From £5 to £111.35

I started with £5 from my dad and an idea. The idea was to put crumble in a cone as when you get to the bottom of an ice cream cone there is nothing there, after all people eat crumble with ice cream. So, I started a business, CrumbleNess.

I picked all the fruit myself in the Cotswolds, and spent £4.55 on additional ingredients. I also borrowed ingredients from my parent’s cupboard. Thank you, Mum and Dad!

On August 11th, I started with letting people try, but them paying how they thought it was worth. I got £22

We also visited a crumble shop called Humble Crumble to do some market research. IT WAS YUMMY!

For the next batch, I had to buy all the ingredients myself and spent £23. You might be thinking that sounds a lot, but my dad put in a advance order of £20. The next day I tried selling to the neighbourhood by setting up a stall outside mu house and my dad sent a message on the neighbourhood chat. I sold 17 crumbles and got £50.

To make CrumbleNess look like a real business, I decided to make my own website with help from my dad. Together we used an AI tool called Lovable to build and host it. I bought www.crumbleness.com for £7.

Finally, on August 31st, I had my last sale, which even had online orders. I had lots of ingredients from left from the previous batch, and once again I picked fruits from my grandmas garden. That batch was 4 times the size of the first batch and I only had to spend £7.70 on ingredients. I made £61.

Because I am a kid and all profits go to charity a lot of people said I could keep the change!!! My dad says this does not normally happen in a business!

The final Profit was £111.35 This includes the £5 my dad gave initially as said it goes to charity.

I learnt that there are lots of challenges:

The first one is ingredients. We wanted to be health but some ingredients are expensive like nuts and maple syrup. To keep things less expensive we swapped ingredients with alternatives like swapping maple syrup with honey.

We also realised if our batches were too small then we would have lots of ingredients left and would not make profit. We had to be strict in portion control.

There were also a few things we learnt about selling:

- Location is important. We live in a small close which people hardly ever come into so you built a website need to find other ways to promote.

- Selling is hard and after a while you can’t just rely on your friends to buy. You really need to plan.

- You can’t just rely on ai to design a logo as you will lose imagination. While my dad and I using AI we have to give a lot of instructions and review carefully

- Taking advanced orders can be helpful as you get the money before so you have enough to make it.

You have to be efficient with how you prepare and operate (if multiple people come at the same time you need to serve quickly).

You have to keep track of the about of money you have made and spent, when it happens.