What does 'scaling' a business mean? Let's talk about CANS! - Part 1
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
4M ago
Hey, wow, it’s been about two years since I wrote a blog! Time flies when you run a growing business, I guess. I had a conversation with some new friends yesterday and we started talking about scaling our business, and within that, how our growth over the years has allowed us to ‘achieve scale’ when it comes to cans. As we talked, she mentioned that the whole thing was very interesting and provided insight into an area she never even knew was a thing, so I thought I’d share it through a two-part blog. A quick note on the phrase ‘achieving scale’. This is one of those phrases that business peop ..read more
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Growing Pains Part 2
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
2y ago
The last blog I published was in June, called Growing Pains Part 1. In it, I described some of the big projects we’d undertaken in 2021, which led to serious growth and serious growing pains (namely, always being on the verge of running out of cider). In that blog, I promised to write a second part that was less of a report on what was causing the growing pains and focused on more how businesses can manage big growth phases. Of course, we’re a relatively young and small business, so this blog about big growth is coming less from the place of ‘this is what other businesses should do’ and more f ..read more
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Growing Pains Part 1
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
Hey everyone! It’s been a few months since I last wrote a blog about how things are going at the cidery, so I thought we might be due for an update. I want to share a bit about some big projects we’ve been working on so far this year (Part 1), and then wax poetic about growing a business and the ups and downs that big growth can bring about (Part 2 - coming soon). With no further ado, here’s what’s causing some of our current growing pains (but GOOD growing pains). Our Cider Subscription Service. After we started shipping our cider in early 2020, adding a subscription service quickly became ..read more
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Behind the Scenes Highlights of our 2020 Cider of the Month Gift Box
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
Did you hear the news? We just released a gift box that features the 12 unique Ciders of the Month that we released in 2020! We wanted to review 2020 through the lens of this gift box in the blog today. This is from my perspective (Andrea) - if you want a LOT more information on how the ciders were made and how they should be consumed, you need to get one of the boxes to access to some awesome behind-the-scenes content written by Joseph, our Cidermaker. :) The Background: Though we’d done the CoTM program for four years, we had never canned the releases. We decided in mid-2019 that we wanted ..read more
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Business in the Time of COVID - Part 2
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
It’s hard to believe that five months have passed since our last blog about what it was like as a business owner in the early days of COVID-19. A lot has changed, but, sadly, a lot has remained the same. We’re still fighting the pandemic as a country, with higher rates of infection than there were in April. We still don’t have any sense of how the future will play out. Government support (for both small businesses and individuals) has ended in spite of still not being able to fully function. I wouldn’t choose to go back to April of 2020 again, ever, but at least it felt like everyone was worki ..read more
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Business in the Time of COVID - Part 1
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
I’m currently sitting on my couch, crying. I’ve been texting with one of our employees, who we had to furlough shortly after Governor Holcomb’s closure of in-person dining for bars and restaurants in Indiana. A couple weeks ago, I let her and a few other key employees know that we would be able to bring them back because we were approved for the Payment Protection Program. But as time passed, the funds didn’t come, and when they finally did, it was less than we were approved for. Since finding out about the fund reduction, I've been kicking myself for mentioning anything about returning to wor ..read more
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What's the Goal for 2020? Dominate.
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
Back in October, I wrote a blog about some of the big things that happened in 2019 and how they had affected our business. In case you need a refresher, 2019 was a really big year for us. We started canning our own cider (each can filled by hand!), released Fleeting Youth as a permanent seasonal on draft and in cans, and saw massive growth on the distribution side. All of these things combined to make us profitable, a huge milestone for any small business.  2020 is shaping up to be another really big year for us. My word for the year, when it comes to the business, is DOMINATE. I shared i ..read more
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How Canning Changed Our Business - Part II
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
In the last post, we talked about how there were some unintended consequences of releasing our cider in cans. After a year of canning - exposing more folks to our cider and growing our sales - we realized that we’d been losing money because having our cider available in a package format affected people’s purchasing patterns. After taking some time to check our work and make sure it was really true, we had to jump into action to stop the bleeding. These are the steps we took to turn things around (and, spoiler alert - we did! Things are going great! Phew!) We bought a canning line ASAP - I m ..read more
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How Canning Changed Our Business
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
Almost two years ago, we decided to put our cider into 12 oz cans and release them into the wild. We wrote about why this was a complicated decision and how distributors work. We also talked about the decisions we made leading into the release. We put a lot of thought and effort into the decision. But, even with our over-the-top spreadsheets, calculations, and forecasts, there were still effects on our business that we didn’t anticipate. Here are some of the biggest changes - both expected and unexpected - that came about as a result of canning our cider. Is it worth risking your business to ..read more
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It's Been a Minute! Here's an Update.
Ash & Elm Cider Company Blog
by Andrea Homoya
3y ago
Hey everyone! Wow - time flies when you have a kid and you’re also in your first few years as a business. I apologize for neglecting our blog for the last year and a half and will commit to doing better moving forward! Since so much time has passed, let’s spend a bit of time catching up with each other. What have we been up to since *checks date of the last blog post* February 2018? Here are some headlines: We released our cider in cans in February 2018 and that….changed everything. I’ll write a blog post dedicated to this in the next couple of weeks. As a summary, though, we started by usin ..read more
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