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In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 169 - Corrie-tisol, Corrie said, "I want to talk about ways to manage stress." And for good reason - in 2022 she was admitted to the hospital because her kidneys were shutting down. The cause? Chronic, unmanaged stress.

So while this is a business podcast, the business of managing stress will keep you in business. 😫 Chronic stress is no good for the bottom line 📉 - it'll lead to burnout, and up until the day you throw the ol' "tea towel" in, you'll be cursin' the day you first picked up that piping bag.

It's M-I-S-E-R-A-B-L-E.

So - the solution? Well, as with everything - it's a plan of attack, not a single pill to solve all of our proverbial problems (💊 but wouldn't that be nice?!).

Here are 5 things Twin #2 did to cut down on the cortisol spikes.

☕ 1. Manage Caffeine intake.

Caffeine - I love it, I love it, I want some more of it. But when it comes to cortisol, shelving the caffeine (or at least delaying it) may be the answer. 👣 Instead of going cold turkey, try "baby-stepping" your way to a healthier relationship with the brown nectar.

• 🧊🦃 Limit your first cup until later morning (letting your body catch up naturally to what the day holds).
• 🧊🦃 Try going "every other" with a 🫗 glass of water in between caffeine-heavy sodas (where my diet coke lovers at?!).

🧠 2. Identify Stressful Triggers.

I spent 35 years strengthening my stressors, so it could take just as long to tear them down. Being able to identify what causes stress spikes is our key to developing new patterns in handling stress.

• 🧠 What are the things you can control in a stressful situation?
• 🧠 What are the things outside of your control?

Once you identify what you can change and what you can't, you can then channel your thoughts into finding solutions - not fretting about all the worst possible outcomes.

“A man who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary.” - Seneca

💆🏼‍♀ 3. Implement Relaxation Techniques.

Okay - we've identified what we can control, and we've let go of what we can't control. Now fill up that newly found free time with things you find relaxing. I got Corrie a Calmigo (heads up - I can't believe I spent that much money on something so basic - but hey, her kidneys were shutting down, seemed like a cheaper option than a hospital bill). Science says that deep, conscious breathing in and out can really have an immediate effect on cortisol spikes. Walking is a great way to lower stress hormones too.

• 😮‍💨 Breathing exercises (shortness of breath = high cortisol)
• 😮‍💨 Low impact exercise routine can use up excess cortisol - so walking during a stressful situation
• 😮‍💨 Good sleep hygiene (be on time, sleep long enough, phones outta the room, cool dark room)

🖍️ 4. Find a Non-Baking Hobby.

Unfortunately, most of us turned our baking hobbies into baking jobbies - they're no longer the stress relievers we intended them to be. The answer? Find a new hobby that lets you let down your guard for a bit. The more mindless, the better. They say not to move to your favorite vacation destination because it turns "a place where I can relax" into "a place where I have to mow and pay the HOA." Here are some mind-numbing ideas.

• 🖍️ Lettering / Calligraphy
• 🖍️ Sewing
• 🖍️ Coloring Books / Paint Gems
• 🖍️ Animal Crossing (Video Games)

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🚶‍♂ Alotta Parking Lots - Volume-based pricing versus high pricing.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 168 - Alotta Parking Lots, Corrie wanted to talk... well, parking lots.

🌴 We took off from the podcast last week to visit VA Beach (love that beach if you're passing through the great state of Virginny). There's a three-mile strip that runs along the oceanfront where hotels, restaurants, and shops are lined up as far as you can see (or walk). In between this sea of spending, there are parking lots for the endless number of cars driving to spend the day feasting and beaching.

🚗🚕🚙 Some of the parking lots have better beach views (🌞 you know - for when your car apparently wants to relax /s) than even some of the restaurants! And some parking lots felt like they were a 3-hour walk to the destination. Pricing for parking spots ranged from $5 - $30 depending on where the lots were and at what capacity they were at. Prices also went up the closer to the weekend it got (gotta love surge pricing). By Saturday Night, the boardwalk is absolutely packed with people (and their parking spots).

