Cracked Cauldron Spillings

All y'all who come to this blog with the search phrase "how to open your own business", listen up: DON'T DO AS WE DO!

Why?

Because we are coming up on this business of opening the Cracked Cauldron from a financially very weak position, we've had to do things and seek alternatives those of you with strong financial positions won't even have to consider. We've had to review plans, formulate alternatives, and be much pushier in some regards, and much humbler in others. We've made concessions and compromises financially stronger people would never even think of.

We know all the cheap places and best scrounge sites locally for furniture, fixtures, and such. We know how to do many things ourselves, from painting to plumbing, and have learned that while it pays to pay a professional, until we get the money for that, we can keep things together with our own hard-won skills. We've learned the timing needed to stagger baking in a small home oven so we can bake many loaves of bread in a day, and in a pinch can bake in a dirt hearth erected quickly in the backyard. The propane gas grill, with clever use of foil, becomes a powerful oven.

There are easier ways of opening a bakery or coffeehouse, and we're not doing it that way.

The easy ways cost, and money is in short supply.

That's why we've had to have so many alternative plans in place.

We are still shooting for the high goal: a bank or SBA loan. That's the "easy" way.

But we're prepared to chip away at achieving our goal through smaller means.

We have plans within plans within plans, and if we open as a freelance personal chef, that will evolve into a catering business with a small commercial kitchen, that will evolve into a coffeehouse (where we can finally begin to offer the seeds of our Homeless Resource Center), that will evolve into our current plans for the Cracked Cauldron, and from there, it will evolve hopefully as we foresee it.

We can start just as easily from a seed as from a cutting. It just takes longer.

So, if you want to start a business of your own, ignore our bumblings and stumblings, and do it right: be rich and financially sound and stable before you open a business.