Wednesday
I spent yesterday looking back through all of the endless amounts of receipts and paper that we have kept this past year trying to close out my books. Wasn't as easy as I thought and although I have everything I wasn't as together as I though I was. Still we made progress and hopefully will only have one more day of work before finalizing for taxes. After that I went to the Fasttrac program for new businesses, we are entered in a competition to win $25,000 for the best business plan. The requirements are a 10 week class and re-doing the plan I currently have. Not a problem since it needs some work anyway now that I have a more realistic idea of what our cost were and where we will try to go this year. EH went with me but Susannah babysat during the meeting which goes from 6-9pm! Still for the chance to win $25,000 (1 out of 30) I can suck it up. Money is flying out the door which we fully expected but it is hard to write those checks. We are so close to getting everything in the right place and although I have to continue to remind myself it is the right thing for us to have taken everything slowly. We are going to be set up to really handle the impact of rapid growth. Today I am working from home, I had all intentions of getting started on the business plan but I left my passwords to the program at the office so instead I am revamping our pricing structure and break even analysis to reflect the new packaging, hiring employees and raising the cost of the cheesecakes. It is all fun for me even though it sounds really boring. We are also preparing the list of who we will be hitting up first with our products. Luckilly we have a very extensive list of contacts across the US at most of the larger gourmet markets/specialty shops/ etc. So this year should be very interesting to say the least.