In the second episode of the In Good Company podcast, hosts Denis Horrigan and Kevin Leahy of Connecticut Wealth Management (CTWM) sit down with Michelle Nicholson, founder of The Flour Girl.
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From selling sourdough on her front porch to building a destination business that draws thousands, Michelle’s journey is anything but ordinary. What began as a personal challenge quickly turned into something much bigger, fueled not just by product but by the power of community.
Michelle shares the moment she realized the business had outgrown a side hustle, the creative risks that helped her scale, and how a community-first approach shaped the brand from the very beginning. It’s a conversation about entrepreneurship, adaptability, and what can happen when people rally around something meaningful.
This podcast is produced by Connecticut Wealth Management, LLC, a registered investment adviser. This content is for educational purposes only and is not intended as personalized investment advice. Some guests on this podcast may be clients of the firm. Their participation does not constitute an endorsement of our services, and all discussions are focused on business insights rather than personal financial matters. Investing involves risk and past performance is not indicative of future results. Please consult with your financial professional before making any financial decisions.
Episode 2 Transcript:
Denis Horrigan: Hello everyone, and welcome to the second episode of In Good Company. Thank you for coming back and watching—both of you. We really had a good time with our first episode talking with Chris Dima. Today, I’m really excited to have our guest, Michelle Nicholson, who I had the pleasure of watching speak just about a year ago when she won Small Business Person of the Year in Connecticut and told her story. It kind of blew me away.
My colleagues know I’ve been talking about her and her story ever since. I’m really psyched, pleased, and honored that Michelle has decided to grace us with her presence. She is extremely busy with a business and kids, but she has a great story. I’m excited for her to share it with you—how she has evolved from maybe an accidental entrepreneur to a thriving business.
Michelle, welcome, welcome, welcome. Thanks for being here.
Michelle Nicholson: I’m so excited to be here. This is definitely the most official-feeling podcast I’ve ever been part of.
Denis Horrigan: Well, a lot of people are really impressed. Kevin, wouldn’t you say?
Kevin Leahy: Our moms. Yeah, both our moms are super, super impressed.
Michelle Nicholson: Yep.
Denis Horrigan: Yeah, that’s about right.
Michelle Nicholson: I feel like I can add some family members to the mix for you at the very least.
Denis Horrigan: Sweet. Excellent. Thank you.
Kevin Leahy: Shall we jump right in?
Michelle Nicholson: Let’s do it.
From Experiment to Early Business
Kevin Leahy: So, Michelle, again, thank you for joining us. As the story goes, we’re here as entrepreneurs trying to tell stories and help others on the same entrepreneurial journey. Whether you give advice like we do, or you bake things like you and your team do, we have so many of the same challenges.
But we always love to start with: how did it happen? You clearly have a thriving business now. At some point, you had no business.
Michelle Nicholson: Correct. Yes. I actually, at one point, did have a very small business that was marketing consulting. I was doing that when I started to learn to make sourdough bread.
And I do say “learn to make sourdough bread.” I did not know how to make sourdough bread. I was not an expert in any way. In fact, the first few loaves—the first many loaves—that I made were pretty terrible. I was not good at it at first, but I was very determined. I really wanted to be able to make sourdough.
I also feel like it’s important to note that this was in the summer of 2019, which was before the sourdough craze. I think that’s relevant.
So I started to teach myself how to make sourdough bread. The worse I was at it, the more I wanted to get better. The more I made, the more bread I had just hanging around my house. It felt very wasteful to keep throwing it away. It also felt mean to force my family to eat all of it.
So I made a small Facebook group—I’m definitely of the Facebook generation, so it seemed like the fastest place to go. Every time I had an extra loaf, which was fairly often, I would post that I had it.
We’re very centrally located in our town, and a lot of my friends drive near my house daily—back and forth to schools and sporting events. So if they were nearby, they would pick it up for free and take it home. That was exactly where it started.
Eventually, I did get better at it. In fact, I got pretty good. As I improved, my friends started asking, “Can we buy the bread?” They didn’t want to just wait for an extra loaf—they wanted to be able to get it regularly.
