At the age of 29 I decided to start making cakes to order. After 2 years, the confectionery shop had to be removed. I am telling you how much you can earn this way.
In the last article, I told how much I earned by making custom-made cakes at home (I will leave the link at the end). Today I want to share how I went beyond my own kitchen.
2 years after I started making cakes, I received an order to make 100 mini cakes and 100 boxes of marshmallows. I agreed immediately, because this is a good income. But everything turned out to be not so simple.
It's one thing to make 1-2 cakes at home, and quite another to make 100 mini cakes and the same number of boxes of marshmallows. For this amount of cakes, you need at least 2 refrigerators. I generally keep quiet about the ingredients, they also need to be placed somewhere.
At some point, I even thought to refuse the order, but there was one BUT. I have already signed the contract and in case of its termination I had to pay 10% of the penalty. I began to look for a way out of this situation.
First, I figured out how long it would take me if I prepared an order at home. The order required 1600 marshmallow halves. I could dry only 128 at a time at home, which is only 16 boxes in 12 hours. Thus, it would take me 6 days only for marshmallows. It didn't go anywhere. And yet there was still a cake to be made.
I realized that I couldn't do it on my own. I started looking for a company to hand over a production order to them. It turned out to be expensive and I would have lost almost all of my profits. I was already desperate, but suddenly I found a way out.
By the will of fate, I ended up at the “Local Food” conference of gastro-enthusiasts. There I met its founders, who invited me to study at their school. I did not regret 30,000 rubles for the course and after the first lessons I found a way out how to make such a number of cakes.
It turned out that you can just rent a part of the confectionery shop for 1-2 days and make my desserts there. Previously, I had no idea that industries have such a service.
I rented a workshop for a day, hired my brother (he is a cook-technologist) as an assistant, and in 10 hours we did everything necessary. A night later, I returned to the shop with my wife, we packed everything beautifully and took it to the customer.
In just a day, I did something in the shop that would take me 6 days at home. And most importantly, even despite the costs of school, rent of a workshop, salary for my brother, I still remained in the black. How much did I earn?
Let's count. My order was 100 mini canned cakes and 100 boxes of marshmallows. For all this I asked for 100,000 rubles. Since this was a large order, I bought the ingredients in small wholesale, which reduced the cost. The rent of the workshop cost me 7,000 rubles.
My brother's salary was 3000 rubles, another 1000 rubles were spent on logistics. Plus unforeseen expenses and another 1,500 rubles for food. Well, 30,000 rubles were spent on training. In total, if you subtract all expenses, I earned 37,000 rubles.
But if I hadn't spent on training, I could have suffered losses.
I still remember this first experience in the workshop, it cannot be compared with anything. Unless the preparation for participation in the fair can compete with him, but that's another story. If you are interested to know what happened next, let me know in the comments - I will definitely write another article.