This begs the question - 🤔 how can all the parking lots be marketing money when some charged $50 and others charged $5? Are some parking lots working at a loss? Are some lots price gouging?? What gives??

Simple - 🔪 far-away parking lots are operating with razor-thin margins but working at higher sales volume, and featured parking lots charging a premium to cover all of their add-ons (and proximity) but serving fewer cars = higher margins and lower volume.

In essence - both parking lot pricing structures can result in profitable parking businesses. As long as the parking lots' costs are covered (electricity, asphalt upkeep, parking attendee, towing contract), both models produce a profit (a key when it comes to surviving in business).

🤔 "But why wouldn't the cheap lot just charge more? Sounds like people are willing to pay it."

💵 The parking lot charging less often does so because it costs less to run it. 💸Think: 🚙 hiring a parking attendee with 20 years of valet experience versus a college kid on summer break who doesn't know how to parallel park.

Same with parking lot lighting. 💡 The high-end lot we ended up parking in (because it was the only one servicing our hotel) had automatic motion sensor lights in their covered multi-story garage whereas the cheap lots off the strip had next to no lighting at all. Security gates, parking passes, in-and-out privileges - it's easy to see the cost savings versus the cost splurging.

But here's the thing: all the parking lots were full. 🚘🚖🚔🚖🚘🚖🚔

The ones 4 blocks off the strip ✨and✨ the ones right on the beach were all filled with their target demographic. And the overpriced lot we parked in? So full, in fact, they were sending folks to the cheaper lots and shuttling them over.

Same with bakeries.

As long as the costs are covered (math says you can't run a business at a loss), you have bakers who charge a little ✨but✨ make up for it with their high volume of orders, and bakers who charge a ton - which limits their leads - ✨but✨ they have such high margins built into each order, they're still profitable.

You pay the pied piper one way or another. Either working by baking more or working by marketing more. It's up to you, your personality, and your expertise as to which you prefer to be.

🙅 An introvert may like to charge less per order if it means they don't have to speak at a chamber meeting. 🙋 An extrovert may prefer giving a 10-minute presentation and raking in corporate leads if it means they don't have to be stuck in the kitchen for the next month.

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In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 167 - Getting Corpy Orders, Corrie wanted to switch from telling you to get into corporate orders and now tell you how to get corporate orders.

Corporate orders are great - they have higher dollar amounts, bigger order totals, repetitive simple designs (hopefully), and could become a consistent recurring order. Corporate clients' "cut-to-the-chase" approach to ordering saves a ton of back-and-forth and the limited scope means simplistic designs.

But, as always, there's no such thing as a free lunch and the same applies to corporate orders.

👉 1. Set up a GMB / GBP on Google Maps.

"Google Business Profile is my #1 corpy lead source." Okay - that's her answer folks, when I asked Corrie where she's getting corporate leads. And for good reason. Google Maps is a great way for a cold audience (cold = audience who has never heard of you before) to find your listing. But businesses aren't magically added to Maps (unlike websites like Yelp and Bakerias that use scrapers to populate listings). You have to actually list yourself, go through a verification process, fill out the profile, and continue to build out the profile by adding posts, updates, and pics along with getting good reviews.

The Onesday Wednesday shows a pic of Corrie's GMB profile. You'll see no address? That's because it's set up correctly - as a service area. There's a big suspension campaign rolling out for incorrectly listed profiles on Maps. Unless you have a brick and mortar, you are a service business (even if clients pick up at your door).

👉 2. In-Person / Referral Corpy Client Acquisition.

Probably the least liked but the most effective tip on getting corporate clients: in-person outreach and network referrals. In the wild world of internet marketing, "cold email" is the least effective method of outreach. Why? Because it's the easiest. The easier it is, the less effective it is. And that's why in-person outreach is so effective.

