2,980 cookies. Sixteen hours. One thing I got wrong.
The numbers first, because that is how I learned to write them.
Two 16-hour days. 2,980 cookies. 115 boxes sold. $35,000 raised in 48 hours. Six of seven completers from that cohort moved into paid employment.
The bake-a-thon worked. I am genuinely proud of it. I am also going to tell you the thing I got wrong.
Hour 12 of day one. The team has been on their feet since early morning. Things that should be running themselves are not quite running themselves. The small decisions, the logistics, the “what do we do when X”, they are all finding their way back to me. Not because the team is not capable. Because I have not built the systems for them to be capable without me.
At hour 16, I was still there. Most of the team was not.
The bake-a-thon mobilised a community and raised a lot of money. It also showed me exactly where the organisation was still founder-shaped. I was the bottleneck. The emergency worked because I was available for 16 consecutive hours. That is not a compliment. That is a fragility.
The systems question is: what would have happened if I had been unavailable that weekend?
The honest answer, at the time, was that the bake-a-thon would not have happened at the same scale.
That is not fine. That is the thing I have been working on since.
The Worthy Cause operation is worth $650,000 a year in revenue, 12 FTE plus volunteers, two cafes and a cookie kitchen. It cannot run on founder energy indefinitely. The transition from founder-led to systems-led is not a future problem. It is the work that is happening now.
I sometimes describe myself as the “accidental CEO.” The accidental part is honest. The CEO part has a learning agenda attached: executive education, board governance, shadowing other Melbourne hospitality CEOs. The plan is to keep getting better at the things the founding story did not teach me.
If you are building something like this (any organisation that runs partly on your specific energy), I want to name the thing: the moment you realise you are the bottleneck is not the moment the organisation is broken. It is the moment the organisation starts to grow past you. That is the right moment to feel proud, and also the moment to get busy on the systems.
The bake-a-thon is a story I am proud to tell. The lesson I took from it is the one I do not tell as often. I am telling it now because the people who need to hear it are the ones still staying until hour 16.
You know who you are. Build the systems before the next bake-a-thon.