Sweet Success with Candace Nelson

As you know by now, personal development is our jam at Sub Box Basics. We built an entire subscription box business around it. There’s so much to learn from other entrepreneurs, especially those that pepper FUN in the game!

In today’s episode, Julie interviews Candace Nelson, founder of Sprinkles Cupcakes, judge of Cupcake Wars and author of Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe to Turn your Passion into Profit. (which just came out Nov 8th!)

Candace Nelson is a serial entrepreneur, a New York Times bestselling author, Wall Street Journal contributor and an expert in turning one’s passion into a profitable business. Her book, Sweet Success: A Simple Recipe For Turning Your Passion Into Profit will be published by HarperCollins Leadership in November 2022. Candace Nelson revolutionized the baking industry when she left a career in finance to start Sprinkles, the world's first cupcake bakery and Cupcake ATM. Nelson followed with the launch of Pizzana, a growing chain of Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded pizzerias leading the third wave of pizza in the US. She continues to expand her portfolio of investments with CN2 Ventures and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two sons, and Norwich terrier, Willy.

LINKS

• Get Candace’s book, Sweet Success, at https://amzn.to/3F2qifXv (affiliate link)
• Learn more about Candace Nelson at https://candace-nelson.com
• https://www.instagram.com/candacenelson 
• https://twitter.com/candacenelson 
• https://www.tiktok.com/@candacenelson

To be eligible to win Julie’s copy of the book, screenshot this podcast episode and share on Instagram, tagging @candancenelson and @subscriptionboxbasics. We’ll pick a winner on December 5th, 2022. 

Transcript

Julie: 0:22

hey everybody, a welcome back to Subscription Box Basics. I'm Julie Ball and you guys know personal development is my jam. I mean, I built an entire subscription box around personal development. I especially love learning from other entrepreneurs. So when my guest today popped in my inbox, you can imagine my excitement. So. Please let me introduce you to Candace Nelson. She is a wildly successful serial entrepreneur, a New York Times bestselling author, TV personality, cupcake wars, anyone. She's a wife, a mom, and an expert turning one's passion into a profitable business. And if you're watching the video, I have her new book right here. It's called Sweet Success, A Simple Recipe. For turning your passion into profit. It's out now and if you listen to the end of this episode, you actually might get your hands on this copy that I have in my hands. So Candice, welcome so much to the podcast.

Candace: 1:26

Thank you for having me, and congrats on the business you have built and the community you've built is very impressive.

Julie: 1:33

Oh, thank you so much. I am so excited to dive in. We have a lot to talk about and for those of you haven't met, Candace, she is most known for founding Sprinkles Cupcakes, which is the world's first cupcake bakery and the brilliant Cupcake atm. If you don't know what it is, go look it up right now. I love it. My daughter and I experienced it for the first time when we were visiting Disney Springs. And what's cool about Candace and her book is she has some really scrappy early days, and I know so many of you guys can appreciate that because that might be where you're at right now. So, Candace, tell us a little bit about how you got started. You didn't have an mba, right? You didn't like. This started in your apartment?

Candace: 2:18

So I like to say in building Sprinkles, I did get my mba, I got my cupcake mba, Nice. I had been on this path where I was really on this trajectory to get my mba, you know, a true one. and. A couple of things happened. First of all, I was working in the technology world during the.com boom, and then the.com bust happened and I was out of a job, and then nine 11 happened, and all of a sudden I was faced with this reality that, that things are fleeting and I decided I wanted to do something I was passionate about something that was more joyful than crunching numbers, which is what I had been doing before. And so I decided to take a serious pivot and instead of going to business school, I went to pastry school. Love it. And I came up with this idea for elevating the lowly cupcake. You know, this great nostalgic treat that we all love in this country. But that back in the day really was relegated to the supermarket bakery. And I had this aha moment as I was walking through the supermarket one day, seeing all these cupcakes that were stacked up and plastic clam shells and you know, that kind of gross shortening laden frosting. Yeah. And the tacky cupcake picks. And I just thought, golly, the cupcake needs a makeover. And so I said about to reinvent the cup. And it certainly started very grassroots. I mean, I was baking cupcakes out of my apartment. I was pushing them on my friends, and when I say pushing them, I mean, I would show up at every gathering with these cupcakes and people were scratching their head like, Okay, everyone be really nice to Candace. She's obviously lost it. She left a lucrative career and she just shows up everywhere with these darn cupcakes. It's not even a birthday party, but they would, pity order them from me. And those first humble steps, they just seem so insignificant and sometimes it just takes so long. You're thinking to yourself like, is anything ever gonna happen? I persisted and sure enough what happened was first my friends were ordering. Then I started getting calls from friends of their friends who had my cupcakes at a party. And then not that long after I started getting calls from people who I didn't know and who I couldn't trace how they'd found my number, and I thought, I might be onto something. I had always had this feeling that I was onto something in my gut, but everyone around me was telling me that it was a terrible idea. It happened to be the height of the low carb craze. I was trying to sell these luxury cupcakes for$3 when people were used to spending 75 cents. So there're all these cards stacked against me and I just kept at it. I was persistent, and eventually I started to get a little sense that I was onto something. I started to get that traction and that was everything for me. And it's so

