Candace Nelson: Founder of Sprinkles & Author of Sweet Success

Episode 309

Serial entrepreneur Candace Nelson revolutionized the baking industry when she started Sprinkles, the world's first cupcake bakery and of course the Cupcake ATM. Nelson followed with the launch of Pizzana, a growing chain of pizzerias. Now she is an author of the incredible book Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe For Turning Your Passion Into Profit. I can’t wait for you to hear more about her entrepreneurial journey, best tips for existing and future entrepreneurs and of course some incredible stories including some which aren’t part of her terrific book Sweet Success. You absolutely will not want to miss this incredible episode. Tune in now to #TheKaraGoldinShow.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be you just want to make sure you will get knocked down but just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. It’s Kara Goldin from the Kara Goldin show. And I am so excited to have my next guest here we have Candace Nelson, who is the founder of sprinkles and the author of the new book that I have right here sweet success, which is absolutely fantastic. I am so excited to be talking to her. I’ve been fangirling over her for many years. And I have to admit I have had a few cupcakes from the ATM machine with my hint water. But that is was absolutely genius on many, many levels. So Candace, as I mentioned before, is the founder of sprinkles the first cupcake bakery and cupcake ATM. You may have also seen some of the other amazing stuff that she’s done, including the launch of Parana, which is a growing chain of Michelin award winning pizzerias. And as I mentioned, she is the author of the brand new book, which you have to read called sweet success, a simple recipe for turning your passion into profit. And it is so so good. So I can’t wait to speak to her more about her journey and all of her tips. And more than anything, I am so thrilled and grateful that you came on. So thank you.

Candace Nelson 2:00
I am thrilled to be here. I’m such a fan of you what you built your podcast. And I’m just so happy to chat with you.

Kara Goldin 2:07
So excited. So talk to me a little bit about the beginning of sprinkles, I would love for you to share a little bit more started in 2005. Like how did it get going? Well,

Candace Nelson 2:20
there’s a very long story, and I’ll try to shorten it. But basically what I did is I took a big left turn in my life, I started my career in investment banking, I was recruited out of school to go work at an investment bank in San Francisco during the height of the.com. Boom, working with tech companies taking them public m&a, and then went on to work at an internet startup. But then two things happened. One was, as we know, the.com bust, so I was out of work out of a job and kind of looking around like Wait, how did that happen? I was doing everything right. I was, you know, following this very predictable, but traditional path to success, right. And all of a sudden, I was looking around with no job prospects. But I sort of channeled my energies into planning my wedding, I was engaged at the time and I planned my wedding and my husband and I ended up having two really blissful weeks in the south of France, of course, we ate our way through the blue laundry environment there. Every panel shockula we could get our hands on. And we were in the airport on the way back home. When I noticed something was going on on the TV screens, people were gathering around, there was like some news bubbling up. And you know, I kind of leaned in, but I couldn’t understand anything because it was all in French. So I asked somebody to explain what was going on. And they said something bad has happened in New York. And this of course was 911 planes were getting grounded are still trying to figure out what exactly was going on. Anyway, I got back home to San Francisco two weeks later. And it was the first time in my life that I was confronted with this reality that it could all end tomorrow. And if it did, was I actually doing what I wanted to do with my life. And the answer was no, I didn’t want to crunch numbers. I wanted to do something that brought me some joy that injected a little bit of meaning back into the world, just a little smidge of meaning. And so instead of going to business school, which is 100% what I was planning on doing what everyone expected of me it’s what most of my peers were doing at the time. I went to pastry school and enrolled in a really sweet pastry school in North Beach and every day I couldn’t wait to go I get so excited I put on my chef whites and and spend my days in batter you know with the smell of cakes and coffee brewing and I just fell in love with it. I loved it it was tangible. And I could create something that people could enjoy and consume and and love right that then in there it was really rewarding.

Kara Goldin 4:49
Were you always a baker I mean prior to going to pastry school.

