Saturday morning we had out Angel Food distribution. We had double the orders as compared to last month and we were busy. I didn’t get much time to pay attention to anything that was going on. I ran all over the whole morning fixing one thing or another. We didn’t really have a huge number of problems, but trying to keep everything running smooth was more than a little hectic. At the end of the distribution hour it felt like a total of 10 minutes had passed (this is the relativity reference if you are keeping track). Everything went great and I’m really looking forward to next month, even if we double again.

Saturday night was great as well. I got the opportunity to talk about God for a bit with one of the girls. She doesn’t believe and had a lot of good questions. I was glad to be able to answer the questions and hope I have that opportunity again soon.

I have some other really cool news but I’m gonna save it for tomorrow. Any guesses?

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I’m very glad that I had several people come last month because they were able to help show everyone how to sort things and I didn’t have to spend as much time training because of it. Some people came about 15 minutes early and were impatiently waiting for their order. I had intentionally left a couple of things undone until it was time to start because I wanted to focus on getting everything ready and not trying to help people who got there early. That causes confusion and makes for a setting where things aren’t ready on time. The check-in papers were left in my office until about 5 of 10 so the couple that came early had to wait 10 minutes. It might seem harsh but if you show up 15 minutes before a store opens they aren’t going to open the doors because they are working on making things ready for customers.

Generally everything went well except we had two people not show up. This time I was nice and called them to remind them about the pick-up. One thought it was from 12-1 and the other didn’t seem to remember but both came out right away. I reminded them about the pick-up time and that if they aren’t here their food will be donated. We did have one other problem. Apparently somehow we had a break down in the check-in/out process. We have a specific manner in which we are checking people in and out to triple check the order is properly filled, but one box got switched somehow and the error wasn’t caught at the checkout. Very frustrating so I’ll need to try and find some way to improve the process so this doesn’t happen again. Now I am trying to reach one of the customers who I believe was given a Steak pack instead of the chicken pack that they ordered so I can give another customer the steaks they ordered. Confusing? Yeah I think so too.

I did learn quite a bit. We have a bit of a bottle neck at the check-out, which is likely what caused the order to go by without getting checked. We added in the offer to pray with people and quite a few accepted, but that really slows down the line, so we need to streamline that. We didn’t have a huge order this time but in the future we need to keep things moving. I’m planning a side room with a small group of people to pray. I also added a place for people to write prayer requests on their form. I’m going to suggest that be added online too. The basic setup we had worked really well but there are a few things we need to do differently to help as our orders grow.

We also have a few things we want to do that will slow things down, like providing coffee and snacks, so we will need to really streamline other things as much as possible. I also need more volunteers. We had just enough today, but as things grow the people we had will have a very hard time keeping up.

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Admit it, you want that cake now. That’s what I’m talking about.

Anyways, this weekend I was able to take a small group from our church to the church we are going to be partnering with for the next month or two. We did the pickup and distribution with the church and I learned a lot from what they did. I am excited to be starting our own distribution for next month and the people that went are very excited too.

One of my favorite things is that we are planning on getting the entire church involved and working together. Obviously we need people to pickup and setup, but we also need people to check in, hand out, and check out. We also need people to help carry boxes out and greet as people come in. I’ve got a good idea on how each part of the church can help including some stuff that we want to do beyond the normal. My wife use to pickup Angel Food when we were in Missouri. They were very busy and people lined up and hour or so before and were more or less processed like cattle. I’m not a huge fan of that and at this location they weren’t that busy so it wasn’t so bad, but I thought about my wife’s experience and decided it would be nice if we would have coffee and warm snacks like fresh biscuits or cookies during the winter and something like that in the summer too.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be greeted with a cup of coffee and a cookie, or maybe hot apple cider, when you go to pickup your food? Yeah I think that is way better than being processed like cattle.

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