Most years, a small creamery's New Year's ritual is the same as anyone else's: clean the books, set a modest goal, get back to the vats. This member did that too, but she also did something we have not seen from many others — she kept an actual notebook, dated and numbered, of every change she made to how the business ran this year, whether it worked or not.
It started, she told us, out of necessity rather than discipline. In April, with wholesale accounts disappearing and a walk-in cooler filling up faster than the case emptied, she began writing down what she tried each week so she would not repeat a bad idea twice. By December the notebook had become something closer to a playbook.
What made the list
The changes that stuck were not dramatic. She moved her farm stand's hours earlier, because customers who used to stop after work started shopping before it instead. She started offering a smaller weekly cheese box alongside her regular wholesale wheels, aimed at the households who wanted something between "one wedge" and "a whole subscription." She dropped a slow-moving washed rind from her regular rotation for the winter and replaced the case space with a faster-turning young tomme, then wrote down the exact week she planned to bring the washed rind back once the counter traffic recovered.
Not everything in the notebook is a success. She tried a Friday evening pickup window in the fall, hoping to catch people on their way home, and it never drew more than two or three cars. She crossed it off by November rather than let a bad idea quietly linger on the schedule out of inertia. That willingness to kill something that was not working, and to say so plainly, is rarer than it should be — a lot of small operations keep a failing program running for a full year out of politeness to the idea.
The part worth borrowing
What we would ask any member to take from this, heading into a new production year, is not the specific tactics — her market, her customer base, and her cave are hers, not a template. It is the habit of writing the change down the week you make it, with a date, rather than trying to reconstruct in December what you actually did in April. Memory is generous to itself. A dated line in a notebook is not.
If you are looking for a more structured version of the same habit, our Pricing & Margin for Specialty Cheese course walks through exactly this kind of week-over-week tracking, applied to your actual cost per wheel rather than a gut feeling about how the year went. It is not a substitute for the notebook. It is closer to what the notebook becomes once you start comparing years against each other instead of just weeks.
We do not know yet whether this year will look anything like the last one. Neither does she. But she is starting it with a clearer record of what actually happened than most of us will manage, and that seemed like the right note to open a new year on.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.