SEASON 3: EPISODE 2 TRANSCRIPT
Mignon François
Mignon François: This is what I love about seed. Whenever you get an apple, you get more than just that apple if you don't eat your seeds. And a lot of times we're eating our seed instead of planting it, and on the inside of every apple is an orchard if we will plant the seed. And so that $5 turned into 60, turned into millions, bore the fruit of its kind because I planted the seed.
Dr. Greg Jones: Our world is filled with obstacles that can seem insurmountable, moments when resources run thin and the odds feel stacked against us. Yet even in the face of scarcity, hope has the power to reframe our vision and ignite a path forward. It is an essential ingredient in the recipe for success, fueling creativity, perseverance and the courage to trust that something greater is possible. My name is Dr. Greg Jones, president of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with amazing agents of hope, people who demonstrate what it means to live with hope and lean into the lessons picked up along the way. They are The Hope People.
Today's agent of hope is Mignon François, founder of The Cupcake Collection who started her entrepreneurial journey with just $5. Through faith, perseverance and innovative thinking, she turned that seed into a multimillion dollar business that has inspired countless others. In our conversation, Mignon shares how she transformed financial hardship into opportunity, how prayer and faith anchor her business, and how she uses her platform to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs. Her journey is a powerful reminder that hope can redeem the past and multiply possibilities for the future. I want to take you back to the beginning. You have $5 and that begins The Cupcake Collection.
Mignon François: Yes.
Dr. Greg Jones: Tell that story for us.
Mignon François: Yeah. I was drowning in debt and broken as we were losing everything that we had. I was married at the time, I like to refer to him as my wasband, and he had come onto the porch and he looked like death to me. He looked gray underneath his skin and I just began to pray and ask God for something that I could do to help him make the ends meet. And I heard God say, "Make cupcakes." But the problem is I didn't know how to bake not even out of a box. So God, how am I supposed to do this? When God gives you instructions, he provides a way for you to fulfill those instructions. I like to say it like this, when God orders the meal, he's responsible for the bill. And so as I began to walk toward, okay, how am I supposed to create this, new people were coming into my neighborhood.
They were tearing down a warehouse and putting 15 houses up. They were taking down one house and putting up three. It just was an explosion in my area. And as those people would come, I would welcome them to the neighborhood with cupcakes and I would say, "Hi, I'm Mignon François. I have a bakery coming soon across the street. I don't know how to bake. My family says it's good, but they love me but you don't. So maybe you'll try it and tell me what you think." Those people would knock on my door and ask me for more. They would offer me money for the product that I was giving them for free. And it was on one evening, I was sitting in the back of my house. I was doing the Dave Ramsey baby steps plan. I was trying to snowball my way out of monthly debt, like light bills and mortgage in those kinds of things.
I didn't have enough to take care of anything and I was sitting in the house with no electricity because we were running our house on a generator at the time. And so what my wasband would do is he would go and make enough money for the day and we would use that to put gas in the generator to keep the lights running so our children would have some sort of normalcy at night when they came home. In this particular day, my neighbor knocks on the door. As I had just finished negotiating what little money I had, I realized I had $5 left and I hadn't even allotted anything for groceries. And she asked me to make cupcakes for all of her clients for the season. I knew that I only had $5. I know that I'm sitting in this house with no electricity and she sees the perplexity on my face and thinks I don't like the idea and says, "When you make some, I'll pay you some."
And I said, "So let's get this straight. If I make you 12, you're going to pay me for 12?" "Yes." "If I make 24, you're going to pay me for 24?" "Yes." "If I make 60." "Yes, when you make some, I'll pay you some." I close the door, I take the deal and I immediately go into a come to Jesus moment with God and say, "Lord, why would you give me this opportunity, an opportunity I've been waiting for when I have no money to take it?" And God said, "But I feed birds and they don't toil or store up in barns. How much more will I provide for you who looks like me?" And so I say, "All right, bet." I put on my tennis shoes and I walked to the Kroger at the corner of Monroe and Rosa Parks and I buy everything I could buy with that $5. I gamble everything that we have on her paying me like she said that she would. And like she said that she would, she paid me that day and I turned that 5 into 60.
I took the 55 because if I burn everything, which I was known for doing, I wanted to at least have the five that I started with. So I put the five back and I took the 55 back to the store and I bought everything I could buy with that 55 and turned that into 600 by the end of the week. And I'd been flipping that money from 2007 to 2017 where for the very first time I learned how to leverage my own equity and my own opportunity to create more opportunity for The Cupcake Collection. I did that with no debt, no experience, no knowledge in the business, and over 5 million cupcakes were sold in that period of time with nothing more than that one $5 seed.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow. That's an extraordinary story.
