Introduction
After the café closed, Maja Schenk found a stack of delivery notes behind a flour tin. The dates told a story she had not wanted to read while the espresso machine was still running: too much stock before quiet weeks, too little staff before busy ones.
Maja lives in Dortmund and now coaches small food businesses on AI-supported workflows. She does not sell a redemption story. The debts were real, and that is why her advice has weight.
Story of the Path into AI
The insolvency forced Maja to look at numbers she had avoided. Weather, staff schedules, supplier delays, social media posts, catering requests: in daily stress everything had felt separate. A digital tools course showed her how simple automation could connect some of those signals.
At first she was afraid to advise others after her own business had failed. She started with her own mistakes, building small routines for invoices, shift planning and newsletters. Her first larger project was a weekly planner for small eateries that combined purchasing, staffing and weather. It failed when a local street festival changed demand and the model had no way to know. Maja added a manual “local surprise” field after that.
Current Work
Today Maja works with founders who want more structure without becoming dependent on software. For a snack bar she built a routine that suggests ingredient quantities while leaving the owner room to adjust for neighbourhood events, school holidays or a regular customer group that arrives without booking.
Clients gain overview, not certainty. Maja is careful about that distinction. AI can reduce repetitive planning and reveal habits, but it cannot replace honest calculation or the courage to close a product line that loses money.
Personal Advice
“Failure does not automatically make you wise. Only honest analysis does,” Maja says. She advises small-business owners to examine one messy routine first, not to buy a full system because the word AI sounds like rescue.
Key Facts
Age and place: 40, Dortmund.
Background: café insolvency, non-academic background, second professional start.
Entry into AI: weekly planner for purchasing, staffing and weather.
Focus today: small gastronomy and workflows.
Typical tools: workflow automation, forecasts, newsletter AI.
Werkstattnotiz
Maja’s planner has a blank field called “what the model cannot know.” She added it after the street festival. Some users laugh at the field and then fill it carefully: roadworks, flu season, a funeral nearby, a school event. That field is often the most honest part of the forecast.