• 🤝 Go to in-person networking events (BNI, Chamber, Toast Masters)
• 🤝 Utilize LinkedIn and LinkedIn Company Page posts.
• 🤝 Go to a home show / vendor show with printed cookies.
• 🤝 Ask for businesses to be "test mules" for printed cookies.
• 🤝 Use the Mainstreet Collab approach to recommend businesses to your audience (and tag said business).
• 🤝 Market to the companies you're already paying (landscaper, the plumber, the nail salon, the dentist)

👉 3. Add a Corporate Page to your Website.

Dedicate an entire page on your website to corporate order clients. Tell them exactly what they need to know, what they need to tell you, and how this will play out. Corporate clients are b-u-s-y. They don't have time to go back and forth about their hopes and dreams. They want to know how much, how fast, and how many. Build out that page for efficiency. Bonus if you include a corporate-only intake form on that page only.

👉 4. Offer Delivery (when legal).

Most corporate orders are for events. Some are for holiday gifts, but let's focus on events for this tip. These corpy clients are busy managing a grand opening. The last thing they want to do is drive to your front porch. Offering delivery for these clients (even if you don't deliver) can seal the deal. Feel free to charge for it too - time is money, and they know that. "Your order is $600. You can pick it up in [City], or I can deliver it to your business for $X." Make that money, honey.

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In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 166 - Ask and Ye Shall Receive, we covered the unfortunate necessity to ask for what you want in business. For those of us who d-r-e-a-d rejection, not asking for what we need to get our business up and runnin' like a well-oiled machine is a "coping" strategy to avoid the word defeating word "no."

But per Corrie's experience in car sales - ABC, always be closing. Always be asking for the sale. Always be asking for that review, always be asking for the next step needed to close the deal on that cookie class space.

Ask and ye shall receive an answer. Whether that answer is yes or no doesn't matter - the answer, regardless of what it is, gives you the next step in your business. If the answer is, "No, we don't want to host your cookie class in our cafe," guess what? You now have the opportunity to ask some place else instead of always wondering what the answer could have been had you just stuck out your neck a lil' bit.

"So, what do you think we need to ask for?" Look at you - already asking questions. We're off to a great start, and of course, we gotta list.

👉 1. Ask for reviews.

Ask for those reviews. In a podcast poll taken in the Sugar Cookie Marketing group this week, over 55% of bakers NEVER ask for reviews. Talk about a SWOT analysis pointing a bright shiny arrow at "getting more reviews will increase your leads," right? Would you hire a remodeling company without checking their reviews first? No? So why do you think your clients are any different?

👉 2. Ask for social shares + likes (engagement).

Treat this like a content bucket you only dip into every other quarter or so - but asking for support from your audience (what I like to call "pity party posts") works because it appeals to the emotional needs of the small business owner. Posts like, "If you can't order from me, you can still support me by liking and commenting" or those posts that open yourself up to your audience explaining how hard it is to fight the big corporations when we're all boot-strapping our businesses can really boost the likes and thus the algo-reach.

👉 3. Ask for email signups.

Just like the Onesday Wednesday newsletter - I don't get signups from you guys unless I ask. Like - I have to make a post every week asking folks to sign up for the free transfer sheet in the newsletter otherwise our email list grows by a whoppin' 0. The fastest way to grow an email list? Ask for people to sign up for it.

👉 4. Ask for understanding from family.

Hey - running a business ain't for the faint of heart - and running a business and a family at the same time is an Olympic sport. Asking for understanding, space, and time from the family to run your business can go a long way. It'll help you set better expectations with them and allow you to work sans the guilty feeling we get when we're buried in our phones during a family event. As always - keep a healthy balance between work and home life. Business will eat up everything you give and leave no crumbs.

👉 5. Ask for grace from customers.

I don't think we give customers enough credit for being understand, imperfect humans just like us. We're so busy strapping on our boxing gloves to realize that if we just ask for understanding when we make mistakes, our clients are often happy to give us some elbow room to fix our "oopsies."