Julie: 5:22

interesting too, because you were in LA at the time, right?

Candace: 5:24

Yes, and I still am. And yes, the Okay. Yes. This started in LA in Beverly Hills. Nobody's known for eating cupcakes here. Everybody drink green juice. Everybody drinks green juice. By the way, when I first arrived here, I think it's really important to go through life with open eyes. right? Not just buy into the things that people are telling you because everybody said nobody in LA Eats carbs. But as I was driving around, cuz I had freshly moved from San Francisco where I was working in technology and I saw so many burger joints and so many donut shops and I was like, wait a second, there's gotta be some people around here who are eating carbs. Otherwise, there wouldn't be these places in every strip center.

Julie: 6:05

I love that you said how shocked you were when someone ordered that you didn't know, because as a business owner, there's something so special about that. I remember when I was just launching my subscription box business, sparkle Hustle Grow, when I first got an order of a name that I didn't recognize. I was like, hallelujah. Someone who doesn't know me bought my product and it's so validating. Don't you think?

Candace: 6:32

It's so exciting? Yeah. You're like, wow, I'm really in business now. These aren't just my friends who feel sorry for me. Exactly.

Julie: 6:43

It's not a pity by Exactly. So you tell a lot of your story. In the book. So I encourage our listeners to read deeper into that story. But I wanna talk a little bit more about the book right now. So what inspired you to bring it to pen and paper and before you go into it, I love. The formatting of this book. Guys, if you're watching the video, this is a beautiful book. It's hard cover, but it's got some color in it and everything in here you relate back to your industry of baking, and I just think that's such a unique twist on a personal development book. So tell us what

Candace: 7:18

inspired it. Thank you so much for those kind words. First of all, I do wanna say that sweet success is definitely business book, but it is softened with this idea of sharing my personal stories and I don't want it to be too serious of a read. I want entrepreneurship to feel more accessible. And I wanna break down the barriers to entrepreneurship because so often we see in the media these larger than life characters, who are raising hundreds of millions of dollars and they're sending Rocketships to the moon. And it's like, no entrepreneurship can simple. It's on a spectrum, and I built a really big business out of something anyone could do. So I want people to feel like they can do it too. Because I was the most unlikely entrepreneur. I was raised to just, go to school and follow a career. My dad was a corporate lawyer. He was totally risk averse. And so the idea of, peppering in fun pop culture stories, which were so much a part of Sprinkles History. Yeah. And the idea of sharing all my mistakes, all the learnings from along the way and peppering it with these illustrations to make it more fun, to make it more accessible was really important to me. So thank you for mentioning that.

Julie: 8:31

I love that you do talk about things that you have learned the hard. And I love that you talk about joy. We always, in my business, we've always measured like the joy of doing business. And that doesn't mean you have to create this huge business. Maybe you, I always call it the sweet spot, like what works for you in this season right now for you and your family? So I love that you do touch on that stuff and you encourage along the way through all of the ups and downs of your.

Candace: 9:02

It's so important not to forget the joy in anything you're doing. And to your point about there's different seasons in life and some may feel really hard and grueling, but at the end of the day, like gotta pick your head up and remember what you're doing it for, you know? And if you are. On this journey and you're not enjoying any of it, no matter how hard it can be at times, like what is the point? Lift your cut up and pat yourself on the back for stepping outside your comfort zone and try to find a little bit of joy and lightness in the experience. So thank you for that. And so sweet success is really about my journey, bootstrapping, building, scaling, and ultimately selling a significant stake in the business. And when I did step away, I found that a lot of women, female founders, aspiring founders were coming to me for advice. They wanted mentorship. And I loved doing that. I loved being at a place in my career where I had something to share and some lessons to share. But I wanted to do more of that at scale. And so it's hard, you know, I still operate a business. I stepped away from Sprinkles, but I'm now running Pizzana which is my new pizza concept. We have three, soon to be five in Southern California. We've expanded to Texas and we're growing there. So I'm very busy on a day-to-day basis. And I wanted to help more women. So that's where the idea of the book came in. And actually, Being an entrepreneur, there's very little time to sit down and reflect on the things that you've done right. And be able to write those lessons down. So Covid actually provided a perfect opportunity for that because there was nothing on the social calendar. I wasn't even driving my kids to school. They were Zoom schooling, and I got a chance to sit down and reflect, and it was a beautiful journey.

