TWB Team Retreat
I am continuously awed by my team. Here’s to building TWB and changing the world, one piece of bread at a time.
TWB has many champions – our trained women, our donors, our partners, our volunteers, our team. While I get to interface with all of our champions, I had the opportunity to be with our senior staff on our team retreat in Colorado last week.
To say our team is uniquely committed would be a gross understatement. Our team is the most fiercely dedicated, uniquely qualified, courageously enduring, and compassionately driven team I have met. It is a privilege to work with a team of this caliber – and to build and shape TWB with them.
Their commitment to TWB has a kind of JFK “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” tenor to it. I was amazed, and humbled, by it. This was certainly not the first time I’ve felt both awe and gratitude for this team, but it certainly was intensified by being in person with them.
We discussed everything – from gas reimbursement policies, to grand visions for US expansion. We mapped out in detail our plans for 2017, yet dreamed well beyond. We revised plans and refined methods and solidified our priorities.
At our core and in our services, we are women-centric. We strive to provide women with:
- An educational foundation
- Sustainable and gainful employment
- Opportunities for improved health
Number three has a subtext that applies to our individual bakeries – TWB bakeries will provide nutritious options to a community that otherwise would not exist.
Comprehensively, The Women’s Bakery, we confirmed, exists to provide women an educational foundation for their sustainable and gainful employment, which can result in opportunities for improved health.
While we achieved many tasks, substantiating these priorities was among our most important. These priorities are our why. They serve as both our guiding principles and long term goals.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, we have revised our 2017 goals in Rwanda – we will dive deep into the operations of our individual bakeries, analyzing their breakeven and profit horizons. We will also test our markets, listening more intently to our customers – what do community members desire and value in their bread? We presume it to be nutrition, but it may be cleanliness, or even technology (that is, bakery machinery). We will maintain our emphasis on nutrition, but we may approach it differently and in accordance with customers’ desires.
We are excited – trepidatious, yes – but excited about our US expansion and the possibilities for TWB therein. Our priorities will remain the same with our US target populations, currently refugee and immigrant women, but our mediums and methods may vary dramatically (and excitingly).
I am continuously awed by my team. Here’s to building TWB and changing the world, one piece of bread at a time.
Looking Ahead
Why do sustainable bakeries matter? Sustainable bakeries provide a group of women with consistent and growing incomes. That’s job security. And it’s also opportunity. Women can rely on their work at the bakeries and choose where, when, and how to invest their earnings. Sustainable bakeries provide suppliers (farmers) and buyers (shop-keepers) consistent business. That’s micro-economic activity that can self-improve and correct. Sustainable bakeries also provide community members consistent access to nutritious bread. That’s Good business.
2016 has been a year of growth for TWB. Our model has evolved and grown in the last year, and while it still resembles the original concept, it is far more robust and professional. We designed TWB to be a social enterprise – a baking educational service for hire in Rwanda. We manage nearly every aspect of the startup, launch, and operation of our bakeries in Rwanda. Because of the drive and intellect of our team, we have become experts in this field and our services are being sought after by large organizations, companies, and enterprising individuals.
Building on this momentum, 2017 will be a year of analysis. We are so close to solidifying our model. This may sound strange because we’ve been operable for two years, but like most startups, TWB’s model has gone through innumerable iterations. It’s like an experiment – you have an end goal (or multiple end goals), and you’re trying to find the correct, most efficient, most easily replicable means to achieve that goal. That’s where TWB is right now. We have most of our end goals in sight, and now is the time to test different means for how best to achieve those end goals.
A singular goal for 2017, from which our other goals stem, is to build lasting bakeries. As Julie Greene, TWB’s Co-Founder/Co-Director points out, “profitability means sustainability,” and I agree. We strive to code sustainability into every piece of our model, but we’re learning that sustainability tends to be a “product of,” not a “precursor for.” That is, critical thinking is a product of training and practice. And sustainable bakeries are (most often) a product of profitability.
So how do we do that? How do we ensure that each bakery we build or help to launch will be profitable without TWB staff there every day of operation for an indefinite period of time? Good question! That’s what we will spend most of 2017 answering. We’re close – we have robust projections and hypotheses for bakeries’ profitability, but 2017 will be the year to test these operational variations.
Why do sustainable bakeries matter? This question contains multiple answers and illuminates many of our other end goals. Sustainable bakeries provide a group of women with consistent and growing incomes. That’s job security. And it’s also opportunity. Women can rely on their work at the bakeries and choose where, when, and how to invest their earnings. Sustainable bakeries provide suppliers (farmers) and buyers (shop-keepers) consistent business. That’s micro-economic activity that can self-improve and correct. Sustainable bakeries also provide community members consistent access to nutritious bread. That’s Good business.
The ancillary benefits that radiate from sustainable bakeries are motivating (to say the least) and conclusive. They’re what make TWB’s model not only plausible, but powerful. Powerful because we are using business – bakeries – as a medium to achieve multiple grades of social good. It’s like a chain reaction: by building a bakery that is profitable, we help to create a system that lasts as long as the women work and works on behalf of a community’s well-being.
Thus, 2017 will be the year to analyze and perfect the profitability of our bakeries. We will do so by taking a deep dive into our model – testing various aspects, building on what works, and boldly tossing what doesn’t. Our long-term goal is still scale – 100 more women trained and 10 bakeries in Rwanda – but to achieve sustainable scale (and real impact), we will first focus on profit.
