Bakery Franchise Owners Wear Lots Of Hats

We recently rolled out a new website program option for our Great Harvest bakery owners, so I’ve been talking with lots of local bakery owners about their websites and their businesses. I also did a workshop at our annual meeting a few weeks ago helping these small business owners with some of the online fundamentals. Great Harvest bakery owners in our 

session were busy optimizing their website for keywords, claiming their business pages on Google Places, Yelp, and other search engines and review sites, plus sharing links, photos and videos on their Facebook pages.

Helping these amazing bread business owners with their online presence and marketing has reminded me of just how many hats they wear. They have all been very complimentary about the help, and sometimes even apologetic about their computer skills. But I’m in awe of how they are learning things very quickly and I keep thinking -- this is just one tiny slice of what they manage as small business owners. Whole wheat bread and sweets are baked, employees are hired and trained, customers are served, lobbies are merchandised, ingredients are ordered, equipment ismaintained, bills are paid, income statements are produced…and the list goes on. Small business owners are an impressive lot!