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In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 165 - Stab at Collabs, Corrie took one for the team and signed up for a local vendor collab on Monday so she can give us the bake-down this week. And I think you'll like what she has to share with the classroom.

Okay, so what's a local collab? If you're familiar with our cookie collabs on Instagram - it's not that exactly. Our digitally-based SCM collabs get a bunch of bakers together and engaging with each other on a single day for 1 hour to help boost the alg'rims.

👉 1. What's a Local Collab?

Similarly, a local collab gathers local vendors together and helps them create a referral network + content generation. The collab that Corrie' participated in was spearheaded by a local picnic planner (these are all the rage in our area now) who sourced a florist, her own picnic setup, a baker, a photographer, and 5 models to create a staged bridal shower.

We'll break down the pros and cons of these local collabs based on Corrie's "on the ground" experience this week + how to plan your own in the event you don't have your own local dreamy picnic planner.

👉 2. Pros and Cons

Rarely in marketing is anything a 100% free and clear win - there's always the give and take (we just hope the give exceeds the take, amiright?!). Same with these local collabs - they're front-loaded effort followed by repurcussion results - thus it's hard to track the value proposition until after services have already been rendered.

• ❌ Con: free work (you're likely not getting paid for this)
• ✅ Pro: Referral network + connections
• ❌ Con: No guarantees of leads
• ✅ Pro: Passive long-term lead gen (referral list)
• ❌ Con: It's only as good as the camera equipment
• ✅ Pro: Social Content + social sharing with other vendors
• ❌ Con: Lots of moving parts and people
• ✅ Pro: Most versatile baker wins

👉 3. Setting up / Joining a Collab

Corrie got lucky and caught a community group "call for vendors" posted by the picnic lady. I know in our area, there are dedicated Facebook groups for local area vendor calls. In the event that you don't have an event planner creating these collabs, you can set one up yourself. Sure, more footwork, but also - more power (muhahaha). What I mean is people tend to respect the hostest with the mostest, so use that to your advantage.

• ️🎈 If you want more wedding work, partner with the picnic / event planners
• ️🎈 If you want more birthday work, partner with the balloon garland people / face painters
• ️🎈 Joining a collab is harder to find - search community groups for leads

👉 4. Breakdown of This Collab

I'm not going to type this out - but in this week's podcast, Corrie does a verbal walkthrough of how it started, how it went down, what she expected vs what happened, and how she'd approach creating your own if this sounds like a lead generator you want in on. Regardless - it's a great way to get good content.

👉 5. Recap: Things You Wish You Knew

Rare in life do things go off without a hitch - and this local collab with so many moving pieces and people was not exempt. Being a baker, you'd have to be flexible with events that are outside or involve a lot of folks with ever-changing plans.

• 💧 "I wish I knew that there was potential for this to get rescheduled multiple times - rain dates."
• 💧 "I wish I could have known the color palette beforehand and frozen my set so I was more flexible for the rain potential."
• 💧"I wish I knew that the distance is very far from my home and thus my target audience since we can't ship in Virginia."

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🍗 Loss Leaders - How losing can help you win.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 164 - Loss Leaders, we covered, well, what a loss leader is and how to implement it as a marketing strategy in your baking business.

💰 If you've been to Costco (formerly Price Club) anytime in the last 2 decades, you've seen (or smelled) their rotisserie chickens priced at $4.99 - a staggeringly affordable price that hasn't changed since 2000 (💸 save one price bump in 2008 which was reverted a year later in 2009).

Costco loses money on each of these birds. 🤑 Why? It's their loss leader. These underpriced prepped chickens get people into Costco stores, where, according to the CEO in 2015, these rotisserie chickens bring in $30 - $40 million dollars of additional product sales.

🤔 How? By pricing something like these chickens ridiculously low, they get people into Costco stores. They position these loss leaders deeper into the store near things you'd typically grab when you make a grocery run. The more you grab on your "I'm just picking up a rotisserie chicken" fueled grocery run, the more money Costco makes - by you buying other non-bird related things.

