The race for who quits their job first

Both John and I were sick of our jobs. Well, I wasn’t necessarily sick of my job, more like de-poofed and unmotivated. John had true hatred of his job, he couldn’t stand the thought of being in that building for one more minute. Being the more motivated one, John took the reins and organized our first sample run. He went out and scoped different places and we started to compile a list of places that might want to buy our tarts. From our home kitchen, I baked up 6 or 7 of each of the four flavors of tarts, and boxed them up to be ready for our field trip the next day. I put a stack of order forms next to the boxes.

We decided the best time to hit our targets was after the morning rush, but before the lunch rush. We packed up the car and off we went. I think the first place we went to was C&P coffee company in our neighborhood. I had done a scoping mission a few days prior and the fanciest thing they were selling were these rum cakes, which isn’t something I normally gravitate towards, so I knew we had half a chance. I was far too nervous to sell my own wares the first day out, so I sent John in solo. He bought a coffee and struck up a conversation with the Barista, who turned out to be the owner (pretty likely since most coffee shops in Seattle are teeny tiny). I don’t know what he said to her, but then he came out to the car and got a box of tarts, and told me it was going well. He talks to her for a bit, then out to the next place. We probably hit about 6 places that day, I think.

The next morning first thing, we still weren’t used to the idea of waking up early, we got an order from C&P. Later that day (or maybe it was the next day), John followed up with the places we’d dropped samples off to and got I think 3 more orders, with a couple of “unsures”. In the next couple of days, we tried to secure our commercial kitchen, but then knew we wouldn’t be totally setup for a little while, so we had to bake our first couple of orders in our home kitchen, which we know is a big no-no for the Health Department, but we were really excited people liked the tarts, and didn’t want to screw up that opportunity.

I think it was the next week that John gave notice for his job, and he was going to do sales for Sugar full time since I still had not gotten enough courage to sell yet. I would stay at my job until I got too busy to handle it. We still needed to pay the bills so we had to proceed with caution. We didn’t know how long it would take to become profitable, but we were assuming at least a year. John picked up a few more clients, and I started baking at the new rented commercial kitchen.

We still didn’t know where to get our ingredients. Suppliers never returned any of our calls. Luckily, we found Cash & Carry which had a lot of our supplies, and there was also Costco, which was a big hassle to go to, but cheaper for eggs, and they had heavy cream in 32 oz containers; whereas Cash & Carry only had them in 64oz size. I couldn’t imagine using that much! The thing that sucked was that the date on the Costco cream was always pretty soon, in fact often the cream was out of date, but we really didn’t have a choice, or any other solutions so we pressed on.