So I went through the process of getting a cottage food license, which was a fairly new distinction in the state of Connecticut. It has a lot of restrictions, but it fit sourdough bread very well. I was able to bake sourdough bread and sell it off my front porch with contactless delivery.
We were all busy parents buying this at that point. People would pick up bread whenever it was convenient for them and either Venmo me or put cash in a box I left on the porch labeled “cash.”
Kevin Leahy: And at this point, you’re baking and selling how many loaves?
Michelle Nicholson: Not very many. Maybe three loaves a day at most. I remember calling my mom one time and saying, “I made $50 in bread this week,” and just being blown away that I was able to sell it at all.
But as I went along, I got better and better at it. As it turns out, my system for sourdough bread was a really good one. It was something people were looking for. It filled a need—home-cooked food with easy access. And it was ahead of the sourdough craze.
So I had established this business. I had done business work before, so I knew I needed an LLC and handled the basics to make sure everything was legal, including health requirements.
I really had everything up and running well by November or December of 2019. And then, of course, March of 2020 came around—
Denis Horrigan: Sorry, what was that? Oh, right…
Michelle Nicholson: —and my business just exploded.
Because I had contactless delivery and a product you couldn’t buy in stores—you couldn’t even buy the ingredients anymore. People couldn’t get flour. It’s crazy to think back on, but you couldn’t get yeast, you couldn’t get flour, and you certainly couldn’t get bread.
So all of a sudden, in a small town that still had enough people to keep me busy, people had nothing else to do. I have so many friends who told me, “The first time we left our house was to drive and get bread off your front porch.”
We grew quickly. The Facebook group went from 10 people to 20, to 50, to 100, to 400 people in just a couple of weeks.
Community-Driven Branding and Growth
Kevin Leahy: Michelle, let me interrupt you there for a second.
Michelle Nicholson: Yeah, of course.
Kevin Leahy: How much of the early stages of this journey is about sourdough bread, and how much of it is about the community? Can you even distinguish between the two?
Michelle Nicholson: No, you really can’t. Especially when we got to the COVID era.
In the initial part of it, it was a fun hobby. It was about bread—it was about the craft and me being able to take pride in what I was making at that point. Once COVID hit, it changed completely. It became a source of positivity. It became a source of entertainment, really, in a lot of ways for people.
It’s sad to say that was entertainment at that point, but it was. There was so much going on, and people were scared. Nobody really knew what to expect, especially in those first couple of months. The community was looking for a way to rally, and it was almost a distraction for a lot of our customers.
At that point, the business wasn’t established with a brand. It was just called “The Porch.” The development of the business and the branding behind it was actually done on Facebook. You can go back and see it—Facebook archives everything. If you ever wanted to scroll through posts from 2020, 2021, you can see the evolution of the business and the votes from people:
“I think you should call it this.”
“I pick this color scheme.”
“I’m voting for this logo.”
They developed the brand with me and for me.
And the community aspect, to your point, that’s where that connection really comes in. Now you’re taking a business and giving the community a real stake in it. Maybe not a financial stake, but they’re in it.
“I picked this.”
“I wrote that slogan.”
They’re really excited about it, and it’s something they wanted to see succeed. It was something to root for. In times of trouble, people are looking for something to be hopeful about, and they wanted to see that.
Denis Horrigan: Michelle, I have a question for you. I was speaking with a buddy of mine, Frank Malone—shout-out Frank from FML—and he lives in Hebron. When I told him we were going to speak with you, he said, “Oh my gosh, The Flour Girl is Hebron—that you’ve turned around the center of town there.”
I think back—you are the proud mom of twins and a singleton, if I’m remembering correctly.
Michelle Nicholson: Yes, correct.
Denis Horrigan: As am I, as is Kevin.
So when you reached out to the community to help name it, were you actually looking for help because you were overwhelmed, or were you thinking this was a good way to engage the community?
Michelle Nicholson: No, I was thinking it was a good way to engage the community. I thought people needed it. I think people needed something to rally around, and that was what I wanted to give them.
I feel like it worked. If you talk to our customers who were there in the early days, they will proudly tell you they were part of it:
“I was one of the people on the porch.”
“I remember picking up bread there.”
They call themselves “Flour Fanatics.” It’s a closed group now—we haven’t let anyone into it in years. It’s about 550 people who were part of the craziness that came along with it.