Candace Nelson 4:53
So I grew up baking with my mom and baking played a really important role in my life because I grew up a lot of my childhood overseas. My dad was a corporate lawyer. It’s funny because we, you know, he was a lawyer, very risk averse household, like there was nothing entrepreneurial going on at all. So I never anticipated this path for my life. But when I was living in Southeast Asia, you know, 1000s and 1000s of miles away from home, friends, everything I knew, I was homesick. And, you know, this was before the internet, this was when long distance calls were expensive, and they dropped. And so my connection to home was really creating the treats and the foods that I loved from back home, if I wanted a brownie, if I wanted a rice krispie treat, I couldn’t go to the corner store on the island of Sumatra and get one. So my mom and I spent hours in the kitchen, you know, baking from her joy of cooking cookbook and making notes in the margins. And so baking was always my connection to home, my connection to family. And it just played a really important role in my life. But also, I just really revered and love these classic American desserts because they represented my my homeland

Kara Goldin 6:07
still to this day, you are smiling when you’re describing that. And I think like that’s, that’s one thing I also always share with entrepreneurs or people that are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs is figuring out what you really enjoy doing right? And if you don’t enjoy doing it, and you’re not able to smile, it’s way too hard to be an entrepreneur. Right?

Candace Nelson 6:30
I totally agree. I think your passion is your fuel. And certainly there are entrepreneurs that do it another way they see a white space in the market and kind of analyze it and they go into you know, what they think is going to be a successful market with a new idea. But I can’t do it that way, I have to really be moved to do something I love because as we all know, it’s a tough road. And so you need that extra I consider it like an extra battery pack, you know that you kind of turn on to get you through the extra challenging moments. It’s so

Kara Goldin 6:59
true. So it’s one thing to go to pastry school, it’s another thing to actually start a company and scale a company as you did with sprinkles. So what was the first point where you thought, Okay, I’m going to open up a store,

Candace Nelson 7:12
I had a pretty unique insight. When I’d been planning my wedding I’d had, you know, my nose really deep into Martha Stewart weddings magazine, I was, you know, going all over town tasting wedding cakes. And one thing I noticed was the rise of these trendy cupcake towers as an alternative to wedding cakes. And I thought, that’s kind of fun. You know, you can take up cupcake onto the dance floor, you don’t need a fork and knife. Everyone gets their favorite flavor. Like there’s so many things to love about cupcakes. But cupcakes at the time were super basic. They were generic. I mean, I’d be walking through the supermarket and see all these like shelf stable cupcakes, packaged in plastic clam shells, just sitting there for days on end. And I was like, cupcake needs a makeover. So that was sort of my initial insight. But at the time, it was kind of a crazy idea there. There weren’t really fancy cupcakes unless you, you know, ordered them for a wedding, for example. And it was the height of the low carb craze. I mean, the South Beach Diet Atkins that had all been raging for years. So for me to think about going all in on a cupcake at that time, particularly given that I just left a lucrative job in finance and bakeries are not known for being very lucrative. Everyone thought it was

Kara Goldin 8:23
nuts. And you moved down to Los Angeles, right? At this point? Yes. Do you remember? Like, what was the first point where you said, Did you write a business plan? Did you say, I’m gonna like, open it up, and we’re gonna start and see what happens.

Candace Nelson 8:38
I mean, it’s so scrappy. I remember riding on the back of a napkin. I was driving in the passenger seat, my husband was driving, and we just started jotting down numbers. I mean, we both had been in investment banking, we could definitely build a model. The model for sprinkles was like, hmm, this would be the rent. This would be how many employees this is the profit margin. How many cupcakes would we need to sell each day to you know, cover the expenses? I think we can do that. That’s as simple as it was. And so it was much more about even though we had all this financial background was much more of a gut feeling and instinct. But I did need to test demand for my product a little bit before I decided to like pour all of my life savings into this crazy idea. And so I I started baking out of my West Hollywood apartment. And you know, first my friends were calling because they felt sorry for me. And then before I knew it, people were finding me to place orders. I had no idea how they tracked down my number. And at that point, I realized I had a little traction in fact, the producer of The Tyra Banks Show at the time found me and I was like, we you weren’t cupcakes for for Tyra Banks for her 30th birthday. Okay, I think there might be a market here like I think I’ve I’ve struck on a nerve.