Julie: 10:51

What a blessing in disguise, right? Yeah. Okay. So in the book you do talk about when you're starting a business, you don't have to always start something from scratch. You can take the route of reinventing an old classic. So you've given the example of like Peloton, how they reinvented group spin classes by making it available at home and how you at Sprinkles reinvented the kids treat to an upscale sophisticated treat. So a lot of my students who are thinking about starting subscription boxes they come to me and they say, how's it done before? Is this gonna work? Is there room for me in the market what would you tell them?

Candace: 11:30

I think first of all, there are people who look at the market and say, oh, that already exists. and they are dissuaded from it. Right? And then there's people who look at the market and say, that already exists, and see it as proof of concept, right? So I think it's important to realize if it exists already, that means there's a market for it. The fact that you wanna do it means you can bring your own unique spin to that business idea. Nobody is you like that is your superpower, is that you are uniquely you and you bring your unique set of experiences, perspective, voice and personal brand to this business. And so, Don't be discouraged, but I do encourage you to really lean into what is that differentiation. It is a noisy market out there. There is gonna be competition. Don't be discouraged by that. Use it as inspiration to really dig deep into what your brand is, what value you're offering, and how it's different from the rest. And I think one way to do that is to really target down on your niche, right? Don't try to be everything to everyone. Yes. And that was. Initial inspiration for sprinkles is like America's the land of the supermarket, but I thought it was really special to go to a, you know, specific store or market for a specific ingredient or item. And by really nicheing down and targeting what I was doing, I was able to resonate so much more deeply with an audience that then, became my brand ambassadors and ended up doing my marketing for me. And then all of a sudden my market was really big. But you have to start by speaking to a really small audience.

Julie: 13:03

I 100% agree with that. And if you're listening and you're not sure where to start with, Go read some reviews of your competitors. It is like gold. You can learn what they're doing really well and you can learn what their customers are complaining about, and that is just a really good place to start if you're kind of worried about. It being, too busy in the marketplace or is there's room for you. So I encourage you to do that. I agree with you.

Candace: 13:29

I think you do have to study the market. you have to understand the competition and the landscape initially. Do your homework initially and figure out. Where you can really, rise above the noise and succeed and what your sort of part of the market is going to be, what you're gonna own once you're on your way. I do encourage people to tune out the competition a little bit. Good point. And really focus on what you are doing, cuz sometimes that can be a distraction. And really it's all about you doing what you do really well and delivering on that every day. And the competition really doesn't have anything to do. Yeah,

Julie: 14:05

that's really good advice. And we get so trapped in that comparison syndrome. So if you need to unfollow somebody, if you need to unfollow the competition mute

Candace: 14:16

them. Mute them, then they won't know you're unfollowing. Yes,

Julie: 14:19

Good point. Yes. Okay, so I wanna talk about one chapter, and I think this is really important for our listeners. It's a chapter called Test the Appetite, and you talk about getting feedback. Early iterations and really validating the Sprinkles cupcake concept. And I really think it's important when you're starting a business because you don't wanna put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, and then nobody wants it. You haven't validated that concept. And so you tell the story about baking tons and tons of cupcakes in your apartment, taste testing them one bite at a time, sharing them with friends for feedback. Right. Can you tell us a little bit about that story and why you thought that was So, I.

Candace: 15:01

Well, I really encourage women to dream big. I think you have to dream dreams that really light you up, that get you almost like just tingly inside. Like, yes, you wanna wake up every day and be excited about what you're building. But temper that by starting small. And that's because entrepreneurship is not about just carelessly throwing all caution to the wind. It is about a risk versus reward scenario, but you wanna minimize the risk, right? And take a calculated risk. And so, The way to do that is really to test your idea, your thesis, your business on a smaller scale before you go all in. And you're right, that's what I was doing when I was, baking out of my West Hollywood apartment with my tiny little mixer. And, you know, the boxes were stacked up on my dining room table and people and mm-hmm. people who were driving by and picking up my orders and my dog was barking at them. I mean, it was it was so scrappy, right. And the reason I did that is because to sign a lease to truly put in the orders for our customized boxes, all of these things were such an unbelievable investment. We feel you on that. I was bootstrapping this business. Only way I could stomach it was by having that little bit of traction and just having that indicator that there was a true appetite for my product. And so that will obviously look different for someone who's doing, a subscription box. But I think there's so many different ways to your audience and maybe get a little bit of feedback in the beginning so you can iterate on what you're doing. You know, some of the best founders will put a product out into the market thinking one thing, get that feedback and completely turn their idea around and have success doing something else. But because they were nimble and because they were testing at a smaller scale, they weren't, dead in the water

