how much picking these values have informed our choices over the last decade, because looking back at them, the core value is still there, but I would word it so differently. Like, “self reliance”? I mean, damn, you can ask for help, it’s better if you do. I think we just meant not waiting for others to do stuff for you. But now I’m wondering where my “humble” card is at. Probably nowhere cause I was just a snot-nosed kid when I made these cards.
Be humble or life will humble you.
Mike Tyson
Haha. These are our future customers. See yourself? 🙃 This is pretty unimportant now. At the time, it seemed that only young and hippy people drank cider. Not anymore. These are “perfect customers” clustered with activities, interests, and needs. So the green card is are environmentalists, the blue card folks are into trendy local stuff, and the yellow are young people in apartments needing a space to hang-out. Today, I think of my “perfect customer” as a dog needing clothes. Oh wait, wrong business. As probably someone living in the area where our business is located. Period. People need more places to go in this city. Now, the goal is to make a space where people can bring their kids, friends, dogs and enjoy a few hours. I’m not sure we need to cater to any group in particular.
Business statement. Pretty long and flowery. I think the book gave me the prompts: “I am passionate about…” and “My purpose is to…” We’ll shorten it and fix it. But the collage is pretty.
There were more assignments, these were just a few of the more interesting ones.
Moving forward, more numbers, and trying as always to be practical but not sacrificing too much of our dream.
Any questions, comments or gripes are all welcome! Give us a holla:
In line with our special events idea, what y’all think of a Krampus party? Saw this video years ago, and it just looks like the most fun ever.
Want a little more info on Krampus? These two videos are great.
Previous Newsletter: It’s Always a Good Time for Popcorn
Money Don't Grow On Trees, Apples Do
Making Cider Smarter Not Harder