Kara Goldin 9:54
That is so funny. So how soon was it before you knew that you were on? Something I feel like I was the first one in Santa Monica.

Candace Nelson 10:03
The first one was little Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

Kara Goldin 10:08
And I feel like the branding you so nailed it. Like it was just cute made you smile you wanted to go in you wanted to try whatever you were going to tell me to try. So definitely it was. It was so spot on.

Candace Nelson 10:24
Thank you. Well, from the beginning, I was really trying to innovate. I was bringing this idea of disruption to the bakery world because no one had ever thought of cupcakes in this way before they were still just an average kids treat. So if I was going to reinvent the cupcake, you know, with ingredients and technique and make it more artisan, and, and more sort of covetable, I wanted to obviously, update the brand aesthetic as well. So people always thought of cupcakes as sort of Grandma’s kitchen, retro, overly feminine. And instead I said, you know, this is going to be a modern cupcake, we’re going to make it sophisticated. We’re going to keep it playful, but give it sort of graphic, you know, pops of color, which we’re big, we become really well known for that modern dot decoration on top that was putting a modern spin on an old fashion classic from the inside out.

Kara Goldin 11:14
And so great. So what was the sort of the height of sprinkles? How many stores did you have? Because you were nationwide?

Candace Nelson 11:21
Sure. So it took us a minute, we actually, even though everybody said it would never work. We opened the first day two lines, because there was this. I’m sure you remember the email, daily candy. Yeah, that was sort of that tone email newsletter, it had so much power and it would go out in whatever city you were in and tell you what was hot and happening that day. And so daily candy went out on our first day, and all of a sudden, we had lines, which we weren’t prepared for. Because I was still working with these tiny mixers. My recipes yielded like two dozen and people were coming in and buying to everything at a time. Yeah. Overnight we went from is anyone going to show up to Oh, God, so many people out there and we need to scale up, we need to get our operations buttoned up. We need to hire some people. So it took us a while to figure that out. Given that we had no experience working in the restaurant world, the bakery industry, just a lot of optimism and hard work. And ultimately scaled nationwide 10 locations nationwide until we sold a majority stake of the business to private equity, and they’ve gone on to continue to expand it. I think they have 26 locations now. But 40 If you include the cupcake ATMs, but what we did was really difficult. I mean, if you talk to anyone in the restaurant world, I mean, we were baking from scratch on site every day at that location, the frosting that was hand frosted, it wasn’t the sort of piping bag, you know, production line style that took a lot of nuance and a lot of training. And every time we built a new location, it was an entirely new city. It wasn’t like we had any sort of we were focused on any geographic region. So it was slow. It was painstaking. But we did it ourselves. Because we really wanted to control the brand and the experience and how special all of that was.

Kara Goldin 13:12
I love your description of the operations. I mean, this is one thing that we do on this podcast is interview founders from all different industries. And the consistent threat is, you know, people wonder if people will want it right. You fear whether or not people are going to buy it. And then all of a sudden, there’s just like this overnight thing that hits you that you’re like, Oh my God. And the one for hint, we sold 10 cases overnight in the first store. We got I got the product into was Whole Foods. And I went and had my fourth child, Justin that afternoon and a plan C section. And then I got a call in the hospital that the product was gone 10 cases and I’m like who took them? They’re like, No, they’re sold. I’m like, Wait, that wasn’t supposed to happen yet. I mean, it was just crazy. Right? And I remember when it rains it pours. Yeah, but it’s scary, right? You could be out of stock, you could you know, all of those things, you know, but you just go out and do it right and get the traction first and get that first sale. And then you know, hope you have that problem is a good problem to have.

