Thanks for joining us again on this growth journey. We’re taking our tiny businesses – The Cheshire Food Co. and Marple Catering - and turning them in to a slightly less tiny business (or may be an enormous one – who knows?) and we’re chronicling the successes, the trials and the tribulations. It should be fun.
Marketing is an area where I’ve got few skills. I did some training a few years ago, I’ve chatted to people who know far more than I do, and I’ve read plenty of online articles, yet I still don’t feel like I get it really. I suspect it’s as much to do with me not getting excited about crafting ingenious content as anything else (or it could just be that I’m not clever enough…) Last week as I was making some pies my 15 year old saw me rolling the pastry in to balls and said something like “that looks cool” and proceeded to grab a chair to stand on and film me in action. Apparently if the 30 seconds of footage is put to music it could look quite good. Now, I know enough to know that video content gets much more response than a simple picture or some text, but I probably wouldn’t have seen the value in balling some pastry. Anyway, I’ll post the raw footage in this blog and then post the finished video next week so you can see the difference.
On the subject of pies, we currently make around a hundred a week by hand, but this could easily double in the next few weeks if the local pub I’m talking to trust us with their business. A hundred pies for one person is fairly straight forward if a little time consuming, but if that doubles then something will have to change. Neil will be able to help (remember him? He’s my neighbour, ex-chef and now retiree), which will be great but it won’t be a long term solution if Smithy (our sales guy) continues bringing in new business. So on Friday evening I flopped in to the armchair and looked online at pie presses. They’re a piece of kit which removes the need for rolling pastry and manipulating it into the foil pie tin – instead it presses it straight into the tin in one easy motion. They can easily handle 100 pies an hour and every bakery in the country has one. I’m really tempted but at £1500 I think we’ll need to solidify the pie volumes before I jump in with both feet (I bet you didn’t think you’d be reading about pie presses today, did you!!)
An update on last weeks activity. Basically there’s nothing much to report. My meeting with the pub was put back to this week, Dan’s special didn’t materialise (something to do with having a 4 month old at home and getting 5 hours sleep – a poor excuse if you ask me), Neil did drive half way around Cheshire doing our deliveries and listening to a podcast, I talked to my accountant about incorporating and that will be happening in April, and Smithy is popping round for a cuppa and an update this week.
As for the growth journey this week I’m chatting to a local amateur sports club with a view to using their kitchen occasionally in the future. They don’t use it at all during the week so I can’t imagine it will be a problem, and it will certainly be a huge help on busier days when, hopefully, my new chef starts in the summer (more on that next week!) It makes the logistics more of a hassle but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do so we’ll make it work.
Other than that it’s mainly about the cooking this week. Amongst the usual selection of frozen dishes and pies, we’ve got to turn 10k of chicken livers in to pate for our favourite butcher and supplier of top notch meat, Littlewoods. I love the smell of the onions, garlic and rosemary frying together before the pans are deglazed with red wine and then the livers thrown in. It’s a job my chef at the deli used to do and it’s so evocative…
Thanks for reading. I hope you’re enjoying these updates and following our little journey. I’m toying with the idea of doing them as a video, but that seems more scary!! We’ll see.
Catch you soon.
Dan
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