So - cool for Costco, but how can we take this "loss leader" strategy into baking? ✌️ Full confession - we use it in our memberships. Our "loss leader" tier is the $2 Transfer Club. Priced at, you guessed it, $2/mo, this membership gets you an instant download of over 180 digital transfer sheets. That makes each sheet less than $.01. But on Etsy, a similar royal icing transfer sheet can cost around $3 - $4.

🤔 "Why undercharge so much, twins?"

Because with such a low buy-in of $2, you've made an account on our membership platform. Switching to a membership like The Class Kits or The Cookie College is as simple as two clicks now. Plus - 🤝 we're able to build trust with you since I promise members 1 transfer a month but I deliver members around 4 - 8 transfers a month. If you like how you spent your $2 with me, imagine how much you'd love The Cookie College.

Okay - let's bring it back to baking. How can we implement the Loss Leader strategy for home-based bakers?

1. Car Cookies.

I like this one - 🚗 car cookies as your bakery's loss leader. I like it mostly because it means you've already made money before losing it. A car cookie (also known as a "thank you cookie") is a cookie affixed to an order going out. It's intended to give the purchaser a taste test of their order which is often intended to be a gift they'll never get a bite of. 🤤 Now they'll be hooked on that delish sugar cookie recipe you've got and come back for more.

2. Free Samples + Taste Testers.

🍴🛑 Put down your pitchforks. I know "free" and "cookie" aren't words we readily use in the marketing group, but we're talkin' loss leaders here. Free samples (heyo - another Costco strategy) get folks in the door for events like markets and pop-ups. The odds of them buying are higher post-sample.

Another take on this approach is asking local community groups (while abiding by the no-selling rules) for taste testers to give you feedback on a new product. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This accomplishes two things: new people trying your products (and giving you feedback which is a bonus) + you're able to sell without selling when you make the post.

3. G-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s.

When used sparingly, g-i-v-e-a-w-a-y-s can be a decent loss leader. 🧠 Keep in mind the disclaimer: how you get them is how you keep them, though. Too much f-r-e-e and you'll get folks who only jump on these types of promos.

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We've been working on getting Corrie a new website 🕸 - and we got the barebones bits together - so we thought it'd be fun to audit an unfinished website on today's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 163.

The big takeaway is this: there are many website hosts + templates + themes + plugins. 💻 Find what works best for you and don't be afraid to change and shift as your business grows and pivots.

⚠️ Now - this podcast focuses less on the mechanics behind the website, and more on the layout of the website along with the copy, imagery, and buttons. We explained why we used it, what we still need to edit, and things we'd like to move around a bit. That's the beauty of a website audit - it helps you know what you need to tweak!

Here's the basic layout of the website - heavy on the brand colors, big CTAs (call-to-actions), she wanted to elongate her funnel to add a form so she can further vet leads - see, it's about what works for you even if it doesn't make sense to someone else (because - you know we say to keep that funnel shorter for high converting website leads, not longer).

So what do we want to focus on when we talk website layout. 📑 Here's a starting list (note - this will be different for different bakers).

1. Find a website platform that's right for YOU.

🔗 But for Corrie's website, I went back to ol' faithful - Shopify. Why? Well - I've used it before, and I wanted to see if it changed much (hint: it changed a lot). Do I think everyone needs to use Shopify? 💻 Not at all - but for what Corrie wanted and what I had experience with, it's what we went for.

There are so m-a-n-y hosts, so don't be afraid to try them out (most have trial periods for free) to see which feels right. 💵 You may have the budget to hire someone to build your website for ya (or were born a twin), or you may want to "DIY" it and figure it all out (along with some new curse worse). Some website platforms give you tons of freedom (💔 which can break the site) and some keep it very structured (which is less customized, but also - 💢 a not broken website).