Candace Nelson 14:21
It’s a great problem to have. But man, people were angry. They yelled at us in the store. I mean, that’s the one thing about being in the store is like I was just sitting there with my baseball hat on like saying, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. We’ll have those out in a minute. And I remember one woman came in and she was like, she just let us have it. She was yelling. She said we were incompetent. She said we would definitely fail. We were doomed for failure. I mean, I had to agree with her. We were totally incompetent.

Kara Goldin 14:50
That is so crazy. You mentioned your machine. Obviously with all the look, I mean, brilliant on so many levels. It was sight? Yeah. How did that come about?

Candace Nelson 15:02
You know, I think it’s really just an extension of this idea of innovation. One of the things that I wasn’t prepared for, because we were surrounded by all these people saying that what we were doing was a terrible idea was this instant success. So I thought, you know, I always imagined sprinkles in every city across America, but I didn’t know how fast the whole idea of a cupcake bakery was going to take off. So we opened our first location. And within months, I started hearing about other cupcake bakeries. And that just the market exploded. So our success was really, you know, it was creating a lot of competition. But more than that, a lot of imitation, which was problematic. One of the things we really leaned into, of course, was the brand and you know, strengthening the brand, we actually ended up trademarking the modern dog. So that was something we could protect. But for the most part in the, you know, the restaurant industry, there’s not much you can protect. Yeah, so we had to really also focus on innovation. And, you know, we were sort of the leader, and then all of a sudden, we were one of a crowded pack. And we were like, What are we going to do to move the needle again, here? I really preach about like innovation being a mindset and kind of being open to this idea of like, possibility. And what if thinking, you know, embracing, like, the crazy ideas and the brainstorms. So it was one late night, I was Charles and I had gotten back from a party, I was pregnant with my second son. And I had a cupcake craving, imagine that. And there were no cupcakes in the house, and was kind of grouchy about it, to be honest, and just started saying, What if you could get a cupcake anytime day or night? What would that look like? And so it really came about from this, you know, personal need, but also this idea of like, what could the world look like? Like, what could we create that doesn’t exist yet. And that was the genesis of the cupcake ATM and, and that, that really set us apart again, in so many ways from the rest of our competitors.

Kara Goldin 16:57
I love it. You talked about competition. And that’s something that comes up a lot I, you know, tell people not to fear competition, because you can’t control what other people are doing. You can control what you do. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that as well.

Candace Nelson 17:13
I think that’s great advice. I certainly think people should understand the market and the competitive landscape before they go into a specific market before they start their company. And I did that I ate every piece of cake, every cupcake in the United States, I feel like it got a little ill in doing so. But once you’re operating, stay focused on the goal, and what you’re doing, I think I got a little off track being so thrown when other businesses were emulating what we were doing, and I kind of took my eye off the ball a little bit. So I totally agree with you, you know, competition. Also, listen, it spurred us on to innovate and to continue to like really do the best that we could do and show up our customers in the best way every single day. So let’s reframe it. Competition is

Kara Goldin 18:04
good. Yeah, no, I totally agree. When your book is so so good. So sweet success, a simple recipe to turn your passion into profit. This is your second book. The first one is the yummy, yummy cookbook. But this is really canvasses journey. And there’s so many great insights in addition to storytelling in here, one of the things that you talk about is packaging a product for profit. And do you want to share a little bit more about that?

Candace Nelson 18:35
Oh, sure. Anything is, in particular, just specifically?

Kara Goldin 18:39
Well, I think what’s interesting is, particularly today, it just ends up being very much coincides with what happens in the market, but everyone’s talking about profitability, right? You’re, you know, getting closer and closer to profitability, especially during times when it might be more challenging to raise money if you’re an entrepreneur. But I think that the key thing that I took out of that was really, you know, you’re developing a product, you’re thinking about the profitability versus, you know, creating something that you’re underwater.

