Starting Your Own Cake Decorating Business From Your Own Kitchen
So you have been baking and decorating cakes for some time. You’ve received an astounding amount of effusive compliments and people have asked you if you are willing to make a cake for them or a friend. You look around your kitchen and it is starting to look and smell like a bakery. You’ve invested a small fortune in equipment, accessories and supplies. You are at your happiest when you have just figured out exactly where to position a calla lily in a field of baby blue fondant. You are now asking yourself if you should turn your hobby into a business. If this is the state you find yourself in, chances are, it is time for you to take a quantum leap into being paid for your art.
Figuring Out the Cost and the Price of Your Products
If you are serious about transforming your hobby into a cake decorating business then you need to sit down and start to figure out the cost of your products. Here is a rudimentary procedure for gauging product costs:
1) Make a list of each and every ingredient that goes into each cake from the baking powder to the confectioner’s sugar in the frosting. Calculate the cost per item. For example, get the cost of a tub of butter cream, figure out how many cups in all it contains. Divide the total cost of the tub by the number of cups to get the cost of each cup and start from there to compute the cost of the butter cream in your cake. Do this for all the decorated cakes that you plan to sell when you are in business.
2) Calculate the time you allotted to bake and decorate the cake and take note of this as cost of labor. Although you may not be charging this at the start of your business, it is good to keep this cost in mind because it will give you an idea of how many cakes should be simultaneously baked for cost effective operations.
3) Find out the cost of running your stove, your oven and your mixer per hour. Your power company will probably have a list of the energy appliances use and the cost of running them per hour.
4) Include related costs like packaging, delivery and materials like ribbons, cards, stands, dowels and plates. Don’t forget to include an estimate of the tax per sale you make.
5) Add up all the basic costs and add other costs as needed. The list you come up with will be your cost price. To this, add the profit you want to make. The total price you get will be your selling price.
Once your selling list is ready, go around and look at the prices of identical or similar items in groceries and pastry shops. This may help you decide which items to push for when you open your cake decorating business in earnest and start selling. Remember though that your goodies did not come off an assembly line and that plus their quality will give them added value.
After you have been selling instead of giving away your decorated cakes for a month or two, you should take stock of your equipment and start remembering to set aside a little amount each time you use them to prepare for future replacements.
Test the Waters
Once you know how much your decorated cakes should sell for, test the waters. Tell your friends and your family that you are now accepting orders. Create a blog; make flyers and leave these in public places.
Be courageous when you start your cake decorating business. Remember that the mammoth companies we now call Amazon, Apple, Google, Walt Disney and Hewlett Packard all started in a garage. So, there is every hope that something big will come out from your kitchen.
