Good morning my fellow CCers!

I am only a hobby baker but am hoping to one day be able to have my own business. I have been reading a lot of posts lately about charging for your time etc. and I am curious... When you are putting together the prices of a cake, and you say it took 4 hours to bake, does this include the time your cake is actually in the oven (say 1 hour)?? If you are not doing anything while your cake is baking, do you still consider that time spent when calculating costs? Or is it assumed you'd be cleaning up, making frosting etc. while you're cake it baking?

I look forward to seeing what everyone does!

~ Meagazz

AIn that case you could calculate how much did you spend in electricity/gas depending on your oven.

The way you organize your time is up to you; in my case, also a home baker (learning still, without a steady number of monthly orders), I try to clear up while I have a cake in the oven, but that doesn't mean I wont be clearing up again after the cake has been decorated. I try to make an estimate. For me it's easier to price a slice, that will depend on the type of cake and decoration. It is good to have an idea of this prior to any consultation with a client. Also, if you're a hobbyist you may be doing this on your spare time after work, like I do, I organize a single cake days ahead of the actual making. I usually won't take an order with less than 2 weeks notice, so I can organize each day of the week I will be delivering that cake.

So perhaps, for "time" you could consider:

1.- Consultation & Design time 2.- Shopping time 3.- Cake making time (Baking, Decorating, Figurine modeling <-- these, price them ahead of time, etc) -*yikes, it all takes time!* 4.- Clearing up time 5.- Delivery cost, if you're doing that yourself.

Maybe you should read Jason's blog, he discusses about Pricing and breaks it all down very clearly. http://jasonkraftblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/the-magic-pricing-formula/

Good luck! Cin

AGenerally it is much easier to be profitable if you are able to design a process that takes advantage of slack time, e.g. the time you spend waiting for something to bake or cool. In terms of calculating labor cost for a product, I would work based on your desired end state (your target number of orders per week) which would hopefully allow you to work on different orders during slack time.

@Myfair

@MyFairDiva and @jason_kraft - Thank you both so much for your responses!! There is so much to learn when thinking of starting your own baking business!! I am going to keep both of those things in mind! And Myfairdiva, it is also funny you ended up posting Jason's blog! I will be taking a peek at it later this evening! :)