Candace Nelson 19:12
Yeah. And I think so much of that is testing demand and getting a little bit of comfort that there’s a market for your product before you, you know, raise money and, and kind of go all in on something. And there’s so many ways to do to do that these days. I mean, I did it, you know, baking out of a KitchenAid mixer in my apartment, but you can build waitlist I have. I’m mentoring a baker who actually had a pop up virtual bakery business, which was a side hustle as she was, you know, doing her full time job. And she would only do you know, a few times a year, she would build up this waitlist for her product. She has 10,000 people on her waitlist. So I mean, that’s a good indication that you’ve got a business there. So she has now she’s now doing actually A crowdfunding raise donation based and rewards based to open her first location. But you know, I think anytime you can kind of test that demand in a small way, get a little bit of traction. That is the best way to go as far as launching a product.

Kara Goldin 20:16
When I think of sprinkles, even though you haven’t been involved in the company in a little bit, I think of you and your founding story. I’ve heard it over and over again and never get sick of it. Why do you think people should use their founding stories and not just people, but also brands should use their founding stories to actually get people to understand their brand?

Candace Nelson 20:41
I think it’s so important. People want to know, the person behind the brand. They want to know their story because they want their relationship with the brand humanized in some way. I think consumers these days are so skeptical, there’s so much BS out there that it’s like if you can have a real authentic connection with a brand that’s so meaningful, that builds their trust that builds their loyalty. And I really, you know, I’m a huge proponent of founders, what I say is taking off the apron, which is what I did, I kind of stepped out of the bakery and into my personal brand. It helped to amplify the brand, it helped to humanize the brand. And I know a lot of people feel nervous doing that sometimes. But it’s just a practice. You know, we all have social media, you know, at our disposal, all it takes is turning the camera around and starting to talk to it and building that community. And the great thing about a personal brand too, is that if you do sell the company or if you’re no longer, you know, associated with that company, you take that community with you to your next venture.

Kara Goldin 21:44
Yeah, no, I think that that’s absolutely true. So you founded and been involved in a few different launches. Now talk to me about Prasanna is it pronounced Prasanna.

Candace Nelson 21:55
You’re very close. It’s Pete son, Peter. Just you know, add your inner Italian and you’re all set. Pete’s on it is a concept that we developed with our head chef, Daniel UDT, who immigrated from Naples, Italy with $200 in his pocket and his grandmother’s sourdough starter, I met him at a party, he was catering and took one bite of his pizza. It was love at first bite. And again, talking about the passion I I was passionate about him and his story story, again, playing such an important role. I was passionate about the product. And I knew I could build a brand around this. And I knew that there was a need. Just even on a small level, right? We were we opened our first location in Brentwood, California. And I have so many friends who have families in that neighborhood of Los Angeles, and they were either taking their kids to CPK, which five Cpk or Toscana, which is the white tablecloth, there was nothing in between. And it’s like that’s how people want to eat. They want simple fuss free foods that are made well, with great ingredients and technique. And they want to feel good about what they’re eating and a nice experience, but still feel like they can bring their kids and have a casual dinner. You know, it’s accessible to all but still somewhat elevated.

Kara Goldin 23:11
And are you working in in the business actually? Or are you are you making pizza or

Candace Nelson 23:18
not making the pizza although I have I do know how to stretch dough Daniela has taught me I am executive pastry chef. So the desserts are mine on the menu, love it. But mostly my role in the business is marketing branding PR. And that’s that’s what I love. I’m also elevating. Now kind of I had my time in front of the camera with Cupcake Wars and Sugar Rush. And now I’m a little bit more behind the camera supporting Danielle Lee’s star by CO creating and producing a new show he’s on on Hulu called Best in dough. It’s sort of, you know, what would you call it? 360. Now I’m behind the camera helping him be me on Cupcake Wars but on best Endo.

