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☀️ Summer Slowdown - Keep your marketing piping hot all summerIn this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 263 - Summer Slowdown, it's that tiiime of year - where both bakers and clients take a step back from the onslaught of End of School and grad orders.
We say it every year - the dreaded "J" months are the slowest months for bakers because it's the convergence of our clients being out of town or busy entertaining the rug rats, along with a hiatus of any major holidays that tick cookie sales up.
But if you plan to take a baking break or just understand the ebbs and flows of our industry, the summer slowdown can be a great time to take a deep breath and retool, touch up, and tweak before we get into the crazy Q3 and Q4 "cookie Super Bowl" months. So here are ten things you could do to sharpen the ol' butcher knife that'll make quick work of crunch time.
🌞 Stockpile Dough
Batch mix and freeze pre-portioned dough. If you could portion out each storage bag to handle X amount of cookies (this will take some measuring and depends on your roll-out thickness), you could really make the dough thaw process quite efficient. The last thing we want is wasted defrosted dough. Corrie recommends an upright freezer from Wally World to keep your stash outta the way of family ice cream night. Probably best to leave this towards the end of the summer so you're sure it'll last you til Christmas, storage space dependent.
🌞 Audit those SOPs
SOPs or "standard operating procedures" are the step-by-step instructions you follow when X is triggered. For example, my SOP for a cookie class starts with adding it to the shared Google calendar, emailing the venue, scheduling another reminder email for the venue, downloading the contact info for class attendees, uploading that info to our newsletter contacts, and emailing Corrie the class info (amazing how I still manage to forget stuff even with this approach).
If you don't have any SOPs or they're out of date, now is the time to sit down and build them out so you're not reinventing the wheel every time something happens in your business - a corporate order comes in, a cookie class is scheduled, a custom order is placed, etc.
🌞 Learn 1 New Technique
You bought all those courses, and now you're overwhelmed. Make a deal with yourself to just crack open one course and learn 1 specific new skill you know will level up your cookie game (hint - check out these Bootcamps, just 2 days, press play, learn something specific in each one).
🌞 Design your Q4 Offerings
We did this last year with our Christmas in July collab - bakers pre-baked their Christmas cookies in slow July, so come the Christmas rush, they were sittin' pretty with pre-batched content ready to go. You can do that now - and if a trend pops up between now and Halloween, add that to your lineup. But with the bulk of the work done, you're going to be set up for the holiday rush.
🌞 Batch your Content
Facebook Planner only allows just under 2 months of content to be scheduled, but FeedHive (and similar apps) let you schedule out for the year. So you can create a pre-scheduled content base now to go up well into the holiday season when you're more pressed for time, but you definitely don't want to ghost your Halloween ghosts.
We cover a few more ideas, but you know what your business will benefit from this summer. Get a plan going now, execute in June and July, relax in August, and hold onto your horses in September - it's Cookie Bowl!
👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or watch it on YouTube) by searching for Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 263 - Summer Slowdown.