The challenge: Growing a team fast and getting buried in the process

Going from a one-woman side hustle to a brick-and-mortar employer happened fast for Luanne. Within a year of opening her Lansdowne location in January 2021, Ruru Baked had grown from a three-person team to nearly a dozen. The business was working. But the way Luanne was running it wasn't.

She was doing the scheduling herself and that meant she was also the default solution to every gap. "I was overworking myself," she says. "Anytime someone couldn't work, I'd try to find them coverage, and if no one else could do it, then I would just do it. So I was working all the time." For a stretch, she was logging 60-plus hours a week before she'd even started on the strategy and planning the business needed.

Part of what made it hard to change was the team itself. Ruru Baked had built something rare in the industry: a crew that stayed. The team that Luanne started with is still with her, years later. Some team members took full-time jobs elsewhere and still came in for evenings and weekends because they love working at the store. 

Luanne paid above minimum wage and gave raises every year — giving back to the team that gives her so much, because that's who she is as a founder. With loyalty came longevity, and with longevity came a payroll that had grown significantly. Without a clear breakdown of where hours were going by role and location, Luanne needed to find efficiencies — without cutting pay — to put more back into the business.

The solution wasn't to change the culture. It was to get better tools.

"Homebase is extremely easy to use. There's like zero learning curve. You just plug things in. It's easy for the team to use. You can access it from anywhere, and it'll save you time — and time is obviously money."

— Luanne Ronquillo, owner of Ruru Baked

The solution: From reactive scheduling to a month planned in advance

Luanne knew what she was looking for before she started searching. She needed a scheduling tool with an intuitive interface, daily labor cost reporting, availability tracking, support for multiple locations, and a direct integration with QuickBooks. She found it with Homebase. "It had everything that I needed," she says, "and it was a good price."

She started building schedules in Homebase herself. The tool was better, but the problem wasn't the tool.

It was Anna who changed that. One of Ruru Baked's founding team members, Anna had gone from back-of-house hire to one of Luanne's most trusted leads. She watched Luanne absorb shift after shift and eventually said what needed to be said. "You're too nice. You'll just take the shift. Let me do it. I'll be more strict about people finding their own coverage."

Luanne let her, and Anna ran with it. The Homebase interface made the complexity feel manageable — a visual, slot-based view of availability, open shifts, and coverage gaps that turned a stressful weekly task into something she could own. "You just slot things in," she says. "You see people's availability, there's all the open shifts, and you can just slot things in where they need to be."

Today, Anna builds a full month of shifts in a single session and releases the schedule to the team a month in advance — a level of planning that keeps the whole team accountable and gives everyone the predictability to plan their lives. Team members submit availability and time-off requests in Homebase; once the schedule is posted, coverage gaps are their responsibility to fill.

"Could you plan out an entire month of a schedule in Excel or on Post-it notes or on a whiteboard? Probably not. With Homebase we can do that, and then you can change it easily."

— Luanne Ronquillo, owner of Ruru Baked

With scheduling in Anna's hands, Luanne had something she hadn't had in years: time. Time to get into the numbers, dig into labor cost reporting by role and location, and figure out how to build a more sustainable business without changing the culture that made it worth building in the first place.

The results: 20 hours a week back and a plan for what’s next

The first thing that changed was Luanne's schedule. "It would have been like 60-plus hours a week before, because I was doing back of house during the day and then I would do front of house at night if I had to cover a shift," she says. "Now it's like 40. And this last year I wasn't scheduled in our main location itself at all."

The hours she got back went straight into the business. An ice cream truck. A seasonal Union Station pop-up. The kind of strategic planning that only happens when a founder isn't filling shift gaps six nights a week.

It also gave her time to ask harder questions. Luanne started digging into Homebase's labor cost reporting — not just glancing at daily totals, but breaking down hours by role and location. What she found gave her a clear answer to a question she'd been carrying for a while: "How do I reduce payroll without reducing payroll?"

The data showed her front of house was overstaffed. Her team was experienced, loyal, and capable of doing more with less backup than she'd been building into the schedule. She trimmed hours in the right places, kept the raises she'd committed to, and brought labor costs down without touching pay. She's targeting further reductions the same way — not by cutting, but by scheduling smarter.

"The great thing about Homebase is you have all the different roles. So I was seeing: how much is back of house making? And then how much are we staffing front of house? I love using it for all our locations and seeing the numbers so I can actually see how much labor we're using a day."

— Luanne Ronquillo, owner of Ruru Baked

The savings have a plan. More merch runs throughout the year, the annual team trip, and a longer-term goal that says something about how far Ruru Baked has come from a friend's apartment kitchen. "Eventually," says Luanne, "I would love to buy our own building."

Still in the business, but no longer buried by it.

There's a version of this story where Luanne keeps doing it all herself: covering every shift, managing every schedule, running on 60-hour weeks until something gives. That's the version a lot of small business founders know too well.

Ruru Baked took a different path. Not by cutting corners or scaling back on the team, but by getting the right tools into the right hands and trusting the people who'd been there from the start.

"I don't like to be a distant leader," Luanne says. "I like to work in the business, because I understand everything that's going on." The difference now is that being present doesn't mean being indispensable. The schedule runs without her. The labor costs are visible and moving in the right direction. And the time she's reclaimed is going into the next chapter of a business she's been building for a decade.

"Innovate or die," she says. "When you're running a business and you need access to information at your fingertips at all times, nothing should be analog anymore."

She's not done yet. But for the first time in a long time, she has the time and space to figure out exactly what comes next.