Tom and his family are in the States for the wedding of daughter Kate. with the help of son Mathew pictures and stories continue to arrive. 

Tom 

Had a customer comment about the price we charge for our training DVDs

( I am absolutely amazed that Tom charges $198 for a 40 minute DVD. That’s $5/min. Tony Robbins the world’s leading inspirational speaker doesn’t charge that much. You’ve got to admit that it sounds a bit silly.
Concerned)

 Well I reckon this is great opportunity to explain.

Our DVDs are fairly expensive, but as far as business training DVDs they are very reasonable. Most business DVDs are over $1,000, many over $1,500. Tony Robbins sells thousands of CDs etc. It costs quite a bit to make a quality DVD and the thing is that you can watch it heaps of times.

Our DVDs are used a lot in training sessions so it works out really cheap in the long run. DVDs of movies are produced in thousands so they can sell them cheaply. We don’t sell in those quantities. Our DVDs are great for training, they are very motivational and they are Australian. We offer a money back guarantee so you have nothing to lose.

We get terrific feedback, people tell us they are great value.

Here's a recent message.

We’ve just had our Harvest Festival in Beechworth and it’s a fantastic thing. Last week I was in Napier and Hastings in New Zealand, it’s a big growing area with lots of produce. I talked to them about our Harvest Festival and they were just gob smacked – “Why aren’t we doing this?”  It gives our growers and our rural people a real opportunity to showcase their product. 

I must admit that this year the numbers were down but the weather was a bit rough. But it really is a good chance for our Bakery to give samples out and show our products in  a different environment. I did a cooking demonstration with John Walker who was the MC. He’s on telly and on the radio every week, what a character. Well I got up there and a nearly had a mental blank and luckily I saw Adam my baker, he’s also my son in law, and he came up on stage and we were a good team. It was probably one of the best cooking demos I have done. It was great.  

We also had a dough making session for the kids for a gold coin donation that went to the Harvest Festival. That went extremely well as well. It really is a great event for own town.  

Tom  

A few weeks ago I was over with Glen and Meredith at the Beechworth Bakery in Echuca. They asked Christine and myself over, because they were doing a staff photo shoot. We did one not long after we bought the business 5 years ago and it was great to go back after 5 years and see the vibrant young people.

I don’t know how many staff they’ve got there but there’s probably about 40. It just reminded me again of the local employment that the Beechworth Bakery has created in Echuca. I talked to a few of the parents that were there  and they were saying “Our kids just love to go to work! They were amazed at the synergy, the energy, the excitement, they love it they want to go to work. A number of people said almost exactly the same thing. What an incredible grounding. It was really wonderful, I was so pleased that we were invited over. It was a great evening.

Tom

Here are some pictures from one of our staff functions. It was a restaurant night down at Mytleford, all of the bakeries do these nights. Healseville and Ballarat they’ve taken their staff to Luna Park. Well the staff at Beechworth hired a bus, (I had nothing to do with organising it), I thought we were just going out for a meal. It was at De Fazzios in Mytleford, a very well known  place, great product and been in lots of magazines.

Well when we got there they had facepainting and then you had to make these rabbit ears and get judged, they had the quickest to do it, things like that. There were little songs that you had to sing and most of them were about me. And then they stuck up on the wall ‘pin the moustache on Tom’. It was about teamwork. They put a mask on one person and the other person held a mirror and had to guide the other person to put the moustache on the picture of me. It was really funny.  

Then there were trivia questions. I don’t go to trivia nights I never know the answers. But these questions were  all about me and the Bakery. How long has Tom been in business? What’s the price of this bakery product?  It was a great night. A lot of laughs and a lot of fun. I thought wow, this is what it’s all about. We do this kind of thing quite often. Even when everything is really busy you’ve got to make the time.  

Why do we do it? It makes our business stronger. It’s about meeting up with some of your co-workers so you can get to know them better, there’s no pressure from customers. It's meeting some of the other teams, the morning team gets to meet the evening team. Because we have about seventy staff, some of them never get to work with each other. It’s a great thing to do. I was really proud of them all.

Tom

I'm the bunny second from the right!