With a little help…

Photo by Emily P. Goodstein

Well, we’ve been a couple of busy bakers. The two months of small business ownership have been good to us. Our special Thanksgiving menu yielded hours of pie fun and a growing following of loyal customers. With the orders from our winter menu and recent catering orders we have made more cookies in one month than you could shake a rolling pin at. All of this hasn’t left us any time to write up an update until now. It is our intention that this post be the first of a more consistent effort to keep people abreast of our endeavors.

Our adventure has shown us many things, but there are 3 major themes we’d like to share with you: our learnings, our rewards, and the support we’ve been given from friends, family and community.

The support and interest from our friends and community has been incredible. Our friends have offered us their advice and talents from CSS codes and blogs to finances and accountants, PR and marketing ideas to photos, blog postings and more. All of the offerings and help have really shown us that within our community there is a wealth of skill and knowledge to be shared.

We’re learning to ask for and accept help. Every challenge and lesson learned we now see as an opportunity to reach out to our people. We’re building new and deepening old reciprocal relationships of skill, knowledge and love. We feel good when we are able to help others, especially friends, so why should we hesitate to think that others would want to help us to?  Is this what it means to build community? Yes, for us this has really bolstered and expanded our community. It really is true that we have all the tools that we need among us.

We were also featured in a documentary and article, “Getting Creative in the Great Recession” on Campus Progress’s website. We had a blast with the author of the piece, Julie Turkiwitz. She came to us because she was doing a piece on the effects of the recession on our generation and the creative things people are doing because of it. She affirmed that our story wasn’t unique but that Grassroots Gourmet was a unique response. Julie accompanied us on a Restaurant Depot shopping excursion, expertly interviewed us, and filmed us baking. Talking with Julie allowed us the opportunity to articulate the connections between Grassroots Gourmet, the recession and our politics. We are incredibly grateful to Julie for sharing our story as it connects to the bigger picture. She is a talented journalist that works fluidly through writing, film and photography. Check out the piece on Campus Progress’s site and her website.

Starting a small business for the first time comes with a mix of predictable and unpredictable challenges. What I mean to say is we do our best to plan and prepare but sometimes we are flat out wrong or surprised by what we didn’t know we didn’t know.

There’s a moment in the “Getting Creative in the Great Recession” film where we are caught off guard by the total of a supplies run, it was almost three times what we had estimated. Running a small business has come with a steep but rewarding learning curve. With every success and mistake there is room to learn and grow. We are finding our work with Grassroots Gourmet to be challenging and incredibly rewarding. Leading us to our final thought for this post.

This is the best job we have ever had. Really, we’re not just saying that. We talk daily about how we’ve had the freedom to take on and learn the new skills in ways that best suit our talents and interests. One day we are managing and improving our website and 2.0 happenings and the next we are developing the menu and figuring out finances. We are pleasantly surprised by the constant demand for us to grow and develop as we build Grassroots Gourmet. It’s true to say that we are becoming the people we envision ourselves to be as we build the business of our dreams.

Our theme song has become “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey. We’re holding on to this feeling. We’re singing and growing in the kitchen. Thanks to all those who believe in us and this journey.

Stay tuned for posts such as: a holiday baking wrap-up, expanding the blog roll, and more….