Solid Plan

For the most part, we've returned to a normal summer schedule at PJP...or as normal as one can be in a college town.  We've lost several members of Team PJP to summer internships and other projects, but we've welcomed four new employees into the fold over the past few weeks.  And all this had made PJP feel like a hotbed of activity, although historically June remains one of our slowest months of the year.

Jeanne and I have been low-key working on an idea for about oh, TWO YEARS, that involves a scenario where either of us don't bake much in the mornings because we are sufficiently staffed with a trained team of bakers.  The goal has been to be in a comfortable place with staffing that allows Jeanne to supervise all the baking operations while I sneak off to Starbucks for an hour or so and do all the stuff that I like to put off on the popular theories of "I'm distracted", "I'm baking", and "I'm too busy".

And I don't mean escaping to do the things that have to be done to keep our lights on and the doors open, like paying bills and updating QuickBooks.  But more like the stuff that needs to be worked on to keep us moving in a steady forward motion toward #worldpiedomination.

So today, armed with my venti iced coffee (which is next to impossible to find in Ireland, I might add), I found a quiet corner at Starbucks and opened my laptop and suddenly realized...welp, this is overwhelming and I totally see why I choose to avoid it.

Putting some serious thought into continuing a solid line of growth in a business isn't easy...unless you listen to the Internet, right?.  Because I didn't find one single mention in all the things I researched that gave a solid nod to the very real need to love what you do and the requirement that you keep doing it, even when you want to quit from frustration/annoyance/exhaustion.  Rather, the Internet is full of downloadable e-books, newsletters, and testimonials that if I just figured out the right key words to make Google love us, well then, it would be smooth sailing the rest of our days on our trajectory toward growth into a national corporation.

In short, the Internet is a noisy place.  Where did the words all go before the Internet?  Do you ever wonder that?  (Also, here is the placeholder for the irony that I'm using up word space on the Internet to complain about word space on the Internet.)

I have no answers to any of this, of course, but to say that we live in such an interesting time in our history.  A few months ago, someone left us a one-star review on Google because we apparently make the worst Dutch Apple pie she has EVER had in her life.  And reading that made me feel bad and now I'm here talking about it...just making more noise and feeling awful that the review takes up a small space of the world wide web.  I can't remember, but how did we handle all this in our pre-Internet lives?  And how will entrepreneurship work in 30 years from now in the digital world that we can't even begin to imagine just yet?

I feel like thinking about this is how I'm going to distract myself tomorrow from taking a deep dive into Google AdWords.  Solid plan.