Starting Your Baking Business
Seven Steps to Building Your Foundation for Success
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“Starting Your Baking Business” walks you through the steps to create a business with a strong foundation and puts you on the road to sweet success!
This course teaches you:
- Baking Business Startup Requirements
- How to Create a One-Page Business Plan
- How to Identify Your Ideal Client
- Marketing and Promotion Strategies
- Pricing Your Products
- Making it Legal with Contract, Policies, and Procedures
- and more!
This course is your complete guide to setting up and starting your cake or baking business!
Includes a companion course workbook to take notes and write down your personal goals and action items.
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Your Instructor
Alana Thomas is the editor and publisher of Sweet Success Magazine. Her cake hobby started when she was a child, and grew into a full cake business in the early 2000s. She’s worked in commercial kitchens, hotel resorts in the catering department, and finished out her career as a cottage food baker in 2015.
She is a self-taught baker and designer, and her formal education includes undergraduate and graduate degrees from Texas State University. This combined experience led to the creation of Sweet Success Magazine, and is the first publication that provides business education, resources, and tools exclusively for cake decorators and baking enthusiasts.
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Frequently Asked Questions
When does the course start and finish?
The course starts now and never ends! It is a completely self-paced online course - you decide when you start and when you finish.
We recommend that you complete the course within 6-8 weeks as the end goal is to have a fully operating business.
**Please note that if you are in a beta group, you will only have access to the course for a few months. Check your beta program enrollment for details.
How long do I have access to the course?
How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to this course for as long as it is available in the school - across any and all devices you own, for the lifetime of the course.
Once we retire a course it will no longer be available for access.
**Please note that the beta version retires for everyone on July 1, 2021.**
Who is this course for? I'm already selling my cakes.
This course is for all bakers and cake decorators who are hobbyists ready to transition into a business or those who have started the process of becoming a registered business and want to make sure all of their bases are covered. Oftentimes, people start baking and selling their cakes and cookies without fully forming a business and this course helps with that.
There are no tricks or shortcuts here, this course is for those who are ready to take the steps needed to make their business legal and officially open for business.
(Note: This information is general and geared primarily towards bakers in the United States although the business foundations and principles taught are applicable to everyone.)
I'm not sure I'm ready to start a business right now.
There will always be responsibilities, obligations, and deadlines to meet. You have to decide if creating a baking business is right for you and if today is the day where it will be one of your top priorities.
We've designed the course to be self-paced and easy to follow and you can always come back to the materials as many times as you need to, as long as the program is still available in the school.
The course is designed to set up your business over the course of several weeks, so you can work at your own pace. We've also included a course workbook that you can download and take notes. This will also give you your personal guide and playbook to set up your business.
How does it work?
This online course consists of 8 modules that walk you through all of the steps of building a cake or baking business.
You will have a short video explanation of each topic and action items needed to complete each step.
There is also a companion course workbook that is available for download so you can take notes and write down ideas you want to implement as you build your business.
How long will it take to finish the course?
Although you can probably get through all of the content in less time, The course is designed to be completed in under 8-12 hours.
Due to the time it takes to file paperwork and get all aspects of business set up, a realistic expectation is to have a fully operating business created within 4-6 weeks.
This is all dependent on your own efforts and scheduling to get documents completed and filed with your local government/business officials.
What if I need help?
All students can leave a question or comment directly within the course and receive assistance, or send an email through the email address provided in the course materials.
How much money will I make?
We cannot determine how much money you will make in your business and that's not the purpose of this course. There are no shortcuts or get-rich-quick schemes here.
This course is intended to walk you through the steps of building a solid business foundation, taught by an award-winning baker and cake business owner.
The business principles taught in this course are the same business principles from other industries, however, they are customized for cake decorators and bakers who want to own their own bakeries, whether it's a home-based bakery, cottage food business, or retail bakery.