Kara Goldin 23:57
Oh, I absolutely love that. So what are a couple of the big things that you’ve learned? You’ve been involved in startups, you’ve been around a lot of entrepreneurs, what are some of the big things that you would tell your kids who were starting a business or tell your friends that you want to share?

Candace Nelson 24:14
Well, it’s funny you say tell your kids I have two boys, 11 and 15. And I talked to them about our businesses all the time. One of the greatest things about being in the cupcake business and the pizza business is they have understood what I do for a very long time. It didn’t take much for them to get my mom’s house cupcakes, my mom sells pizza. But really at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are just problem solvers, just trying to make some money doing it. And I think that’s an important message for everyone. And I’m starting young with my kids is just to be a problem solver. Lean into your frustration and maybe create a product or a solution to that problem you’re seeing in the world, create the change you want to see in the world. And it doesn’t have to be a business. It can be a movement, it can be a nonprofit, but really this idea of no one’s going to fix it for you I’m so start to develop that mindset of, I can take care of this, I can solve this problem. And I think if you are open to that possibility, one of these days, a problem is going to come along that you are uniquely suited to solve. And you’ve trained yourself to look for it, and then you can go after it.

Kara Goldin 25:17
Yeah. And don’t rush it. I mean, if you, it’s great to be an entrepreneur, but you have to have an idea that you think is actually going to be able to scale before you can get there. And as I always tell people, to including my kids, go work for entrepreneurs. It’s the best training, I couldn’t agree

Candace Nelson 25:32
more. I had to catch myself the other day, because my 15 year old is very excited. He started talking to me about starting a digital marketing agency. And I said, you know, you’re still in high school like that. I want you to be an entrepreneur. But let’s do baby steps, right? Like, why don’t you get some industry experience? I don’t want you to just take a flying leap into this. So yes, and I agree, I actually learned a very hard lesson on that the second time around, because sprinkles really was sort of a rocket ship to success. And so in my second venture, you know, building Pete’s on him, we’re in a big growth phase right now we’re doubling the number of locations, we’re moving into the Texas market. But for a long time, it seemed like nothing was happening. Yeah. And after, after this sort of incredible, phenomenal success of sprinkles, I thought, Oh, I got this just gonna open a pizza restaurants gonna be really successful to know. Yeah, good business takes time to build an enduring business takes time to build sprinkles certainly was lightning in a bottle, everything lined up just right. But just because your business doesn’t take off overnight. That’s not abnormal. That’s normal. So leaning into patience, leaning into perseverance. Those are key qualities in my mind,

Kara Goldin 26:49
super key. So people always think that really successful people have had it easy. They just snap their fingers. They knew how to do it. They had all this great experience in order to do it. But the more I’ve talked to entrepreneurs, the more I know that they all had fears. They all had failures along the way, challenges in their business. And I think like the biggest thing that I’ve heard over and over again, unlike joining a bigger company, maybe have waves in the business and entrepreneurship, it’s spikes, right? You have really big highs and really low lows. And it’s just like, day to day, right? From day to day, right? Bipolar? Yeah. Yeah, you’re like, everybody’s waiting in line for your cupcakes. And then they do, you know, a statewide blackout, right.

Candace Nelson 27:42
Right, in a tower goes out, when you’re trying to make somebody’s wedding cupcakes. And we have to go and rent a generator for the day so that we don’t like ruin someone’s most special day of their life. These are the things we have to do on the fly.

Kara Goldin 27:55
So tell me one of your stories. You know, were that were that actually where you thought, oh my god, how am I gonna get through that and what lessons you learned?