Julie: 16:57

Right? And you have to listen to that feedback. And actually take action if it makes sense to, to pivot. Now, you had talked a little bit in the book about you weren't gonna have the red velvet cupcake, right? and that was some feedback that you took and it turned out to be a, one of your best sellers, right?

Candace: 17:15

That's right. So this is funny. My husband, who is my co-founder in Sprinkles, is from Oklahoma City and he, listen, one of the reasons we work so well together is we both have crazy sweet tooths. So he was my number one taste tester, my co-founder in the business. But just what I thought, I was ready to roll out my menu. He said to me, you're missing the red velvet. And I said, what are you talking about? He goes, you gotta have a red velvet. I. I don't have to have a red velvet. This isn't my menu and I don't like red velvet. These are just, you know, any red velvet I tasted to that point was just flavorless cake with a little bit of red food coloring and he. Sweetie, I am from Oklahoma. They are gonna laugh me outta my state if we open a cupcake shop without red velvet. And I was like, Ugh. All right. So here was my compromise. I was like, I'll come up with a red velvet cupcake, but I'm gonna do it my way. I'm gonna amp one coco. I'm gonna do like a really rich tingy cream cheese frosting. I developed one that even I liked, and sure enough, we, when we opened Red Velvet, became our runaway bestseller. And no matter where we open, it's our best seller. So sometimes you gotta listen to those ideas around you. Sometimes you gotta tune'em out, but sometimes you gotta listen. Yes.

Julie: 18:29

I love that. I think too you have to be cautious of not just listening to one complaint. You know, if there's a lot of people who are giving you similar feedback, that's a red flag to, that's something to pay attention to.

Candace: 18:42

That's so true actually. And we use that idea at our restaurant now because, you know Yelp reviews, I mean, every restaurant tour just rolls their eyes at the Yelp reviews, right? Because all it takes is one person with a bone to pick and they can just go crazy on the Yelp and you can run yourself ragged, chasing after those Yelp reviews. So what we've decided to do is if there's just one you customer who has got a bone to pick, like, okay, maybe we don't have to change our whole business, but if there is sort of a theme or a trend going on, that's when you really gotta lean in and pay attention.

Julie: 19:18

Yeah, I agree. Okay, so let's wrap up with one piece of advice to someone who's listening and they're just like, they're on the edge, they're so ready to turn their passion into profit, and they just need your, that little kick in the butt from someone like you. What are you gonna tell?

Candace: 19:32

Oh, it's all in the action. It's all in the action. And so even if you're not feeling it, take those first few steps. And fake it till you make it if you have to. I mean, it's, if we were to sit around and wait for the confidence to take that first step, nobody would ever take those first steps. The confidence comes from the action, and that action is what separates the dreamers from the doers. So just get. Take those first few steps, ask for help, and be on your way.

Julie: 20:05

Yeah, small progress is still progress, right? All right, so where can our listeners follow you online? I know you're on Instagram, so what's your handle there and where else can they follow you?

Candace: 20:15

My handle on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok is at Candace Nelson. And that's Candace with an Ace, not an i c. Okay. And I'm also on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a new favorite platform of mine and I'd love to connect with any of your listeners there as well.

Julie: 20:32

Right on. I've been hearing that a lot more lately about people are getting back into LinkedIn. It's so interesting. So thank you for sharing that. And listeners, if you are interested in winning this copy that I have in my hands, I want you to take a screenshot of you listening to this podcast episode, then share it on Instagram stories and tag us both. You can tag Candace. And you can tag us at subscription box basics and we'll be watching for those. Candace, thank you so much for this interview. I really admire you, what you've built. I love that you're sharing your story with others, and it's been so fun getting to know you. Thank

Candace: 21:10

you. I feel the same about you, and I'm really just so honored to be able to speak to your community and thank you for everything you're doing out there inspiring female entrepreneurs.

Julie: 21:18

Thank you. All right, listeners, thank you for tuning in again, and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye.