Looking Back: Past Articles
Here’s an overview of the different articles we’ve written in the past four years. They’re always available in full on our website.
From our very first post on local food systems, we’ve been thinking about how to support local businesses and sustainability measures with the foods we grow, harvest, serve, and eat. These choices come out of an economic imperative or a desire for food justice, local foods and local urban farming.
We’ve worked through the journey of growing your business together, starting with fund-raising (Financing Your Business and Alternative Funding PSA) and writing your first marketing plans (Getting Started: Writing a Marketing Plan and Creating a Marketing Plan to Increase Sales). We’ve written about finding a hospitable start-up environment in a culinary incubator, and put out a whole bunch of tips on growing your business (and still more tips for growing your business!) from there.
As your business has grown, we’ve outlined ways to track your progress with benchmarking, and figured out how to measure success. We’ve pushed beyond the boundaries of traditional business planning with innovative ways to approach the business development process, by wearing The Six Hats of Creative Thinking and developing creative problem solving skills.
While much of our writing lately has been focused on farms and agriculture, the restaurant industry is still in our soul. We’re always trying to bring you suggestions for increasing your efficiency, whether directly by streamlining and standardizing, managing food costs and inventory management – or over a longer time horizon, with planning for design.
Don’t miss our in-house library on sales and promotion (and cross promotion) and marketing your menu, whether traditional or through social media for food businesses. (Taking our own advice, we later revisited this rapidly-changing field, as we’ve developed our own approach to growing your social media presence.
Social media is fun (and can be distracting) but we must remember the day-to-day financial realities that it takes to keep your business humming, from keeping on top of those QuickBooks best practices for restaurants and farms, to allocating expenses to best manage your business, and eventually creating financial projections to help you grow your business. We’ve taken a broader view of financing, too, with a look at fundraising for Slow Money and the challenges and opportunities of micro-finance.
All this drives home one simple lesson for us: it benefits us all when we work together, especially farmers and chefs. And as we get our own business in order we can start thinking about helping other entrepreneurs get their start and mentoring the next generation.
Thank you for bringing us along on your journey. We look forward to helping you grow and prosper in your entrepreneurial endeavors.
Something you’d like to learn more about? Suggest an article topic for us to investigate. Feel free to call or email – we look forward to working with you!