2. Keep the top CTA-centric.

Towards the top of the website - called the top bar, menu, and banner ribbons - 📣 keep them CTA-focused meaning constantly call your web traffic to take an action. ➡️ Order here, ➡️ get started here, etc. We don't want to make our most primate website real estate about the dog we had when we were 3 years old that we named our bakery after. No, no - we want their money. So make it easy for them to give it to us.

3. Add in some content that adds validity.

If they scroll past our prime web real estate, they may be looking for more trust-building. 💯 A great way to do that is through various segments of your home page that add validity to your bakery. Yeah - the very same stuff we told you to not put in the top section. Hey - they didn't buy, we need to convince them more. ✅ About me, ✅ about my process, ✅ FAQs - these can help answer questions (and address objections before they come).

4. Your branding matters.

🎨 Find your brand colors (coolors is a cool website to help you do that) and make that home page match. 🟪 The more "wow, this all matches their logo and brand identity" your website gives, the higher the trust factor from your audience.

Websites are a compromise - what works well for the bots vs the humans. What looks pretty versus what the client needs to see. What the page should say that's enough words without being too many words. You give and take until you find a design that works for both you and your clients!

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This week we cover a topic that can get some bakers into trouble - hiding in the bushes of their exes. Kidding - that was our mom, but the concept still applies when it comes to stalkin' our clients.

The issue arises when we feel we're owed more than just the money we made for an order. As someone who loves to peek over the fence of past lovers myself, it can be tempting to sneak a peek at a client's Facebook page or business page to see if they've posted pics of their party... and then to turn a lil' sour when you realize they did and just conveniently happened to forget tagging your and your bakery business.

😣 "Well, twins - referrals are the lifeblood of my lead sources! I need tags and shoutouts to earn more income. And you said you're business-centric, right?! It's okay if I comment, "So nice baking for this event - I'm the cookie baker, @[tags business passive aggressively]."

I hate to say it boo-bear, but your "praise" was piles o' cash and anything beyond that just ain't owed to you. While yeah - the tags are awesome, the posts full of praise about you amazing, and the emails fawning over your fantastic flood can make your toes curl... it is not owed to you.

📚 In the book, No More Mr. Nice Guy - a book written for men, but still some great takeaways - 🤫 Robert Glover talks about "covert contracts" - these are contracts made not in writing. And that's what's happening with this whole bein' owed beyond the bread (ahem - casheesh).

I see this happen in the Marketing Group - 😣 bakers who feel as if they're owed more than just the money they were paid. It's a quick recipe for resentment, and we're here to break up with the bad mojo.

1. Your money is your motivation.

💵 Fall in love with money (within reason). What we mean is: your only job was to bake cookies. In exchange for those amazing cookies, someone gave you the life energy they exchanged with their employer in the form of money - they gave you some of their life - 🤑 and the money was the physical representation of that. That was the contract. Nothing more. 🍰 Anything additional is icing on the cake (that they proverbially paid for so - again - not required).

2. Stop stalking.

🙈 Blinders are the best way to tune out the torture of wondering if you were tagged. You can't know what you can't see, right? Stop stalking your clients (and while we're at it, your exes... right mom?). If you can't stop from looking or party pics are showing up in your feed, Facebook has a "mute friend" option - use it.

3. Create review-generating assets.

😩 "But twins! I need tags to get leads!" Sure - leads do come from tags, but they also come from good reviews - so instead of stalkin' your client, send a follow-up email asking them if they wouldn't mind leaving you a review on your Facebook Page or your Google Business Profile. 📑 If you think you should be allowed to market to their party attendees, use a Munbyn thermal printer to throw a cheap printed sticker on the back of each cookie (adding the ingredients can help it look less like "PLEASE HIRE ME" and more like "hey - allergies include, but also... hire me, maybe?"

4. Incentives for reviews.

🎁 Not my favorite approach - but when it works, and if you work it right, it produces great results. The thing about thinking you're owed tags is likely because you're too dependent on word-of-mouth for your lead gen. By building up other lead sources, you can grow... well... other lead sources.

5. Learn to let it gooo.