Candace Nelson 28:04
Well, I spoke to this sort of complexity of what we were doing in terms of scaling. You know, every time we opened a new location, we were in a different state. And we were having to hire and train a whole team, you know, front of house back the house from day one. But what I didn’t mention is that also the climates of these different areas and cities affected my baking. So cut to opening in Scottsdale, Arizona. And you know, the desert is very unkind to baked goods, you leave those cupcakes out on the counter overnight, and their heart is Roxton this day, but sprinkles business model is really about, you know, people buying it doesn’t it’s not about people coming in and buying one or two people come in and buy a dozen, two, three dozen for the party. And that’s really important. So, really quickly, we realized like we weren’t gonna make it if people were just coming in and buying one or two cupcakes. On the fly. I am in the back, like reinventing my recipes, amping up the moisture, we develop this new, really large custom ziplock bag that could slip over the dozen boxes so that we could still encourage people to, you know, buy more than they were going to eat right then cooler packs. So if they left them in the car, they wouldn’t melt. I mean, it was a whole recreation of our product on the fly because of this new climate.

Kara Goldin 29:26
So you solve the problem, which all great entrepreneurs do. That’s so amazing. And did you stay? Do you still have a store there?

Candace Nelson 29:34
Yes. Yeah, we do. We do. But it man I don’t know. I? I don’t know why I didn’t think about it.

Kara Goldin 29:42
In retrospect, but that’s the thing. I mean, great entrepreneurs do that. They just figure it out. And they don’t allow these challenges to stop them. And I think there’s a ton of learnings. It’s not that it isn’t hard. It’s not that you’re not freaking out and having a bad day. But you just figure it out. Last question, what is the worst advice that you’ve ever received?

Candace Nelson 30:08
Nobody’s ever asked me this before. That’s amazing

Kara Goldin 30:12
that you sit there and kind of laugh with, you know, people saying like, I remember when I was first starting out, people said to me, oh, you can’t do this. And that was so wrong. Hmm.

Candace Nelson 30:24
I’m gonna flip this question a little bit. It’s advice that I got that I thought was bad. But that actually I should have taken. Yeah. So when I was first sort of, I used to call it informational interviewing. I mean, I feel like that’s such an old term now. But I was trying to learn as much as I could about the baking industry. And I didn’t have that many didn’t know anyone really in it. So I remember calling up one of the wedding cake makers that I’d met during my journey and just talking to her and she said, Okay, if you’re going to start your own bakery, you need to keep a journal every day. Whoever’s closing can write in the journal, what happened that day, it can be stories that are kind of crazy. It can be, you know, not just business stuff, like more sort of, editorialized, right, yeah. And I think back on all the craziness, like this stories that could have been captured, of course, the day we open, were drinking from a firehose, and that was like the last thing I could have possibly managed to do. But I really still wish that I had, because even in just sitting down to write this book, and thinking about the incredibly wild journey that it’s been, yeah, there would have been so many great gems, I know that that are forgotten. And I actually did a LinkedIn post about this. And it really took off, like just journaling in general and journaling for business and make sure that you’re not misremembering certain situations. And so I think there’s something to it.

Kara Goldin 31:49
Yeah, no, I think it’s definitely true. And that’s what my book sprung out of was my journal, and it was 600 pages. Yeah, jealous? No, definitely it was. It’s, it’s very, very helpful. So well, this is absolutely amazing. Everybody needs to get a copy of suitesuccess for sure. And follow everything that Candice is doing. We’ll put everything in the show notes as well. So everybody has access to that. But thank you again for coming on, Candice. It’s such a pleasure. So great hearing, your voice and and all your lessons. I wish you sweet success. So thank you so

Candace Nelson 32:29
much. Thank you. I really appreciate chatting with you. I love your story. And we need we need to chat again offline.

Kara Goldin 32:36
Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks again. Take care. Thanks all for listening to this episode. We hope you enjoyed it. And I want to thank all of our guests and our sponsors. And finally, our listeners. Keep the great comments coming in. And one final plug. If you have not read or listened to my book undaunted, please do so you will hear all about my journey, including founding, scaling and building the company that I founded. Hint we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks everyone for listening, and goodbye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening

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