We recently connected with Sadie Stutzman and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sadie, thanks for joining us today. Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I’ve thought about this question a lot recently as I’ve just made the transition to full time entrepreneur! For the last year and a half, I’ve had a “regular” job and have been running the bakery. As with anything, there are pros and cons on both sides and it’s very possible that it was just simply too much to have two full time jobs. However, for my personality and drive type, I believe that running a business is a great fit and it does make me very happy.

I appreciate that the challenges of running a business are new and most importantly, they are exciting to me (which is good because there are a lot of them)!! Especially since I have an engineering background and am learning the business part as I go! I love the idea that I can set the tone, pace, urgency, and culture at my business. I hope to build a culture that supports the workers, the customers, and other businesses.

I am eager to see what happens when all of my energy and attention is focused on growing Full Stop.! Although, I don’t believe I’m making the move to chase happiness. Happiness seems too fleeting. In general, I think I am the sort of person that can be “happy” (or “unhappy” for that matter) in a lot of work environments. In fact, I’ve had many happy, sad, or anxious moments in the last week in both my “regular” job and my business!! So, in going full time business owner I’m not chasing happiness, I’m chasing an obsession and a dream!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up baking quite a bit with my family. And as a family, or with friends, many memories were made around food…baked goods in particular. I’m a huge believer in the idea that food brings people together and people, generally, are better together!

I started the bakery back in 2020 with that in mind. I loved the idea that people were having special moments/celebrations/solo time/etc. around the items that I was baking. As the bakery has evolved and specialized in sourdough crackers, the same thought process applies. I am motivated by the idea that maybe someone is taking a bag on a hike, or a group of friends is celebrating a promotion with a charcuterie board ft. our crackers, or perhaps they are a road trip staple. It’s very motivating to feel like something as simple as a bag of sourdough crackers can elevate an experience and make it more memorable for a group or individual.

Baking came naturally to me as a skill, but getting into it as a profession was a career pivot for sure. My background is in mechanical engineering. I studied engineering through college and opened the bakery right before I graduated grad school (go Buffs!). I started out baking anything under the stars, but the Full Stop. ~thing~ has always been sourdough crackers! They are really what started it all. Over the years, I’ve found a way to quite the noise and keep the main thing the main thing!

I’m most proud of the relationships I’ve developed in the last 3 years, with customers and fellow business owners. It’s been so rewarding to see growth and development in both, mine and other peoples businesses, as well as in those relationships. And along the lines of what I said earlier, it’s so fun to see and hear how people are using our sourdough crackers!

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn the idea that everything is urgent and that there are a million top priorities. I feel like my time in school, as a graduate researcher and in industry this was the case, everything was urgent and needed done “yesterday”. In my business, I’m trying to set the culture that there is ONE top priority and if something is urgent, it actually does HAVE to get done by a certain time. There are many times where I’ve set unrealistic to do lists for myself because it all “has” to get done…only to realize many of the things on the list I have made an arbitrary deadline for, but in reality, they could be pushed back a day or a week or a month!

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

Currently, Full Stop. manufacturers all of our sourdough crackers ourselves! There is now a small team of us that bake in a rented shared commercial kitchen in Boulder, but when I first started the bakery it was just me in my home kitchen!!

Prior to recipe testing, I had only made crackers a handful of times, and never sourdough crackers. I made the sourdough crackers for my family… my mom and sister suggested some changes/add…boom. We had made the OG sourdough cracker (parmesan & herb). From there things started movin’ and shakin’. After baking in my house for a few months I got the hang of the process but realized I didn’t love the dynamic of baking professionally from home and moved into a small commercial kitchen. Scaling a recipe and process always has few bumps, but got those ironed out and saw the business grow. Next, I added in a dough laminator to roll out the sourdough crackers (I was actually starting to get some elbow pain from all the manual rolling!! ha!). Finally, Full Stop. got to the point that it made sense to have some extra hands in the kitchen and once that was dialed in, we moved into a bigger space, where we are now!

It’s been a real journey, but I think the lesson I learned, or at least what I’m seeing from our history, is that a natural rhythm for growth is to make a change just as the kinks are ironed out from the last change. It doesn’t have to be a giant jump, even small steps, in the right direction, end up being big moves years down the road!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fullstopbakery.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fullstop.bakery/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FullStop.Bakery/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sadie-stutzman-667b7374/