Sugar Switches Things Up With These Banana & Peanut Butter Pupcakes

When I came up with the idea for Pupcake Sugar, I was extremely excited.

Combining my love for baking pupcakes with my love for helping other pups create their own wealth was a dream career to me.  I spent hours and hours pawing through information about pup business ownership.  I attended several conferences and pup networking events to get some insight on the pupcake and pup spa industries.

I even signed up for a class to learn the lingo.  Not to mention all of the videos I watched on, as we say, “PupTube University.”

The deeper and deeper I got into working towards my dream pup business, the more excited I became.  I was amazed to see how each day; my pup business idea became more of a reality than a creative idea swirling around in my head.

When Pupcake Sugar finally opened, I felt such a sense of pride.  After almost two years of planning, I was finally standing in my pup dream come true.  However, those two years were not all filled with warm fuzzies. 

In fact, while most of those days were filled with excitement, there were a lot of days when I just blatantly wanted to quit. 

After all of those pup business classes, conferences and pup networking events, the real work had to begin.  And, while I was a little more prepared than some other pups that I knew, I still had no clue what it was going to be like to seriously be a pup business owner.

When I first started building my pup business, I was still working my full-time job at BarkScent.  That literally meant working during the day when my human was at work and spending quality time with my human when she got home.  While my human slept, I worked into the wee hours of the morning on my pup business.  I often hoped she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night, so I could get my work done.

Anyway, when I initially started my journey, pupcakes weren’t even in the picture.  My first pup business endeavor was teaching marketing and branding strategy to other pup business owners.

I decided to go that route first because I actually worked in marketing at BarkScent.  Plus, a lot of my pup friends would ask me advice on all things marketing and branding.  It almost seemed like the perfect fit for the next phase in my pup career.

However, the further I got on developing my pup business plan, I realized that the market was extremely flooded.  Every branding strategy I came up with was already being done by another pup business owner with a huge following.  And, everything about my pup business I patterned after what another pup was already doing.

The late nights and early mornings of pup business ownership became extremely exhausting.  And, I became extremely frustrated with the direction my pup business started to take.  I wasn’t as enthused about working on it anymore.  The more I worked on it, the less I liked it and the more frustrated I became with it.

I was barking my concerns to a pup friend of mine one day.  I felt overworked and extremely tired.  More importantly, I didn’t even like doing was doing with my pup business anymore. 

Quite frankly, I was running out of steam.  It just wasn’t me.  Finally, my pup friend barked, ”why don’t you just quit and try something else?”

That hit me like a ton of peanut butter.  It sounded so simple.  I thought “why didn’t I think of that?”  In the words of Max Lucado…

The reality is that I hadn’t lost my passion for pup business ownership.  I had lost my passion for this pup business I had created.  So, I decided to just give this business up and refocus.

I spent the next several months reflecting with myself.  Getting into what I really like to do.  What brings me joy?  And, most importantly, what would I do even if I never got paid?  All of these are extremely hard questions, even though they look easy.  But, taking a step back and thinking about all this was exactly what I needed.

After a few months of pup reflection, the idea of Pupcake Sugar was born.  And, I haven’t looked back since.  I also realized that it’s ok to run out of steam from time to time.  Sometimes we pups need that as a signal that we should refocus our strategies to more align with what we need.

So, these Cranberry Pupcakes With Peanut Butter Cream Frosting are dedicated to changing directions when things are working.

And of course, we believe that every pupcake has a love story.  So, while your favorite pup is PUPPY LOVIN’ on these pupcakes, we’d love to hear from you.

What is the biggest thing you’ve learned when you had to change directions on a project?  How did changing directions work out better?

Please share your pupcake story in the box below.