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In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 242 - Losing the Loser, it's the LAST day of 2025, and it will be the first day we start talkin' to ourselves with respect and support. Because we're gonna lose our internal loser - that baker bully that beats us up every time we get into our own heads.

This year, we're professional framers - re-framers - and we're takin' a new, fresh look at our 2026 goals. By adjusting our internal monologue to be both supportive and curious, we remove the excuses holding us back and the bad joojoo that's gotten some frequent flyer miles sittin' in the back of our heads telling us we're not gonna make it as a baker.

"What's with the lightbulb emoji?" you ask. 'Twas ol Tommy Edison who penned, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." 💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡💡

Didn't reach your goals in 2025? You didn't fail. You found a handful of ways that didn't work. And this year, you'll outfit a new handful of ways that do work.

💡 New Year's Resolutions

Don't beat yourself up over missing the mark on your New Year's Resolutions. They're there as benchmarks, not pass / fail grades. Figure out why last year's goals were a bit too much, then adjust! Use them as indicators of goals that need resizing, not as a big giant F.

The brain needs small wins, so maybe break down a BIG goal into quarterly or monthly slices of the big goal - 🧠 that way your brain gets to reward itself while still puttin' in work towards that big goal. How bad would it be to say, "I got to 80% of my BIG goal by accomplishing 8 supporting goals."

• ❌ Bully Baker: I didn't accomplish any of my resolutions.
• ✅️ Believer Baker: I recalibrated how big my resolutions can be before they become overwhelming.
  
  

💡 Missed Classes / Courses

Raise your hand if you're a course hoarder like Corrie. 🙋‍♀️ All hands up? Great. Stop feeling like a loser. You don't need to take every class. Find 1 class that fills a knowledge gap and start listening to the first 10 minutes of it. That's it. 💯 You just passed the "I started a class" test, and you got an A+.

Free yourself from the guilt of not taking courses, and instead - dip a toe in. I promise this new approach will make you feel like such a winner.

• ❌ Bully Baker: I suck at macarons, I don't enjoy them.
• ✅️ Believer Baker: I'm really close to figuring out macarons. I just need one final course to close the gap.

💡 Uggo Photos

Photography = looks easy, feels hard, gets overwhelming. We see the posts all the time, 📸 "My photos are so ugly." 😔 Great - you identified the problem! Now let's baby step the solution. First, focus on lighting - let's keep props off to the side for a minute. Got that nailed down? Let's try staging next.

Build up. Don't fall back. "Being perfect at photography" is a goal too big to bite down on. 🐘 How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

• ❌ Bully Baker: My photos suck.
• ✅️ Believer Baker: I'm glad I'm consistently taking photos now, but I understand there's a gap between what I want and what I'm getting. I'm going to approach each aspect individually - lighting, staging, post processing - and work from there.

How you speak to yourself is how you'll show up to others. Hate your work? You'll think no one likes your bakes. Hate the hustle? You'll blame other bakers. Hate your clients? You'll treat every single one of them as a nail, you hammer.

Be good to yourself in 2026. You'll thank yourself for it.

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🧮 Stay on Track Track Track - Metrics to guide your marketing.

In this week's Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track, the twins have spreadsheets on the brain just in time for the new year.

While yes, you can start a spreadsheet any time on any day in any month of the year, it does help to have it ready to go on January 1 - that way, you can look at your bakery's entire fiscal year, start to finish.

The key to spreadsheets and data tracking is this: first, determine the goal, then let the goal guide what you track.

If you want to become a social media influencer, you'll focus on content and views. If you want to increase sales, you're going to focus on customer acquisition. If you want to focus on corporate orders, you're going to track business networking event contacts.

That's why there's no "one size fits all" for reporting and record keeping. What your goals are in 2026 =/= the goals of your closest competitor. So stop lookin' over the fence at what they're doing and focus on the reports.

🧮 Increasing Returning Customers

Let's say your focus for the first 3 months of the year (Q1) is to cultivate returning leads. You're going to shift from finding new clients (yes, you can still look for new clients, but it's not our driving metric).

To cultivate returning clients, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many past clients did you add to your CRM?
• 🔢 How many emails have I sent to past clients? What was the open rate?
• 🔢 How many past clients placed new orders in 2026 YTD?

🧮 Increasing Corporate Leads

If you want to set a goal of increasing corporate leads, you're not going to naturally do a hard push towards cookie classes, right? That's not the right fit for the goal = corporate girly era.

To increase corporate leads, you must increase corporate exposure, and that's likely through business-centric networking events and apps like LinkedIn. You're likely going to create a segmented email list for corporate contacts.

To cultivate corporate orders, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many networking events have you attended?
• 🔢 From those events, how many contacts did you add on LinkedIn?
• 🔢 From those LinkedIn contacts, how many did you drop off a "pop-by" to?

🧮 Increase Order Totals

If you're looking to increase the total ticket sale (the amount you make per order), you're going to focus on tracking your price increase, your production costs, and your upsells.

To increase order totals, you may be tracking these types of metrics:

• 🔢 How many clients added an upsell to their order?
• 🔢 By what percentage did I increase my custom orders?
• 🔢 What was my order ticket average in 2025? What is my order ticket average in 2026?

Yes, you can run concurrent goals, you can run campaigns for various durations, and you can absolutely abandon a goal if you determine it hasn't been fitting your overall strategy. Knowing when to cut a goal off can be just as valuable as knowing when to double down.

When determining which metrics to track, ask yourself:

• 🧮 What is my primary goal?
• 🧮 And if that's my primary goal, what metrics support being able to track and determine if that goal is being met, missed, or in progress?

👂 Snag this podcast on any major podcast player (Spotify, Apple Music, Audible, Amazon Music, or watch it on YouTube) by searching for Baking it Down Podcast - Episode 241 - Stay on Track Track Track.