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she wasn’t cut out for college, knew she’d always wanted to make
it as a singer-songwriter. The move didn’t come out of nowhere, so
her parents might have seen it coming. In fact, at the ripe young
age of seven, Gigi had come home one day from a talent show and
announced that she was moving to Nashville to become a country
star — so the dream was always there, underneath, all around. She
was bound to follow it — it was just a matter of time. By this point,
first year of college, Gigi had been singing in a band for a couple
years — Gina Butler and the Wild Silver Band. She’d been play-
ing local biker bars, old folks’ homes, state fairs, even did a tour
of Canada. All through high school, she worked cleaning houses
during the week, played music every weekend, tried to fit in a
little school in between — the whole time looking ahead to her
first big break.
“I had a booking agent at the time,” she tells me, “and I was
always on him to send me to Las Vegas. For whatever reason, that’s
where I thought I needed to be. To me, playing Vegas would have
meant I’d arrived. But he didn’t see it the same way. He didn’t
think Vegas was such a good idea. He’s the one who said I should
go to Nashville, become something in Nashville. Vegas was where
you ended up, not where you started.”
So Gigi listened to that little voice singing inside her head, sold
her little cleaning business, paid off all her bills, and headed to
Nashville with $500 in cash. She didn’t know a soul, didn’t have a
place to live, didn’t have a job. “But I knew God would take care
of me,” she says.
Oh, I almost forget to mention — Gigi came from a God-
centered, hardworking family. Church and faith were a big deal
in her house when she was growing up, and so was the spirit of
entrepreneurship — and I’ve come to realize that these hard-won
values are tremendous assets when you’re looking to go it alone. A
faith in something bigger than yourself — it’s something to rely on,
to help see you through, and here Gigi was able to lean on these
DARE TO GROW
Gigi had always been an avid reader, so she loaded up on business
books, self-help books, whatever she could grab to help her get
past this trouble spot in her life and grow her game. She expanded
her housecleaning business, built it up into a thriving little com-
pany. At one point, she had five girls working for her, and they’d
each clean two houses a day. Gigi herself would do two or three
more — always recognizing the power of doing it herself. She saved
enough money to buy a house of her own, pay off all her bills. Life
was good. It wasn’t what she’d dreamed about all these years, but
it was good.
And then the most amazing thing happened. She got a call
from her brother, who was visiting New York. He’d just waited on
line for a couple hours at a trendy cupcake shop in Manhattan. He
said, “I’m eating one of these red velvet cupcakes, and they’re not
as good as yours. You should open a cupcake shop in Nashville.”
Gigi was in somebody else’s bathroom when the call came in,
cleaning their toilet. It was a tiny little bathroom, with a tiny lit-
tle mirror over the sink, and when she got off the phone with her
brother she found herself staring into that tiny little mirror for the
longest time. It was like a scene from a movie, and as it played out
Gigi asked herself a bunch of questions, which, taken together, was
really one question: why not?
She was wearing old, ratty clothes, a pair of cleaning gloves,
she looked a mess, but the face that looked back at her was the
face of that seven-year-old girl who wasn’t afraid to dream big. So
she decided to go for it. Baking was in her blood. Her whole family
baked — her mother, her grandmother, her aunts.
Of course, Gigi didn’t just look in the mirror and make such
an important decision on a whim. Now that the seed was planted,
she went back and did a little research. She learned that the recent
run of high-end cupcake shops — like Sprinkles in Beverly Hills,
Magnolia Bakery in New York, and Georgetown Cupcakes just out-
side Washington, DC — had all opened up in affluent communities.
All signs indicated there was an opportunity in a smaller market
like Nashville for a bakery built on her family recipes, featuring
fresh cupcakes, made from the finest ingredients, served in a fun,
friendly environment.