There was so much. Naming it and branding it was only a piece of the puzzle, because at that point everything was running very smoothly—but it wasn’t like that the whole time.
Kevin Leahy: No way.
Michelle Nicholson: I know, right? Who would think?
From Home Operation to Scalable Business Model
Kevin Leahy: So at what point does it become clear that this is a real, viable business? When does it go from a hobby—or $50 a week—to “this is a career, this is a business, I’m going to employ people,” and so on?
Michelle Nicholson: It’s funny, because I think a lot of business owners don’t have the luxury of pinpointing that transition the way that I can—but I can tell you exactly when it was.
It was Mother’s Day, around 4:05 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon.
My ordering platform crashed—we crashed the website. I realized we were no longer able to operate the way we had been. I know enough about marketing and business—I have a master’s degree in business—so I wasn’t coming into this completely blind.
I remember the website crashing, people getting frustrated—“I can’t get in, it’s not working.” They weren’t mad, but they were trying. And I remember thinking, this isn’t going to work anymore. We can’t do this this way.
So we needed to either go big or go home. That was the moment where I had to make some tough choices—what ended up being some really crazy choices—to keep the business moving in the right direction while we figured out how to overcome the many hurdles that came up over the next six months.
Denis Horrigan: Crazy choices—I love that. As an entrepreneur, things are coming at you fast and furious. What was one of those crazy decisions where you thought, “I don’t know about this, but we’ve got to go for it”?
Michelle Nicholson: Even now, I wonder about the choices I made that day. I’ve had years of marketing experience behind me, and I have never done—or advised a company to do—anything as crazy as what I did, which was shut down my ordering platform for a week.
I started a lottery system for the bread.
Every Monday, I opened the lottery. People could put their name in. It closed Thursday at midnight. On Friday, I would randomly draw 50 to 75 names—however many orders I thought I could handle the following week. Those people were allowed to purchase one item when the menu posted on Saturday.
When I told people I was going to do this, my closest confidants said, “You’ve lost it. No one is going to do this.” But there was nothing else to do during COVID.
So thousands of people every week would enter their name into the bread lottery. On Friday, 50 lucky people would get an email that said, “Congratulations, it’s Bread Week.” They’d get a code to go in and order for the following week.
We operated that way for six to eight months while I figured out next steps—which obviously could not include my home kitchen anymore.
Denis Horrigan: You were still baking in your home kitchen? No storefront? Wow.
Michelle Nicholson: Yep. But we had to contain it, because otherwise people would lose interest.
Denis Horrigan: Right.
Kevin Leahy: Was this your sole job at this point?
Michelle Nicholson: Yes.
Denis Horrigan: In addition to being the mom of three.
Michelle Nicholson: In addition to being the mom of three—and I’m also heavily involved in a lot of boards. I try to give back to the community in every way I can. But it’s the only thing I get paid for.
Kevin Leahy: So at this point you’ve made this decision. You have people helping you, you’re doing it all by—
Michelle Nicholson: No, I’m still flying solo at this point. The help comes very soon after this though.
So I know I need to do something. I’m not really sure what to do. I’m struggling. My first idea is worse than my first loaf of bread—it’s so bad. It’s so bad.
My husband and I—he’s a smart guy too, I don’t know what came over us—but we decide we’re going to buy a trailer. And on the trailer we’re going to build a box. I’m going to bake out of the house, and we’re going to fill the box with bread, and we’re going to put some poor teenager in it, and they’re going to sell the bread out of a parking lot.
That’s how we’re going to do it. It’s a bread box.
So we buy the trailer and we build the box. I think that was July of 2020 when we finished it. And again, it was so fun on social media because I have all the photos—I can see the pictures of the bread box.
We finished it the night before that July hurricane came through. And the hurricane came through and picked that thing up like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz and smashed it right back down on the ground.
And honestly, that was probably for the best, because if we had put that thing on the road, we’d probably be in jail.
Denis Horrigan: Oh, well I was going to say—I wonder if that was the DOT that smashed the bread box.
Michelle Nicholson: Could have been. Could have been the Department of Transportation. It could have been a group effort. Honestly, it was not roadworthy. It was not safe. Whatever poor kid we were going to put inside of it would never have been the same. It was bad. Bad choices all around.