Mignon François: This is what I love about seed. Whenever you get an apple, you get more than just that apple if you don't eat your seeds. And a lot of times we're eating our seed instead of planting it. And on the inside of every apple is an orchard if we will plant the seed. And so that $5 turned into 60, turned into millions, bore the fruit of its kind because I planted the seed.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's so beautiful. And it's so important in our day when so many people are in deficit thinking or scarcity mindset. And as a friend said, you embody joy and hope. Cupcakes happen to have been your vehicle to do that. But it wasn't just about the cupcakes, it was about a trust and a belief and a joy and a hope that really leaned into the future. And when you were just talking about the seed, it has that multiplier impact to see way more than was right in front of you.
Mignon François: Yeah. I love that you said that.
Dr. Greg Jones: You've talked about nothing being wasted. Can you talk about what you mean by that?
Mignon François: Yeah. I believe that there are no mistakes. Every stupid thing that you've ever had to do is taking you from where you are to where it is that you want to be. I was a premed student at Xavier University in 1991, going to school with hopes of becoming a doctor one day. And I was on scholarship and flunking out of my science classes. And how do you manage having a scholarship and you're flunking your classes? Fast-forward through my life 17 years later, I end up in Nashville, Tennessee in Germantown, which is one of the first incorporated neighborhoods in Nashville just off of Jefferson Street, which is just a few miles down the road from Meharry Medical School where I had intended that one day I would end up in medical school.
I'm in my kitchen trying to negotiate that same flour, butter, sugar and eggs to create a recipe for success that my neighbors are now knocking on the door to receive. But in the beginning, I didn't know how to bake, not even out of a box. But I call my grandmother on the phone and say, "Grandma, the man on the radio says, you could get out of debt by having a bake sale. Can you just tell me how to make your strawberry cake?" But my grandmother didn't have recipes that are traditional. They weren't written down anywhere. So she said, "Open up your hand, grab that much flour, pinch your fingers together. That's how much salt." And she walked her whole recipe for me with the measurements of her hands and the lines on her fingers.
It was my experience with science that unlocked for me what was written on that page because after I made the first one and it came out horrible, I stared at that paper to say, "How is my grandmother making a successful cake out of this?" And that's when I had an aha moment that the ingredients on this page were elements that exist in the earth that I could manipulate just like you do in science. And I realized that the failure in that science class came back to serve me as favor 17 years later as I had enough understanding of chemical reactions to rewrite her entire recipe to the tune of many recipes that I now make.
All of the recipes that The Cupcake Collection are mine, all of the fillings, the icings, the cakes are mine. And I write those recipes based on scientific reaction, not having been able to do it, to apply it to the human body. I now can apply it to flour, butter, sugar and eggs. And God used what looked like failure and allowed it to be favor so it wasn't wasted. I needed it in order to inform my future. So one thing I hope that people will hear me say is you look to your past to inform your future so that you know where it is that you're trying to go.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful. That image of failure being turned into favor, that's one a lot of people need to have at the forefront of your mind. That's beautiful. One of the things that I love about your work as an entrepreneur is the way you've woven your faith in and through it. How does daily prayer enter into your business and your life?
Mignon François: Yeah. So we have a huddle time that we call circle time at The Cupcake Collection where a lot of businesses probably use that in order to disseminate to their teams what it is that's coming down the pike that day or that week. We use it as a time to pray and invite the Holy Spirit to reign over The Cupcake Collection. I usually give them a thought for the day, and it's all centered around the circle. We believe that everything is done in a circle at The Cupcake Collection. Even the roundness of our cupcake in the way that we put the icing on is done in a circle. And so that's also the pillars of our company. So they are celebration, integrity, respect, community, leadership and excellence. Those all lead out to be the circle.
And so in that circle time before COVID, we would huddle and we would hold hands in a circle and we would pray. And so we not only prayed for The Cupcake Collection, but we prayed for everybody coming into The Cupcake Collection. So that joy you feel when you experience The Cupcake Collection has nothing to actually do with the cupcakes, even though they are amazing and award winning, it has everything to do with the prayer that we have prayed for you and experienced in The Cupcake Collection that the spirit of God would also flow into you and cover over every challenge or every need that you had just because you came.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's a remarkable story, although I do have to say the cupcakes themselves are amazing.
Mignon François: Thank you.
Dr. Greg Jones: You brought me a caramel cupcake and oh my.
Mignon François: I think that is going to be one of the testaments to my legacy, that caramel cake. Yeah.
Dr. Greg Jones: Ooh, it's amazing. I want to talk about your legacy. You mentioned earlier your book Made from Scratch.
Mignon François: Yeah.
Dr. Greg Jones: How did reflecting on your journey contribute to your thinking about your purpose, your legacy, and all the ways in which what might have been failure at one point has become favor? Talk about Made from Scratch and what you learned in writing it.
