Your First Ninety Days

Everything in this course compresses into one sequence. Ninety days takes you from a recipe to a business with a legal file, a tested product, market data, and your first wholesale conversation. Work the days in order; each block earns the next. Where you are in the calendar year changes the timing of the market block, and the checkpoints below handle that honestly rather than pretending seasons do not exist.

Days one through thirty: paper and proof. This month is desk, phone, and test kitchen. Form the entity, get the EIN, open the account. Call both your state's health and agriculture departments and ask the three questions from "The Legal Kitchen": where may this product legally be made, what registration does it need, and who inspects that kitchen. Tour two shared kitchens and book a first slot. Convert the recipe to weights and write the first SOP, then run it twice and fix what drifts. Order the shelf-life study in week two, because its clock runs in calendar time and everything else waits on it. Draft the label against the five mandatory elements from "The Label and the Code," take the free state review if offered, and buy the real barcode for thirty dollars. Price the product from the shelf backward using the channel table in "The Money Math of a Jar," and if the quarter-of-retail rule fails, reformulate now, this month, before anything is printed.

Days thirty-one through sixty: first product, first market. Book the first production day and run it exactly as the hour-by-hour walkthrough in "A Real Week": batch record on a clipboard, weights to the gram, overfill when in doubt, lot code every unit. Buy the insurance policy and download the certificate, because markets want it before they take your booth fee. Reserve your market spot, the small inconvenient one, and build the booth kit. Then sell. Two to four market days this month, three product options maximum, samples flowing, objections written down nightly, email clipboard working every hour. Set your table price at the shelf-compatible price and leave it there. At the end of the month, read the data like an adult: repeat faces, the objections list, and units by flavor are your first velocity truth. If nothing repeats, the failure lesson's table tells you which column to open, and month two's real cost was a few hundred dollars of tuition.

Days sixty-one through ninety: stores and online. With market proof in hand, walk into five independent stores with the pitch script from "Your First Hundred Customers" and expect one yes out of five. Set the account up honestly: real wholesale price, net-thirty invoice, insurance certificate on file, and a standing weekly restock visit. Stand up the simple online store, one bundle, one photo set from a production day, the email list imported, shipping tested by mailing yourself a box and opening it like a stranger. Winter-proof the calendar: if your ninety days run through the cold half of the year, invert the order, online and holiday bundles now, market launch when the season opens, buyer emails out in January.

If the gate items are checked, you have a business: small, legal, priced, and attached to real customers who come back. Everything after this is repetition and the deliberate climb, rung by rung, with the capital ladder from "Capital: The Lean Entry and the Ladder" pacing each step. From here the questions change: what to learn next, whom to trust, and where the deeper knowledge actually lives.