When Gigi tells her story, I love how it comes down to this
simple question: why not? It’s a question we should all be asking
ourselves as we embark on our new ventures. Really, we spend so
much time talking ourselves out of things and not nearly enough
time talking ourselves into things. For my money, the arguments
in favor of making a bold, proactive move are way more interesting
than the arguments against.
Gigi put together a business plan and went around Nashville
looking for a loan. She went to four banks, but everyone she talked
to pretty much laughed in her face and showed her the door. “They
basically told me I was nuts,” she says. “They were like, ‘A cupcake
shop? Seriously?’ ”
Now, the good thing about running a successful housecleaning
business and owning your own home is that you wind up with great
credit, so Gigi decided to loan the money to herself. She maxed
out her credit cards and took out $100,000 in cash to ramp up. She
drew $35,000 from one card, at 14 percent; $22,000 from another
card, at 17 percent. Then she got one card down to 8 percent and
took out the rest.
“I just went for it,” she says.
Yep, she did.
Now, here’s where her rich and famous housecleaning clients
and her Red Lobster customers check back in, because Gigi kept
working as she ramped up her cupcake business. She had her lit-
tle safety net and wanted to keep it in place. And they gave her a
head start in growing her customer base — in a grassroots way. She
kept telling folks what she was up to, and they just kind of smiled
sweetly, trying not to be discouraging. “They’d say things like, ‘A
cupcake shop? Well, bless your little heart,’ ” she remembers. “Like
they thought I was making this huge mistake. They were like all
those bankers, but I think they also felt sorry for me, because they
kept ordering cupcakes. Leanne Rimes had a dinner party, so I
made some cupcakes for her. Every night I was making cupcakes,
a dozen here, a dozen there. I was working on my recipes, trying to
get everything just right.”
What she was doing, really, was market research. This was
POWER FACT: Did you know there are 9.1 million US businesses
owned by women? . . . And I’m thrilled to say, that number is growing.
Well, the opening couldn’t have gone any better. There were
lines out the door at Gigi’s Cupcakes that very first day — around
the corner even. A local news crew came by to film the crowd,
which of course only made the lines grow longer. Word of mouth
kicked in — although Gigi’s customers couldn’t really talk at first
because they were so busy feeding their faces with cupcakes.
That was in February 2008 — five months after that game-
changing phone call from her brother, and in that short time
Gigi had managed to read a bunch of books on starting your own
thinking about opening a second store. And now, six years later,
there are almost 100 Gigi’s Cupcakes stores, spread across twenty-
four states, generating over $35 million in annual sales.
Her secret? Well, it’s in the recipe, first and foremost. Gigi’s
cupcakes are baked fresh daily, with love, with passion. It took
her six months to find the perfect vanilla — and now she uses her
own extracts to make sure everything’s just right. But a lot of busi-
nesses launch with the perfect recipe, the perfect formula, without
this kind of runaway success, so there’s got to be something else
at play — and here I think it ties into the power of broke mentality
that has followed Gigi around her entire life.
It’s also in the hard work and passion — Gigi’s commitment to
serving up the very best cupcakes on the planet. (She’s even got a
terrific line of gluten-free and sugar-free cupcakes, in response to
the changing diets and tastes of her customers.)
But mostly, it’s in her to-the-bone appreciation of the value of
a dollar.
“I’ve cleaned 20,000-square-foot homes,” she tells me. “I’ve
seen how people live at that level, and what I’ve seen is that money
doesn’t buy you passion. I still save every penny. I know what it is
to not have, so I appreciate everything. I do. And I don’t let any-
thing go to waste. I was raised that way, came up that way with my
cleaning business. If we’ve got a bowl of special frosting, maybe it
cost us sixty dollars, and maybe we’re done with a certain recipe
and there’s still some left over, a lot of folks would just throw that
extra frosting away. Other people, they don’t spend your money the
way you spend your money, right? But that’s good frosting, so we’ll
come up with a special, we’ll use it on a cake, we’ll find a way to
make it work.”
Sounds to me like a recipe for success, whaddya think?