Can I tell you about the invoice that almost made me LOSE my mind?

August 30, 2017, I paid $270.03 for a gallon of Madagascar vanilla. Well, it ended up being $540.06 because I bought two gallons; regardless, the price was ASTRONOMICAL.

$540.06…ON VANILLA!

Apparently, a storm had hit the vanilla farms in Madagascar, and the prices didn't just creep up. They JUMPED. Vanilla has always been expensive (my baker friends know). This was ASTRONOMICAL.

So I did what any smart business owner should do.

I did the freaking math. Immediately.

I grabbed a bright pink Post-it and broke that gallon down to the tablespoon.

30 seconds later, I found out a single tablespoon of vanilla would NOW cost me $1.06.

HOLY F**K.

If you're not in the baking world, a dollar doesn't sound like a big deal. But my baker peeps know. We put vanilla in LITERALLY everything. Cupcakes. Frosting. Fillings. Cookies. That dollar can show up more than once in a single product.

Here's the part that actually scared me

It wasn't the price of the vanilla.

It was that every single one of my products was LOSING money. How? Because my pricing was based on OLD vanilla prices, not the current ones.

And here's what nobody tells you: I wasn't underpricing because I was scared. I wasn't underpricing because I didn't believe my work had value. I had been in business nearly eight years at that point. I knew what my product was worth.

I was underpricing because my numbers were OLD.

That's a whole different problem. And honestly? It's the more dangerous one. Because you can't fix it with a pep talk. You can't affirm your way out of it. You can be the most confident baker on the planet and STILL lose money on every order, because the number you're confident about stopped being true.

Ingredients ALWAYS go up. The real cost is running a business on a number you assume is still true, when it stopped being true weeks ago. Maybe MONTHS ago.

And sis, nobody is gonna call you up when your ingredient costs change and tell you your pricing is outdated. Not your supplier. Not your customers. Definitely not the competing baker down the street.

Keeping up with those numbers is nobody's responsibility but YOURS.

What I did next

I'd love to tell you I made some dramatic, perfectly calculated price change that afternoon. I didn't. I raised my prices slightly. I honestly don't even remember the exact number anymore.

But the price increase wasn't the real lesson.

The real lesson was what I did right after. I went back through my other recent invoices from my wholesale accounts, one by one, to see what ELSE had changed while I wasn't looking.

Because if vanilla could jump like that without me noticing, what about butter? Chocolate? Boxes? Liners?

That's the question that matters. Not "did this one thing go up?" but "what else am I pricing on old data right now?"

The receipts KNOW the truth. You just have to actually look at them.

Your pantry might be lying to you

I LOVE an organized pantry. Matching containers, printed labels, color-coded sprinkles? Give it to me.

But while your physical pantry might be giving Pinterest... your financial pantry is giving FICTION.

Knowing WHERE your vanilla is and how much you have left is great. It's not the same as knowing what it COSTS. Today. Not last year. Not when you first set your prices.

So lemme ask you what I had to ask myself that day:

If I asked you right now what one tablespoon of vanilla costs your business, could you tell me? What about a cupcake liner? A cake board? A box?

If the answer is "ummm, roughly," that's your sign. Not a sign you're bad at business. A sign your numbers need a check-up.

Why this is personal for me

That pink Post-it stuck with me.

Because I didn't need a fancier spreadsheet. I had spreadsheets. A spreadsheet is only right if you update every recipe by hand, every time. What I needed was to KNOW when a price changed, and to see exactly which recipes, products, and margins it hit.

That's a big part of why I built Costli.

You shouldn’t have to discover a disappearing profit margin on a bright pink Post-it nearly eight years into business like I did.

Before you finalize that holiday menu

If you're putting together your holiday menu right now (and if you're not, friend, it's October, let's go), here's what I'd tell you if we were sitting across the table from each other:

Check your ingredient costs FIRST. Pull your most recent receipts, not the ones from last year.

Then actually price out every single product you plan to offer. Every one. Before it goes on the menu, not after the orders come in.

Because some of those cute holiday items? Once you do the math, you might find out they're not even worth selling. And it is SO much cheaper to find that out on paper than in December.

Numbers don't create problems. They reveal them.

Go reveal yours.

Start your Pantry in Costli →

Xo, Janelle