Bread SRSLY makes delicious (trust us, we’ve tried it!) gluten free sourdough bread in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood. Founded by Sadie Scheffer, the company began late in 2011 after a furious bout of gluten-free sourdough experiments in Sadie’s home kitchen. She started selling bread from her own home, and as orders grew, began to deliver loaves on her bicycle. A few months later she was biking late into the night delivering orders, and Bread SRSLY was catapulted into a full-time business.

Sadie needed help with marketing, so she came to BusinessAdvising.org where we matched her with an advisor with experience in food, design, marketing, and business development. Let’s catch up with Sadie, and see how Bread SRSLY is doing!

More Than Just Marketing

Before she started working with advisor — Rebecca Brian Pan (CEO and founder of Covo), Sadie told us, “I didn’t even know what marketing meant.” Since then, “Rebecca’s taught me about marketing — how to set up a marketing plan — but she also went past that, and started helping me with everything. She worked with me on my overall strategy, and with organizing myself. We broke all of the tasks that I was doing and delegating to others every day up into categories, like you would at a large company with several departments. Sales, finance, etc.”

Through Mentorship Comes Growth

Rebecca started talking with Sadie about all of the things she was already doing at her business, and explained how almost a dozen of those things were the building blocks of bigger marketing efforts and campaigns. For Sadie, it was a huge confidence boost. After they started executing on it, Bread SRSLY started growing, and it led to Sadie actually hiring a dedicated marketing person to take over for her. “As an owner, it was actually a big leap to hire someone who knew more than me in an area of my business. But since then, I’ve hired five more people, in operations, packaging, and sales.” That’s six new jobs created this year!

Sadie says that working with an advisor from BA increased her bandwidth, saved her time, and gave her new organizational skills. “I’ve increased my production enormously,” she told us. “I’ve moved from just production, to packaging and distribution, and I have more time to focus on growth. I also have less stress! It’s the first time in my business’ history that I’ve had a full, cohesive team around me.”

Sadie is just one of hundreds of small business owners who are capitalizing on the tools to venture capital made available through BusinessAdvising.org. Are you in the market for game-changing small business advice? Know of someone who is? Connect with BusinessAdvising.org today! In the meantime, snack on some gluten-free sourdough to dip in your tomato soup, or to butter and toast with breakfast, and head on over to Bread SRSLY.

(photo credit Kimberley Hasselbrink)