How My Love For Baking Prepared Me For Business
Well, hello. It's been a while. I was off conjuring up exciting new recipe goals. Have you seen the new lewk of The Noteworthy? More to experience on that front but first, let's get tasty.
I love to bake and cook. But especially find joy in baking. So much so that the first library book I ever checked out in middle school was The Joy of Baking. And when gifted the Baking and Pastry Bible, I quickly read it front to cover. Yet, I hadn't even fully finished reading the scripture from The Good Book. Baking is a balancing activity for me. It's juggling the intricacies of prescriptive processes while injecting moments at creativity, sometimes at my own risk.
I've had successful baking results and even many more trial attempts. My baked brie at a Christmas party resulted in more of a tasty fondue. My lemon polenta cookies were repurposed as ice cream crumble. Fortunately, my humble pumpkin-sweet potato pies became legendary at family gatherings.
My baking has since evolved to one of an expert Italian grandmother that can bake from "feeling" instead of recipe. But this wasn't a technique self-taught, it was a learned behavior conditioned from intensely watching my mother create masterpieces in the kitchen seemingly out of thin air. She's a cook-by-feeling cook and often discarded the recipes but also taught me to "have it handy to know the right ingredients and basics."
What I've discovered is that the patience, process, and planning in baking lends itself well to entrepreneurial development. You must exhibit all three in order to have a tasty result.
Being patient requires you to sometimes take a wait-and-see approach. Whether this be repeated interviews to find the exact right candidate for your team or launching a social media campaign and waiting for the post to go viral, patience truly is a virtue in allowing each component a chance to develop. Patience benefits you as it allows you to see feedback and results in real time and adjust your strategy accordingly. Just like proofing the dough, patience plays a pivotal role in either you rising or falling flat from premature intervention.
Following the process is necessary to ensure synergy between each step. If baking is essentially a tasty prescriptive method, then entrepreneurism is essential organizational management. How well organized are you with your business plans? Marketing and outreach plans? Exit or pivot plans? Trusting the process prescriptively, but also injecting spurts of creativity from your "feelings," can yield unexpected successful results. Sort of like that baked brie fondue--it sure was a tasty "dipping" appetizer!
Lastly, planning ahead for what to expect and how to respond is especially important to not forget a key ingredient or process component. In professional kitchens, they do this planning ahead with their ingredients called miese en place which translates to ingredients in place. Without this preparation, it would ruin the kitchen efficiency, inventory, and ultimately, their execution of service. Just like the best kitchens in the world have their ingredients in place, planning your entrepreneurial journey can put you on a pathway to success, and maybe a Michelen star.
The steps in baking the best dessert mirrors recipes for sweet entrepreneurial success. And given my baking and entrepreneurial instincts, that's a slice of pie I look forward to tasting.