Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Bakery and Catering Company

The situation

The client is an owner-led bakery and catering company. A storefront with a retail case, a production kitchen, a small catering arm for weddings and corporate events, a kitchen lead, a couple of decorators, counter staff, and an owner who still bakes most mornings.

Custom orders are the most profitable work and the most chaotic. Requests arrive by Instagram message, Facebook, phone, email and at the counter. Details end up in a paper order book, on sticky notes, or left in the message thread. Deposits are taken by card at the counter, through a payment app, or not at all. In a busy season, two large orders can land on a Saturday the kitchen cannot cover. Now and then an order is simply missed.

The owner knows it needs fixing. The owner also has no time for a software project, and has heard enough about consultants who need weeks of meetings before anything happens.

What the sprint finds

The first finding is about how the engagement itself has to run. With a business like this, outside help fits around production, not the other way around.

So we set it up that way. Discover happens in short sessions after the morning bake, in the kitchen, not in a conference room. We gather recent custom orders from every channel, which mostly means scrolling through messages with the person who answered them. There is one short weekly check-in with the owner, and every decision is written down.

The order picture comes together quickly. There is no single place an order exists. Kitchen capacity lives in the kitchen lead's head. Deposits are inconsistent, so late cancellations cost real money.

In Diagnose, one custom order intake with deposits and a production schedule ranks first. Retail point-of-sale changes and wholesale accounts go on the roadmap.

What it builds

In Build, we create a single order intake in the bakery's existing point of sale, or in an order tool built for bakers and caterers, such as Square, Toast, CakeBoss or similar.

Every custom request, whatever channel it arrives on, goes into one order form: date, pickup or delivery, servings, flavors, design notes, photos and allergies. Social messages get an automatic reply with the form link. Phone and counter orders are entered by staff on the same form. Capacity rules close dates the kitchen has already filled. A deposit is required to confirm, with the cancellation policy shown up front.

Confirmed orders flow to a production calendar the kitchen lead sees by day, with prep starting on the right day for each item. Customers get a confirmation, a reminder before pickup and a request for the balance.

Hand over

In Hand over, the counter lead and the kitchen lead learn the system in depth. Decorators get a short session on reading the production calendar. A playbook covers rush orders, changes after confirmation and refunds, and names who owns the system.

The owner gets a dashboard of upcoming orders, deposits collected and capacity by date, plus a 30/60/90-day roadmap. Across the six weeks, the owner's part was a few short sessions and one weekly check-in. The ovens kept running.

What changes

Every custom order exists in one place. Nothing lives only in a message thread. The kitchen sees the week before it starts. Double-booked Saturdays stop. Deposits come in before the work begins, so a late cancellation no longer costs a finished cake.

And the owner learns that outside help can fit around the kitchen.

What this means for your business

Good outside help works on your schedule, keeps decisions short and leaves behind a system your team runs.

For a bakery, that means building around production. For a fishing charter, around the season. For a funeral home, around the families it serves.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, fixed scope, four phases (Discover, Diagnose, Build, Hand over), and one live system inside the tools you already use, with a trained team, a playbook, a dashboard and a 30/60/90-day roadmap.