Mignon François: Yeah. I had so many aha moments in Made from Scratch, but here's one of the biggest ones I had. I am the daughter of a man that was born on a sugar cane plantation right outside of New Orleans in Louisiana. And to realize as I was writing the story that I had built wealth and opportunity and legacy in the same industry that my ancestors didn't have free enterprise only two generations earlier would not be lost on me. And so the fact that I am doing this very thing in the sugar industry is the biggest takeaway that I got from reflecting on the journey of Made from Scratch, from nothing with nothing, having no prospect, I was able to build something that could change the trajectory of my whole entire family and the people who are connected to it.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow, that's pretty extraordinary. Talk about the ways in which you've thought about perseverance. It's a good biblical principle, and yet it's really hard, particularly for young people today, to really believe in that. It took a lot for you to get from that $5 to all the way to now.
Mignon François: I believe in the promises of God, and I believe that the way that you receive the promises of God is you read them really slowly. A lot of times we read scripture really fast and try to run through it, but if you take it word by word, the Bible says line upon line, idea upon idea, something new happens when you take each word for word. And so my book Made from Scratch opens with James 1:2-4, and it says, "Counted all joy when you experience trials of many kinds, knowing that these trials come to increase your perseverance, and when your perseverance is mature and complete, then you will lack nothing.
And when I think about the idea that the promise is there will be joy, then I understand the other biblical promise that all things work together, that means in tandem, for the good of them who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose. And we all know the Bible says, from your mother's womb, I called you out by your name into a purpose. That means then that everybody walking on this earth has a purpose that was given to us by God Himself. And so when I know that all things are working for me, not happening to me, that is my fuel for joy. That counted joy in the beginning, in the trials, in the diagnosis, in the things that don't feel good, that joy will come because the promise is joy comes in the morning. I like to say sometimes it comes in the M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow, that's beautiful. And I often will tell people when Paul writes rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice, he's sitting in a prison cell. This isn't because he's just had a great triumph or made a lot of money or had some great news come to him. He's in prison when he says rejoice the Lord always. And I love the way you talk about that perseverance and carrying through that with joy. I want to pick up one of those themes where you had some trials and had to persevere and it's with joy because it also enabled you to innovate through tornado damage, the pandemic, you innovated with food trucks and pop-ups. Talk about how you've developed that entrepreneurial mindset to help you move through hard seasons and find creative solutions.
Mignon François: Yeah. I think I am just naive enough to believe that if I tell others, that they want to help me. And so the tornado hit, we're in the eye of the tornado. We get shut down for 10 days and COVID happens right behind that. So we just went on to social media and said, "Hey guys, here's what we need." Because people were like, "What about our cupcakes?" It didn't happen to the rest of Nashville, right? It didn't happen to the rest of the community where we were shipping our cupcakes nationwide. It only kind of happened in the central part of Nashville where they were hit by the storm, but the people who didn't feel it are not necessarily understanding the magnitude of what has just happened, right? So I go on Instagram and I say, "This is what I need." And people begin to run to The Cupcake Collection to help it.
And I used my platform to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. I have everything I need, but there's people who are unseen who need your help. So I need you to go further into north Nashville and I need you to go help them." And it began to cause other people to be activated in order to help others who didn't have the resources or the access to resources that I had. But what it gave me was an opportunity to connect in a way that I needed to connect, and that was to do pop-up shops. I believed if I could do pop-up shops because the store wasn't necessarily broken as soon as we got back the electricity, but the trees were down and the people couldn't get in and out and those kinds of things.
And so one of my friends who was working one of the food lines that end up getting created out of the work that I sent into north Nashville says to their boss, "What is it that we can do for The Cupcake Collection? I mean, they've got us out here and we're serving food to north Nashville, but The Cupcake Collection isn't open, it's not operating. Is there anything that we can do?" And so this employee of Taziki's goes to his manager and asks what they can do. She ends up being a friend of mine and says, "Mignon, why didn't you call me and tell me that you needed help?" And I was like, "But I put it on Instagram." And she said, "Well, what do you need?" I said, "I need a place to do a pop-up shop."
And so we decided that we were going to do a pop-up shop at the Taziki's in The Gulch. And she said, "Well, how about I have nine stores? How about you do it at all of them? And we do it as long as you want to do it until you get tired of doing it." And so they end up becoming a dessert partner of ours through the pandemic and after. And what they open their hands to help us ends up helping them, and we increased their dessert bottom line by 166%.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Mignon François: It goes to show that when you keep your hand open, yes, you lose things as you give them away, but it also leaves your hand open to receive from God.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's just such a beautiful story. And it reminds me of a favorite image I have from Christian history of a monk who said that all of humanity is on a circle and God's at the center point of the circle. And as you move closer to God, you move closer to other people, or if you move closer to other people, you move closer to God.
Mignon François: Closer to God, right.
