Learning Curve
Today was my first day of procuring ingredients, preparing, cooking, packaging and delivering food. Huge amount of work, and I ended up driving all over town to 4 stores to eventually get everything I needed. The end results? You can imagine, I was terribly late. Food wasn’t bad, but I failed timing like no other. It bothered me a lot, I hate being late. So, a few lessons learned for me:
- Don’t assume the store will have what they normally have on the day of you needing it. Procure a day before. Essentially this is what killed my timing. I was literally driving around like a mad person. Ha, no lunch, no dinner, didn’t even have time for a drive through coffee!
- Prepare as much as possible ahead of time. I was adding cookies to my orders, and was hoping to keep it a signature. However, I ran out of cookies for lunch orders, and had to make more last minute, after running to stores to get more ingredients. So, I am making my cookies at 11 pm for tomorrow.
- Time management. Of course, I was paying attention to this one, but didn’t really overcome shortage of time. Just need to keep pushing for smarter time management.
- I need to reorganize my menu, should not have too many options that can’t be done in parallel. For example, I should have a dish made in the oven with a dish made on the stove top. What I have done wrong for today’s menu was, I had all stir fries on the same day. I had no choice but making them one by one, versus if I had something made in the oven, that would allow me make two dishes at the same time.
Today anything that could go wrong went wrong, along with more surprises. It was a quite stressful day for me, but at the end of the day, I feel very empowered. I feel yes I messed up on timing, but I learned so much more and this will help me work smarter in the future.