Definitely, at least meteorologically, there was some intervention there. So that was the bread box. Not a good plan.
Kevin Leahy: Am I wrong to admit that I feel like the bread box was a better decision than the lottery?
Michelle Nicholson: It’s possible that it was—but the lottery wasn’t going to hurt anyone. And I think what you need to understand about the bread box is that it would’ve fallen into oncoming traffic. So that’s the difference.
So yeah—bread box, no good.
But I also live in a small neighborhood. We have an HOA. Things weren’t going great as far as traffic patterns go to pick things up at my house. I may have made some questionable decisions about hard-to-get products that created little lines of traffic.
I remember opening my front door one day to give out cupcakes—I didn’t want them to melt, so I told people what time to pick them up. I opened the door and saw the traffic backed up all the way down my road.
And I thought: We need a new plan now.
Because that’s just not going to work for my neighbors. It wasn’t fair to ask them to be okay with that. We live on a private road—you know what I mean? That’s just not nice.
So I closed again and went back to my Facebook community and said, “Listen, I need help. We’ve got to get out. I can’t be in here anymore. I can’t have pickups in this neighborhood anymore.”
And man, did they show up. These people didn’t even know what they were offering me, but they were offering their kitchens, their porches—“This restaurant is only open two days a week, maybe you could bake there.” “You could call this person.” “My husband owns this place—you could go there.”
They had so many great ideas. None of them worked out except one.
It was a local church that had a beautiful kitchen they used for church dinners, which was closed due to COVID. So that’s where we went. I talked to their council six feet apart, with masks on. I brought sweet rolls.
They wanted to help me. They didn’t just accept the concept—they really wanted to be part of watching the business grow and helping it grow. So we agreed on a marginal fee, and I moved into the church.
I got a commercial baking license, which is different from the cottage food license I had before. The cottage license is very limiting—there are products you can’t make, and there are income restrictions we would have blown through pretty quickly. Staying with it wasn’t going to work.
So we moved to the church, which worked out great. I had the whole kitchen and the parish hall. At the time, my kids were distance learning, so I still have a really cute picture of my son in kindergarten at the end of the countertop.
You can see loaves of bread rising, and my son at the end at a little card table with his headphones on and his iPad, hand up waiting for his teacher to call on him.
So it really was the perfect fit. I didn’t have to give everything up. I got to keep my kids with me, but I was still able to do what I do.
Their babysitter—who was in our germ bubble—volunteered to run the bread booth for me, which is where we would sell the bread at night.
From Baker to Business Owner
Denis Horrigan: It’s amazing how you started this in 2019 kind of by accident. It sounds like, if not for a little thing called COVID, we may not be here.
I think a lot of business owners forget the impact of luck.
Michelle Nicholson: Absolutely.
Denis Horrigan: That’s amazing, right?
Michelle Nicholson: It can go either way, I guess. And we had unlucky moments too. I guess the bread box may have been luck in hindsight—but it felt unlucky at the time.
Denis Horrigan: Yeah.
Michelle Nicholson: Yeah.
Denis Horrigan: So there’s a book we talk about with business owners a lot called The E-Myth—and The E-Myth Revisited. It’s an awesome book. “E” being entrepreneur. It’s a metaphorical story about a baker, of all things, who starts baking and next thing she knows she’s running a legitimate, significant business.
Moving from a baker to someone who’s running a business—those are not the same skill sets. How did you learn to become a business owner and actually run a business?
Michelle Nicholson: I mean, I’m learning every day how to become a business owner.
And I think you learn by making mistakes. You just make mistakes over and over and over again. And sometimes you get stuff right. I would say maybe 10% of the time you get things right the first time out of the gate. And you can feel that—you celebrate those wins.
But the crux of it is that you screw up a lot, and you have to recognize the mistakes, learn from them, and remember them—which isn’t always successful either. I feel like I have made the same mistake… I mean, a lot of people say, “You never make the same mistake more than once.” No—you do. You definitely do. You don’t usually remember until you make it the second time.
But I’ve definitely made the same mistake over and over again. And I think that’s really just how you learn. You look to see what works, and you ask for opinions from the people around you. You trust the people who care about your vision. But it’s a jump.