Dr. Greg Jones: But that story shows the power of friendship moving closer to your friend actually enabled both of you to flourish more and see God more clearly in a beautiful, beautiful way.
Mignon François: Yeah. Amen.
Dr. Greg Jones: Even if all you had done with The Cupcake Collection and Made from Scratch and just been a fabulous entrepreneur, but one of the things that makes you such a remarkable person and an agent of hope and joy is the way you pour back into others. That you're a person who wants to help others discover their sense of purpose and their joy. And you pour into young entrepreneurs. Talk about why you think it's important to encourage younger entrepreneurs.
Mignon François: Yeah. It goes down to what I said in the beginning, one of the last verses that I opened was, I set life and death before you, blessings and curses, and I choose life. And I said to God in exchange, "God, if you will do this for me, I will tell anybody who will listen about what they could do if only they believe." So doing this, going out and helping other people is just me keeping my promise to God so that He'll keep His promise to me. And what I love about children, the Bible says, suffer the little children to come unto me for such as the kingdom of heaven. For you, a child might be nine, and the things that a child can do if you believe in them just enough to let them do it. My little 10-year old granddaughter has been expertly baking cupcakes since she was three.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Mignon François: I have one that's 13.
Dr. Greg Jones: She's got a pretty good mentor hanging around to help her.
Mignon François: I've got one that's 13 that's been doing inventory at The Cupcake Collection since she was five.
Dr. Greg Jones: Wow.
Mignon François: And I just believe that there is an audacity that hope gives you. And I love that the children, the Bible says, suffer the little children to come unto me for such as the kingdom of heaven. But what you consider a child is not necessarily what the next person considers a child. Because at 51, I'm still my mother's child, right?
Dr. Greg Jones: Yes, indeed.
Mignon François: So I'm still her children, right? And so it's important to not just get lost on the fact of the little children, but also the ones who are unseen who need that hope. And someone gave me the most beautiful compliment a few years ago, and he said, "You know what your problem Mignon is, you believe that hope is obvious." And I'm like, "Well, isn't it?" He said, "No, it's not obvious to people." And so I made that my personal mission in life that I wanted to make hope obvious. And so that's what I'm just out here doing. And what I love about children is that children have awe. They have not lost that wonder, that oh, that was awesome. And I just want to always have that sparkle in my eye, and I believe it's contagious, and you get it by being in close proximity to children no matter how old they are.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's extraordinary. I love that image, making hope obvious. That sounds like the title of a future book.
Mignon François: Oh, I love it. Let me take note of that.
Dr. Greg Jones: What would you say, we have younger listeners, students who may be aspired to become an entrepreneur and they're not sure how to take the first step, how do you encourage someone to take that first step like you did, and then to continue to dream and see those dreams become reality?
Mignon François: God requires obedience out of us. The ideas that you have are not yours. And if you would understand that the ideas were dropped to you, they were whispered to you, you were offered an opportunity to go on a journey to watch it come to fruition, you would follow that dream with a much greater abandon if you knew that you weren't responsible for it anyway except to simply carry it. I love to say it like this. If I were invited to an all-white party and the person who was putting on the party told me to wear pink, I would go boldly to that party in that pink believing that there was something special that was assigned to me at the party.
But everyone else coming to the party would say, "She's not getting in," and looking at me like she must not have gotten the memo that this was an all-white party, never knowing all along that the instructions to me were to wear pink. And I think that we're all asked to wear pink in different walks or different opportunities in life when it was never our idea to don pink in the first place. It was God's idea. And if we go with reckless abandon into the instructions that he's given us, we would find that he was waiting on us all along. Does that make sense?
Dr. Greg Jones: Oh, not only makes sense. It's so inspirational and beautiful. I could talk to you all day and just continue to just soak up your wisdom. I want to ask you one final question. It goes back to Made from Scratch. Fast forward 5 years out, or 10 years out, what chapter hasn't yet been written that you're excited about?
Mignon François: Oh my gosh, this is so good. The redeeming of time. A lot of times we think that we only have a little bit of time for God who's the author of time decides how much time we get. And I just can't wait to see how God buys back the time that I have left to His honor and glory for whatever He's deciding that it will be. I told you in the beginning, I had a wasband who left and God still promised me that one of those was coming. So I'm looking forward to what we create in the atmosphere in the future. But more than that, whatever God has said for me to do next is happening right now with the words that I'm saying and I can't see it. So how he's going to redeem the time is what I'm looking forward to seeing.
Dr. Greg Jones: That's beautiful and a powerful piece of wisdom. Thank you for that. I have to say, your cupcakes are incredible and you're even more so.
Mignon François: Thank you so much.
Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for joining us today on The Hope People Podcast.
Mignon François: Thank you for allowing me to be part of the hope that is cast from this place.
Dr. Greg Jones: Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself, and to help us cultivate a sense of wellbeing for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.