11/03/2024
The sound isn't great, but here's my recent speech for the International Women's Day event on Friday ❤️
Notes below:
I'm Bec, owner of Three Little Birds Bakery, a cake business based in our shop on Cavendish St Keighley.
After I set up the business in 2015, I turned over £300 in our first 5 months. We are now forecast to turn over £180,000 this year.
We've grown from just me racing home from dropping my youngest at playgroup, frantically baking for 2 hours and squeezing my work into long evenings and early mornings. I didn't have any corporate background unlike some of the talented people here, and basically made everything up, winging it and making lots of mistakes along the way. We now employ 7 staff and opened our shop nearly a year ago.
Last year we achieved global fame with the events of what became known as , leading to a double page spread about us in the Daily Mail, interview requests for everything from Sky to GB news, and lots of new visitors to the shop. It was the most surreal two weeks of my life. We then had the honour of winning Retailer of the Year at the Keighley and Airedale business awards in September.
But it wasn't always like this. For many years of this business I had almost nothing to show for it - except sleep deprivation and constantly blocked drains from all the buttercream and ganache I kept shoving down them. And the reason for this is that between my husband and I, we had to have very clearly defined success markers, and most of them involved slowing down the growth of the business rather than speeding it up. It's been a very slow but steady progression.
For years, my role was primarily as my children's caregiver. I was there for every pick up and drop off, every assembly, every sick day.
My goals for the business included capping the amount of orders I would take each month and putting a limit on how much money I would turn over, so I could ensure I was sufficiently present for my family and healthy mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally, while my husband worked full time. I created goals for the business, such as taking on a certain amount of weddings and increasing the revenue, but these always had to fit within the parameters of the other success markers we'd defined.
Now we've swapped round, and Aidans the primary child carer while I work full time. And I'm not gonna lie, I'm loving it.
The point is: Don't let anything or anyone external define your success. You have to define it for yourself and your life.
As women we often look to a well-worn script for our standards of success. We have to be beautiful and also brainy; independent and also great at relationships; economically solvent yet family oriented: curvy but not fat, skinny but with b***s. We should stand up for what we believe in but not be too opinionated or bossy.
We will never measure up to the world's standard of success. So it's time to refine what success looks like for us. For you and for me.
For me, success looks like this:
- having two days off work a week, at least one with my family and one with time on my own.
- going on a walk outside every day.
- waking up and reading by Bible and praying with God.
- enjoying one of my hobbies at least once a week, whether it's piano playing or making food for fun.
And yes - my success markers definitely involve the business doing well. They involve me making a decent amount of money - who knew it's ok for women to want that too? And making enough money in the business for my staff to earn a decent wage and not worry about job security.
So how do we know what our success markers should be? By looking at our needs and our values. Know whats important to you, what you need to survive and thrive and the principles you want to live your life by. For me that's rooted in my Christian faith, the importance of kindness, and the value of human beings and their work.
Previous success markers have been as simple as just making sure my kids had been fed that day and no one had been hospitalized. Your definition of success needs to be able to flex depending on your changing needs and situation.
Sometimes success looks like saying no.
No to the order that will mean you go home late.
No to working on your day off.
No to making more money than you are now, because the price you'll pay as a person is too high.
No to putting your shop in Saltaire or Ilkley because the regeneration and creation of jobs in Keighley is one of your core values.
Through some extremely difficult periods of my personal life, my work has been my lifeline. To be able to escape from the chaos of home life and create art, grow something that is my own, and bring joy to myself and to others through the beauty of cake, is a gift that has genuinely saved my sanity. Work, when it works, is transformative. But make it work for you by containing it, by giving it defining markers that mean your work is never given free rein over the other parts of you that need a different kind of success.
As women, it can be so easy to look to other women and feel inadequate, jealous or insecure. But let's not define ourselves by one another's success markers. Let's make our own, and celebrate each other for what makes us uniquely successful.
Thank you.
