Yesterday was quite a long day indeed. Delivery to the Ashland area has grown at an amazing pace. The best news is we actually had enough product to fill every order! While we had to substitute different sizes in a few cases, there was enough to go around.
However, the sheer number of customers brings us to a point where we will need to split the delivery routes. The hours required to do all deliveries in one day are just too many. Yesterday we were just exhausted by the time we returned to the farm.
An interesting visual of "behind the scenes" at little sprouts is this... envision 4 children, a 2 month old baby, and a little dog all in the truck for 9 hours doing deliveries, eating snacks, taking turns meeting people, amidst the occasional broken bottles, dropped eggs, paperwork, car troubles, trailer doors left open, etc. Makes for quite a day!
So we are going to be working on dividing the routes to shorten the delivery day back to a manageable number of hours. One of our farm rules is "if your not having fun, your not doing it right". We honor that rule by breaking impossibly large jobs into manageable tasks.
We aren't sure yet what method we will use to split the routes, but anyone affected will be contacted before the next delivery. It should be a painless transition.
Thank you for your support and patronage! And we thank the ultimate source of all our blessings... our heaven Father, who inspired us, and empowers us to do this work.
A suggestion: Perhaps you could have 1-2 drop sites per city, with set delivery times, rather than home delivery. If each site had covered storage, then people could even come by later (with in a set timeframe) to pick up their order.
ReplyDeletethanks for the suggestion. We have and will keep considering alternatives and options. Interestingly, every time we look at the big picture, it is home deliveries that make the most sense. This is the model that affords us the best customer relationship while containing costs of labor and time overall. IT will be a challenge to make this model scale to the size we need to be economically self sufficient, but I think it can be done. For now we are looking at splitting the routes and having multiple drivers. Through the summer while we have interns working this is certainly doable. Stay tuned and lets see where this goes!
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