Denis Horrigan: Yeah. Well, you just mentioned something I wanted to ask you about. I think it’s important to surround yourself with good advisors, good resources, other professionals who can help guide you—maybe help you avoid bad decisions and help you make good ones.
Can you think of some of those people you’ve been able to surround yourself with, and some of the good advice they’ve given you?
Michelle Nicholson: Definitely. So I’m very fortunate—I’m not a stranger to the restaurant industry. My parents owned a restaurant when I was growing up.
So my parents actually moved back from Florida when we got into the crux of things to help me out. My dad is still with me several days a week. He does all of my in-house bookkeeping and is definitely sort of an in-house business advisor. Not to say we don’t figure things out together, but he’s seen more than I have, so there’s a lot there.
I was also very fortunate to be paired with an SBDC advisor very early on—a free program run through UConn by the SBA. My advisor has been with me since I was baking out of my house, and she’s still with me today. I don’t see her as often, but I don’t know what I would do without her.
She’s my panic phone calls, my scheduled check-ins. She helped me through all my initial financing, and she listens to my crazy ideas. Sometimes she’s the only one I’m willing to tell them to.
From Doing It All to Leading a Team
Denis Horrigan: So you’re a mom of three, you’ve got a husband at home, you start baking bread, the bread goes crazy—and by the way, I’m hearing stories about lines out the door and bread selling out early in the morning.
So this product you have is high demand—as are, I would imagine, your kids and your husband to a certain extent. How have you gotten to the point—maybe you haven’t—of balancing that, and any advice for people who are kind of where you were a few years ago?
Michelle Nicholson: It’s funny, I was listening to a book the other day by Rachel Hollis, and she was talking about this exact question—the work-life balance conversation, especially as a mom. And I couldn’t possibly agree with her more when she says it’s a complete myth. It doesn’t exist. There is no work-life balance. You’re either in one court or another, and whichever court you’re in, you wish you were more in the other one.
Because when you do take a step back from your business, you feel like you should be back there. And that’s usually when people say you see errors when you’re higher up or further away—you take a look from the outside in.
So when you take a step back and look at your business, that’s when you notice the problems you need to go back in and fix. But when you go back in and fix them, you immediately feel guilty for not being somewhere else you need to be.
So you forget to sign the field trip permission slip, or you realize, “Oh crap, we have a doctor’s appointment and I didn’t do the dismissal form yet.” These are the things you do.
And I actually don’t enjoy the concept of telling people—especially moms, and not to discount dads who are also working hard—but moms who are carrying the mental load of what’s going on with their kids. I don’t like telling them they need to find work-life balance because I don’t think it’s realistic.
I think you just work hard, and you keep bouncing back and forth, and you put your effort where it’s needed most in that moment.
Kevin Leahy: So Michelle, if I may pick up on that a little bit—how do you balance it? You’ve gone from an individual person baking bread in your home kitchen to employing people, growing, going to the local parish, and now multiple locations—up to 40-plus people.
Michelle Nicholson: Yeah, about 40 employees, full and part-time.
Kevin Leahy: How do you manage all that? What lessons have you learned in terms of delegating—not delegating? How do you do this? You can’t possibly do it all.
Michelle Nicholson: No, I don’t even try to. Not at all. Delegation is extremely important.
And I was actually just talking to a friend about this last night. Not to push the women-owned aspect too much, but I do believe women who own businesses have a bit of an edge in staff development.
And I really believe that strongly. The reason is that women, I think, lead with compassion more often than men—not exclusively, but more often. And that’s sometimes looked at negatively, like you’re too nice, you give people too many chances.
But let me tell you—my team is made up of people who never thought they’d be in a job that wasn’t minimum wage. And they are all owning pieces of this business. And I do mean owning it.
I can’t do all of this myself. So instead, I break off little pieces of the vision I have and I give them to staff members when they’ve earned it. I don’t give it to them when they walk in the door, but when they’ve earned my respect and trust.
And often, my best-performing staff members—people who have been with me three or four years—are the ones I gave a piece of the puzzle to. Not just when they were impressing me, but sometimes when they were underwhelming me to a point where I wasn’t sure they were going to make it. Instead of letting them go, I gave them a project.
