Why Baking Bread is like Business Building

This holiday season I decided to try and make sourdough bread. 🍞

I was inspired by my sister during a visit for Thanksgiving. She has been making homemade bread weekly for years. And it is soooo good.

Making sourdough bread is simple enough, but it is not easy. And it takes a LOT of time and effort. Before you can even start making bread, you have to grow a starter.

This involves mixing flour and water, stirring it up and letting it sit. In 24 hours, you dump half, add more water and flour, and let it sit again.

It can take anywhere from 7-14 days for the starter to become "active". You are basically growing yeast that you can use to make your own bread. From there, you must keep the starter active by continuing to "feed it" for the rest of your life.

I'm almost two weeks into this process and honestly, I'll believe it when I see it. In the attached photo, you can see that I've actually started growing two jars.

After a week I was getting frustrated with the first jar, wasn't sure if I was doing it right, so I decided to start a second jar with a different recipe.

My two attempts to create a sourdough starter…

As with many things in life, making a sourdough starter is not for the faint of heart. It takes dedication, determination and perseverance.

Kind of like starting and running a business.

You start with an idea. A vision of what you are looking to build. In this case, our vision is an amazing loaf of bread.

So you start. At first it is fun and easy. You are putting in the work and are excited about what is to come.

But then things get hard. You don't see results as quickly as you had hoped or planned.

You thought your starter would begin to rise, but instead it just smells like sweaty gym socks. (FYI, I've learned that this is normal... 😂)

So you continue to religiously feed your starter every day, care for it, watch over it, and trust that eventually that pungent smell will turn sweet and yeasty and your starter will be ready for baking bread.

Building a business takes a lot longer than growing a sourdough starter, and for those of you that have a dream to build something amazing, I encourage you not to give up.

In my 20 years of running my own law firm, I've learned that there are going to be good days and bad. Good YEARS and bad. Things will get hard and sometimes it seems like it would just be easier to go work for someone else (or to keep with the bread analogy, just head down to the local bakery and buy a fresh loaf of sourdough).

But as with baking bread, business is not about the end game. It's about the process of building and creating something magical.

Because someday, hopefully in the not too distant future, you will bake an amazing loaf of bread. But that isn't the end of the story.

You have to keep feeding the starter (i.e. working on your business). The moment you stop is the when you stop getting fresh bread each week.

Have a safe and happy new year. If I am able to get some bread out of this starter I will share a pic!