How 1 fast casual bakery CEO found success with no recipe

"All you have is all you need," is the life lesson The Cupcake Collection founder and CEO Mignon François learned as she turned the $5 she had to feed her six kids dinner for the week into a multi-million-dollar bakery brand. Despite having no experience and no recipe for success, François has sold over 5 million cupcakes since she opened her store in 2008 in Nashville and added a second location in New Orleans.

François is sharing her story of resilience, determination and faith in "Made from Scratch: Finding Success Without a Recipe," a nonfiction book published on May 9, 2023.

Chapter 2, "The Black Girl Selling Cupcakes" is below.

After a few years of running The Cupcake Collection in Nashville, a trip back home to New Orleans for the Bayou Classic and Battle of the Bands inspired me to open a location there. After Katrina had nearly destroyed the city, a lot of people were scattered to other states, including members of my family. My father came to stay with us in Nashville for a while, and many people assume that my family had come to Nashville to escape the aftereffects of Katrina's devastation. We had, in fact, chosen Nashville as our home one year before the storm.

Years after the hurricane, I knew I wanted to be a part of the Renaissance in New Orleans. I wanted to be a part of the revival, not only to provide jobs but also to be a tourist destination. New Orleans thrives on tourism and the food is the main draw. New Orleans is the epicenter of good food in this nation. If you can make it in the New Orleans food industry, you can make it anywhere.

During my visit, I stopped at a popular doughnut shop that sold buttermilk drops. The business was basically a tourist trap made famous on social media. When I asked the cashier if they were selling authentic buttermilk drops, she had no clue what I meant.

Her answer was, "Well, I mean, we make them here." She shrugged her shoulders and motioned to help the next person in line. That was not okay to me. New Orleans was my beloved city, and this was the donut that I grew up on. I used to miss the bus to get these. I used my transfer money for the express bus and walked the long way home to buy these, and all she could do was shrug. That lit a fire inside of me. I was in an iconic city, doing an iconic thing, and I was finding a lack of knowledge about the culture in a lot of the restaurants I went to.

When I was growing up there, we had a saying: "Others may only eat to live, but in New Orleans we live to eat." In those days we mostly patronized neighborhood restaurants that were run by families and friends. Everyone working knew you and "Ya mama 'nem." Translated: you, your mother, and them—them being everyone else that didn't require naming.

At that point, I knew I wanted to be a part of the return of the true New Orleans. I didn't want to complain about what I no longer saw. Mahatma Gandhi is often credited with saying, "Be the change you wish to see in the world." I wanted to be a part of the change coming to NOLA, the resurrection I wanted to see. I wanted to bring back what the city had taught me. In a fast-paced lifestyle where you can't sit down and have a slice of cake with grandma, I wanted people to be able to take that slice (or cupcake) to go. That's what I want people to feel when they think about The Cupcake Collection.

After attending the Bayou Classic, I went back to Nashville excited about the idea of expanding to New Orleans. When I told my accountant what I wanted to do, she told me, "I don't think you know your power, but I need you to sit still for one year and do nothing."

She wanted me to recover from all the traumatic experiences of my personal life and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I did as she advised and did nothing to implement my idea for the next year. In 2017, I told her I was ready. She looked over all the financials and gave the go-ahead.

We decided to open during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival that ran from April 28–30 and May 4–7. I hired publicist Monchiere Holmes-Jones, a New Orleans native who like me was living in Nashville, to promote it. We aired some radio spots and other publicity. Then we rented an Airbnb unit on the main street leading to the jazz fest at the fairgrounds and transformed it into a bakery, selling cupcakes off the porch. People ate them right out of my hand. They were a big hit!

"Who is this Black girl selling cupcakes?" they wanted to know.

Recipe Note to Self...

You can't take your success with you.

The pop-up market test we had done in New Orleans proved to be a success. With the help of my sister Alaina, who I knew would work hard to produce the product, my friend Aisha, who would manage the process, and my sister Alisa, who was an apt influencer, I felt like my dream team was in place to begin.

By the summer, we found affordable rent and a place to call home there within a food-business incubator. The developers had transformed shipping containers into a beautiful little courtyard called Roux Carré. With rent rates set at only one thousand dollars a month, the central city food court concept still proved to be a challenge; we were only making five dollars some days.

Although they didn't know what it took to facilitate an operation of this magnitude, and frankly neither did I from so far away, they were willing to learn, and they eventually did. Sometimes they met me, or a designated driver, halfway between New Orleans and Nashville every other day while we figured out how to replicate the success we had in Nashville. Every challenge we faced in opening the Nashville store surfaced in some version in New Orleans, especially coupled with their inexperience as business owners. I had to enroll the team in the school of possibilities.

Before I decided to open the New Orleans location, I had read that the city ranked about fiftieth nationally among women-owned businesses. And when you look at statistics on Black-owned businesses, the statistics are even more disparaging. It's not because we can't; we just don't know the how. Without generations to model entrepreneurship for us or a legacy behind us to say, "My grandparents ran their business this way," we often don't know where to start. It's that grit that's going to carry all of us to the next level.

Operating a store in New Orleans has required a mental paradigm shift for the people who work there, as I was grooming and shaping them to understand what ownership looks like. I wanted them to gain an understanding of the business world beyond the level of sacrifice required for simply grinding it out to get a paycheck. I wanted them to see themselves grinding something out that they can put their name on and then pass it down to their progeny. I wanted to give them something that will get them out of debt, allow them to buy property, and allow them to build a legacy for their families that includes generational wealth.

I taught them to know the meanings of their names as fuel to start them on the journey.

Aisha, who always felt like she was fighting a losing battle with her finances, learned in the meaning of her name that God wanted her to be prosperous and live. Her name means alive faith, she who lives, prosperous, and vivacious. Even though she stayed closed to her faith, she always doubted herself. Learning that, Aisha began to change her thought process and worked hard to shift the paradigm in her life. She moved from her home of fifteen years where she lived in lack to a home she spoke into existence, not even knowing where she would live when she started packing her bags. She knew God had something more for her, and after a year's work to get there, she changed her location and the trajectory of her future.

Alaina — whose name means harmonious, precious, sunray, little rock — had always felt fragile. She becomes overwhelmed to be overly perfect. She realized in the meaning of her name that she was called to be strong, to be a person of service, never hiding in the background but taking opportunities to prove that she is and has more than enough.

And, finally, to win in New Orleans, I went back to the scientific method that had served me previously.

The questions may have been a little different, but the hypothesis was relatively the same. What can you do if you only believe? What do you have in your hand that you can use? By now, I was no longer shy. I had confidence at my feet and faith that taught me not to wait for everything to be perfect.

I taught them the lessons I had learned and empowered them to act childishly.

"When you were a child," I told them, "no one ever told you that you could walk. In fact, you decided to walk because it was innately in your nature to progress. When you saw other people walking, you studied and determined that you could get from here to there faster if you employed the same strides you watched them making. You fell, you got hurt, and you might have even broken a bone or two. The pain didn't stop you. The people around you were cheering and telling you that you could do it, so you picked yourself up and you tried again. The difference between you then and you now is what you believe you can do. Become like that child."

When you give a girl a fish, she will eat for a day. When you teach her how to fish, she will eat for a lifetime. I started with fishing lessons. I taught them that the voice inside their heads telling them that they didn't have what it takes was lying to them and that there were people who wanted to help them open this store. Armed with the help of organizations like New Orleans & Company and the New Orleans Business Alliance, and both the Chamber of Commerce and the Black Chamber of Commerce, we opened a store on Magazine Street in New Orleans' Historic Garden District.

"I feel like you're really going to like this landlord," our leasing agent told me over the phone. We hadn't even met in person when I shared with him the challenges we had faced in finding a place that would take us seriously and rent to us in New Orleans. I had been operating a wildly successful business in Nashville for seven years when I began pursuing The Cupcake Collection New Orleans and nine years before we ever landed on a permanent home.

"He's really looking for somebody that's going to be a good tenant and pay the rent."

The property wasn't even officially on the market, but he went to the owner and talked about me moving in the space. I put in a bid on the space. A total of seven bids were submitted for that one space; the company looked at all the concepts and chose The Cupcake Collection. It was two years of working every day, just like it had been in Nashville all those years earlier, before that bakery ever found its place.

As we considered our expansion to New Orleans, it wasn't as easy as I initially thought it would be to teach my extended family circle, such as my godchildren and their parents, what I had learned. It has been worth it, though, as I'm watching them blossom into an entrepreneurial mindset. I see their vocabulary changing as they learn about business issues—supply, demand, and loss. Their growth has been incredible.

Expanding our bakery business to New Orleans was such a feat because everyone in New Orleans cooks. Everyone's grandmother has some great recipe or culinary delight that they make. So if folks from NOLA are going to a store to get something, it either needs to be convenient or simply great tasting.

Locating my store there meant the same for me as it would for a musician coming to Nashville to make it, or an actor going to New York to be on Broadway: if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. It's up to me.