It is just a minute before noon. The sun is unusually warm with a cool wind blowing off the ocean as I sit in the cockpit of our home aboard the ocean. My new noise-canceling headphones have literally changed my life. tuning out the unwanted chatter and noise when I want to focus. So, with beautifully piped in music from the calm app I feel relaxed as I type this note. We’ve already had a nice long walk on the beach and a long yoga session also on the beach. My calm harbor turns into a parade of weekender boaters motoring up and down the channel. Some solo, some with dogs in life jackets, some with lots of people and noisemakers, some going too fast making a huge wake and some just cruising along.
This week was difficult to get back on track with all of the sad news coming out of our County about the helicopter crash. We’ve had too many tragedies to close to home here. But the lemonade company demanded that I stay on track as it turns out sales were way up over my projections and we are almost out of lemonade yet again! With that, comes the endless calculations on which flavors we need to run and how much lemon, sugar, bottles, strawberries, labels and everything to order to fill 63000 bottles-while I have refined my process over the last 8 years, I still prefer to do it mostly by hand in addition to using my formulation sheets. I run the supply numbers over and over until I am sure it’s right and we have the right mix of each flavor and then I get into QuickBooks and create the po’s. I’ve learned that it’s all about follow up with the suppliers, so google calendar is my life connection to keeping everything and everybody on task where I log in my reminders for the upcoming days prior to bottling day to make sure all of our supplies arrive on time.
The last thing I want is to have 90 workers at the plant and I don’t have enough of something!
The rest of the week was spent following up on customers payments, sourcing new places to carry our lemonades, endless emails and sorting out what needs attention and what doesn’t, staying on my fitness plan, wasting a bit of time daydreaming and a bit of time posting on social media.
I’m beyond excited to watch my company grow profitably and sustainably as we are already four months into our new fiscal year. Right now, not much is keeping me up at night worrying about the lemonade company like I used to. That’s a good feeling…
Thank you for supporting us, drinking our lemonades and sharing them with your tribe.
Cheers,
Lori Volk, Chief Believer/Ironman
Lori’s Original Lemonade
since 2011
