How do we transform our experience with chocolate from a hobby to a business without losing the fun, collaborative, part-time nature of it all?

Honestly, this is a very difficult question and we don't assume that there is an answer. This question goes much deeper than the surface question of how to start a business - it asks how we want to spend our free time, how we want to spend our working hours, how much financial risk we are willing to take on, how confident we are that our chocolate is actually any good, if chocolate bars are our ultimate product, what the future of our family looks like, and how permanent we are in our current living location.

All that said, we are trying to follow the practices of The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses , in order to keep the potential business light and flexible. Some of the recommendations in the book are difficult to apply to a brick and mortal chocolate shop, since it's mostly geared toward tech startups. However, we're doing our best!

Let's take a look at the different business model options for starting a bean-to-bar chocolate business (at least to our knowledge in California):

http://rootchocolate.com/2015/01/29/chocolate-business-models/