So There's That...
So today at PJP was just a hot mess, which just shows that you can take the girl out of PJP…but you can’t take the PJP out of the girl. I think if Jeanne and I flew back into town and hit a full week of smooth sailing through calm seas, we would actually be a bit disappointed. We do love a challenge and PJP has yet to let us down.
So let’s talk about what the heck happened here while we were gone:
Well, for starters, Jason and Team PJP outdid themselves in keeping PJP together. In fact, most people likely had no clue we weren’t in Missouri short of the missing blog posts (and the observant regulars who noticed I wasn’t at the store on their visits). There was nothing easy about all the work they did, especially on a steep learning curve for Jason, but they slayed it.
And remember that Jason is our tech guru (and for those of you new here, he’s also my husband and just left a long-term career to be a full-time part of PJP because my entrepreneurial ways finally soaked into him). And to that end, he spent the last month making us so tech savvy that I can barely navigate my way around PJP. Paper order forms? GONE. Matching tickets to pies? GONE. I would bet you there isn’t a pie shop in America that is as streamlined as we are now.
Though, he is about the only person here that is good at math and I think today we broke his spirit with all of our counting, miscounting, and recounting of 600 tarts.
Our 15 year old daughter handled Instagram and all of our merchandising in my absence. I unpacked some new things yesterday and wanted one of everything to take home , so that’s how I could tell she had made some spring purchases for the storefront. She also decorated PJP Nifong for our 7th anniversary and served as the de facto me while I was gone. I couldn’t have a better stand-in ever.
Finally, our 18 year old son made all of our pie dough. That’s his job, whether I’m here or not, because our dough recipe is proprietary to our family and isn’t written down anywhere. (Thankfully for us, he will attend Mizzou this fall and maintain his dough responsibilities. He hasn’t thought about dough for two stores yet, but he doesn’t read this and so let’s just keep that realization to ourselves for now, ok?). Jeanne and I did discuss while we were gone what her mother, the inventor of the dough recipe, would think about two storefronts built on something she created, much less learning that her great grandson is carrying on the tradition. Also, I don’t think she was very good at math either…so there’s that.
