One cake at a time

When Chef Charles Farriér opened Crumble & Whisk Pâtisserie in 2013, it felt like a true homecoming at the end of a long journey. A childhood love of cooking instilled in him by his father became the motivating factor for Charles to attend culinary school. But with those fundamentals in hand, he continued to carve a self-taught path from restaurants to cruise ships and back again.

But his pivot towards pastries and baking happened closer to home. While working a corporate office job, he was encouraged by his co-workers to bring a dessert, and he whipped up a basic cheesecake to rave reviews. The next time he was on cake duty, he put his own spin on the recipe—and the idea for Crumble & Whisk was born, allowing him to marry his love of cooking with his passion for bringing excellent, locally-sourced comfort food to his hometown.

"I was told to bring a dessert in. I brought a cheesecake in and everyone loved it," Charles recalls. "And then everyone was like, 'Oh my God, you should sell this!'" So he started to sell them.

But just as his cheesecake side hustle was taking off, Charles was let go from his corporate role. Suddenly in fight-or-flight mode, he would bake cheesecakes at home and sell them individually around his neighborhood of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area.

"I used to sell my cheesecakes up and down the street that I'm actually on, to the barbershops and beauty shops for like $7 at the time," he says. "That was the money that I saved to use to pay for all my permits and licensing."

He hustled every step of the way, and his hard work paid off with a physical kitchen, storefront, and team of chefs to work with. Crumble & Whisk had arrived. And with it came a whole new challenge: Running a team, balancing the books, and keeping his business afloat, one cake at a time.

The job had changed, and so did his tools.

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"I was told to bring a dessert in. I brought a cheesecake in, and then everyone was like, 'Oh my God, you should sell this!'"

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Challenge: From sweets to spreadsheets

Charles and his team knew their way around a cheesecake, and he was no stranger to the struggles of managing a team and keeping labor costs in check. The problem was time, and how it seemed to keep slipping away from them despite their best efforts.

"We're in the process, we're trying to get the work done, but we don't realize that the time is slipping away from us,” Charles explains. “Especially when you have employees and they're using overtime, or they don't clock out on time, or they forget to use their break.”

Between inaccurate timesheets and breaks being missed (or misreported) entirely, Charles quickly found himself struggling to match working hours to payroll at the end of the month. It was a compliance and budgeting disaster in the making, and it usually called for hours of manual data entry to ensure everything balanced out in the end.

For Charles, every hour spent juggling numbers across spreadsheet columns was less time he could apply towards the parts of Crumble & Whisk that got him out of bed each morning. Budgets were coming before baking; timesheets were eclipsing teambuilding.

Crumble & Whisk needed a unified system that worked as smoothly and efficiently as Charles and his fellow chefs did during a morning rush. And they found those tools in Homebase, which allowed Charles to visualize and share the issues with their scheduling on a team-wide basis.

"I'm able to go into Homebase and be able to say, ‘I've spent an extra hundred hours on labor costs, but where is this going?’” Charles says. “And so it allows you to go in there and just kind of like clean everything up and have candid conversations with your team.”

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"I'm able to go into Homebase and be able to say, ‘I've spent an extra hundred hours on labor costs, but where is this going?’”

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Solution: “Your grandma can use it!”

Charles realized that the most important thing Crumble & Whisk needed was a strong culture of communication between his team members. The more informed and connected his team was, the more invested they could become around the day-to-day details. Through Homebase, he started to do just that by keeping his team in the loop.

"Homebase allows us to become more efficient with the job because I'm allowed to go in there and post notes and be able to send things to the team without me having to be here,” Charles says. “I can give them updates on work performance, scheduling, tasks that they need to do for the day, while also allowing them to see everything at their fingertips.”

That sense of user-friendliness didn’t stop with his team, either.

“Homebase is just easy to use; it's very streamlined. And there's no fuss. Your grandma can use it," Charles says with a laugh.

That increased level of visibility and understanding opened the door for equally transparent discussions between Charles and his team as they could now accurately pinpoint the parts of their daily workflow that were losing them time and money without anyone noticing. And those end-of-month sessions of manual payroll entry? They’re firmly in the rearview mirror.

"You just click one button,” Charles says. “Instead of having to sit there and manually input anything from their timesheet and manually write it down from another software," he explains. “Homebase has been a game changer.”

Within a matter of months, the combo of better team communication and a now-painless payroll process allowed Charles to develop a new recipe for team success at Crumble & Whisk. And with a stronger and more involved understanding of how shifts and timesheets impact their bottom line, the whole team could feel that much more invested in the daily grind and rising profile of their new bakery.

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“I can give them updates on work performance, scheduling, tasks that they need to do for the day, while also allowing them to see everything at their fingertips.”

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Impact: Building a balanced financial diet

With Homebase serving as his foundation, Charles uses its transparency and information-sharing tools to build smarter schedules for his workers at Crumble & Whisk, and leans on his team to help identify ways to work smart and save money—literally hundreds of hours of labor costs were saved due to this updated approach to scheduling and payroll!

"Homebase is great because you can do your scheduling and do your payroll all at one time,” Charles says. “While other companies? Well, some don't allow you to do that.”

And that time saved has been spent in the ways that truly matter to Charles and his team. They recently expanded Crumble & Whisk to a second physical location—and in 2021, they moved beyond cheesecakes entirely! Recognizing a need for healthy, locally-sourced meals in Oakland during the COVID-19 lockdowns, he began selling to-go meals at local farmers markets; and he’s still going strong, almost five years later.

Even though his team keeps growing and the schedules keep shifting, Charles Farriér is still baking cakes and developing new recipes—and a new generation of chefs. By using Homebase to maximize and centralize the admin work of Crumble & Whisk, he gave himself the gift of free time, and is spending it on the same dream that brought him here to begin with.

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