Bakers bake

Imagine that you are a baker. You have your own bakery. It's a small operation. You have to wake up at 3AM every morning to prepare enough bread, buns, pretzels, croissants, rolls and whatnot before you open the store. If you want to be romantic pretend that your partner is helping you by running the store so you can concentrate on baking.

At first you bake, your partner sells. You count the money. You use the money for your own needs and to maintain your bakery - something needs fixing, you need to make sure the flour is coming in in time from the best vendor, you need to keep your bakery clean and the ingredients stored properly. You do all of that in a random reactive way. But you don't really have a... compass of some sort. You just choose what to do and how much to spend on a minute-by-minute basis.

But let's imagine one day you finish work and decide to actually think about what is your business doing. Well, you bake and together with your partner you sell baked goods to loyal customers who chose your small bakery located at the edge of a small town instead of going to a big supermarket and getting everything there. And you get this wonderful idea: if we want to make sure we're getting better at this and not worse we should probably track... something.

You decide to track the thing you want to improve. Maybe it should be money. How much you sold per day, for example. But it feels wrong. You never cared about making money. You wanted to bake and see happy customers come back day after day and know all of them and treat them with respect and get love and appreciation back. Also if money is the metric you can always increase the amount you get by cutting costs and not improving your products. So how about something closer to heart: the number of products sold. You mostly bake small breads and all kinds of sweat and savory buns and stuff. Basically, you bake things that go well with coffee and tea. So it's fair to just count them as equal.

So that's what you do at the end of each day: you write down how many items you've sold and you put this number on the whiteboard (probably better to do it digitally but let's stay in this cozy analogue handcrafted dream). With time you can see a trend - daily numbers become a string of dots that becomes a straight line. OK, you sell the same amount every day.

But you are sure you can sell more. Your customers keep asking for more buns. A lot of them come too late and find empty shelves and have to go away sad and shop in that stupid supermarket where everything is done by GPTs.

You decide to try an experiment - you will make more jam filled buns. They are pretty easy to make but you were never sure they will sell. So next day you make 20 more. And you keep tracking the total number for another week. Well, the line went up by 20 or so.

You also know that it's easy to make more garlic bread. So you try the similar experiment. At the end of the week the line is flat. It even went down a bit by the end of the week. Maybe people here don't like the smell of garlic in the morning. You stop the experiment and the line goes back up.

Now you continue to work and all is well but at some point you run out of this colorful paper you used to wrap your products with. So you're left with boring paper bags. You continue to run the bakery but at the end of two weeks of paper bag packing you see that the number of sold goods didn't go down. So your clients didn't care about the colorful packages. They just wanted the buns. And you've actually saved money because those simple paper bags are cheaper to buy in bulk from this local paper factory.

So this is how you do it - you invest into something and check the results using a clear metric. If you close the bakery for a weekend to go to a bakery level up class you can track what will happen next. Was it an improvement or not? If it was, maybe do that more in the future. If something is broken and the number of sold goods goes to zero it's very easy to make the decision to fix that as soon as possible. But if it didn't affect the number... maybe you can postpone the fix and invest into something else and save some more for proper repairs next month.

You can run your operation by feel. It's not against the law. Or you can select this one metric, the number that will dictate everything, and have this ego-free easy to follow guide that will never lie to you and will always help you find your way to wherever you're heading.