For three years, the cheese counter at the center of this week's spotlight was a one-person operation — a member who cuts, wraps, orders, and answers the phone, all before lunch. This month, for the first time, she hired someone.
"I kept telling myself I'd do it after the holidays," she told us on a call last week, "and then I realized the holidays were exactly why I needed the help, not after them." The math finally worked: holiday gift-box orders were running well ahead of last December, curbside pickup never fully went away after the spring, and she was closing the shop most nights an hour later than planned just to keep up with wrapping orders for the next morning. Gift boxes and contactless pickup have been a bright spot for a lot of small cheese retailers this year, even as in-store browsing stayed thin.
Training in the middle of the rush
Bringing on staff during your busiest stretch is not the textbook approach, and she is the first to say so. But she leaned on the federation's Certified Cheesemonger materials to build a fast, structured onboarding instead of winging it — case rotation, safe cutting and wrapping practices, and the basics of steering a customer toward something they'll actually like rather than whatever is closest to the register. Her new hire will not sit the credential exam until spring, but the coursework gave both of them a shared vocabulary in week one, which she says mattered more than she expected.
There is a quieter thread here too. A one-person shop is a fragile thing — one sick day, one broken freezer, one bad week, and there is no slack in the system. Adding a second set of hands, even part-time, is as much about resilience as it is about the holiday rush. She is not alone in that instinct this year; committee calls we have taken from retail members lately have had a similar shape, people rethinking single points of failure in businesses that ran lean out of necessity for a long time.
She also had to rethink her case itself before training could even start. Wrapping and holding gift-box orders for pickup meant walking her new hire through rotation twice as carefully as usual — a wheel held an extra two days for a pickup slot is still a wheel that needs tracking, and nothing sinks a first week faster than a customer opening a box to find something past its best.
What she'd tell another solo operator
Her advice for members thinking about a first hire: write the make-and-wrap steps down before you need to explain them out loud, because you will be tired and short on patience by the time training actually happens. And don't wait for a slow week that may not come — hire when you need the help, and build the training around the job that's actually in front of you.
She also pushed back gently when we asked if she wished she'd hired sooner. "I don't think I could have afforded it sooner," she said. "The order volume had to be there first. I just should have trusted that it would keep being there once it showed up." That is a distinction worth sitting with if you are running the same math in your own shop right now — the hire follows the demand, not the other way around.
If you are weighing a similar step, our Certified Cheesemonger track is a reasonable place to send a new counter hire, and the Membership & Outreach Committee has fielded enough of these calls lately that they are worth a conversation before you post the job.
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.