Something small. Something I could monitor. But a project.
And that’s when you see the true value of the people around you. And they don’t all make it—sometimes you give that trust and they squander it and you have to let them go. And it’s sad. But nine times out of ten, it works.
Being willing to share your vision with employees, and share both the successes and failures of it, is what builds a team that makes me successful. I am not successful by myself. I’m successful because my team helps make me successful.
I’m not even worried when I’m not there. They’ve got it. I was there on Saturday before Easter because I was ready to jump in—I knew it would be busy—and I was just standing around annoying people. They don’t want me there.
They have it. They know exactly what they’re responsible for and they own it and they’re proud of it. The first time you hand someone a set of business cards who thought they were never even going to have anything but a name tag—that’s where you become successful. That’s how you build a team you can trust.
Kevin Leahy: Hmm. So I think we know that when you’re annoying people—
Denis Horrigan: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Just by the look.
Michelle Nicholson: To be nice, but at the same time they’re kind of grabbing me by the back of the shoulders like, “Can you move?”
Denis Horrigan: Yeah, that’s it. That’s the look. “We’ve got this—get out of the way.”
Vision, Goals, and Entrepreneurial Drive
Kevin Leahy: Sorry, Denis, if I may—Michelle, you’ve said the word “vision” a bunch of times.
Michelle Nicholson: Yes, for me.
Right now, this is where I am. I’m big on goal setting. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I subscribe to a practice that a lot of people probably couldn’t tolerate, but I write down my goals physically every day on paper.
I pick a couple I’m going to work on each year. I have a notebook upstairs—
Denis Horrigan: It’s pink. I’ve got to guess it’s pink.
Michelle Nicholson: Pink.
Denis Horrigan: Yeah.
Michelle Nicholson: I have a whole pink notebook story. But I do have a notebook that has my original goals from 2019.
On that list, it says I run a successful bakery and I also run a successful café. When I wrote that, the café wasn’t even in the cards. It wasn’t part of the picture at all—we hadn’t even talked about it yet.
Another goal was being recognized for giving back to my community, which is something I focus on a lot. And that I have a dedicated staff around me.
So when I go back and look at that, there’s a sense of accomplishment. That was my vision at the time.
I think my vision exists on multiple levels. It’s being able to survive a winter without worrying about payroll. And it’s also, like, “What if we opened a hotel?” There are all kinds of variations of what that vision can be.
Kevin Leahy: What do you love more—entrepreneurship or baking and bakeries and cafés?
Michelle Nicholson: Entrepreneurship.
The bakery ended up being the vessel I was able to pour this passion into, but it could have been something else.
Lessons in Leadership, Trust, and Communication
Denis Horrigan: What have you learned as a business owner now, having 40 employees? What have you learned about leadership over the past five years that you didn’t know before? Any big takeaways?
Michelle Nicholson: I mean, other than that it’s really hard? It requires more patience than I would’ve thought, more trust than I would’ve thought, and more paperwork than I would’ve thought.
But I think the real answer is trust. How much of yourself you have to trust in other people—and you can’t be successful hoarding that to yourself.
Even a dishwasher whose job is to make sure the kitchen is clean at night—I’m still trusting them. I’m trusting them alone with my building. In some cases, I may be trusting them more than anybody else.
Kevin Leahy: You know, I’ve had moments—and Dennis, you’ve probably had them too—where I was so sure I knew how to handle something or how to treat somebody, and then later, months or years later, I look back with probably embarrassment at how little I knew about leadership or management.
When you think about how you help your younger self—or somebody following in your footsteps, regardless of industry—you go from being good at something, or just a hard worker, and then suddenly you’re in charge of people.
Are there leadership lessons you can share?
Michelle Nicholson: Oh yeah. Assumptions and communication—probably the number one thing. I like to tell my leadership team, “If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”
And I’ve made that mistake. It was my mistake. It was Thanksgiving 2022. We had an assistant doing small-level prep, and I wrote down a recipe for an apple pie crumb and abbreviated ingredients.
The baker mistook “BS” on my sheet—not for baking soda, but for brown sugar—and used baking soda instead.
I didn’t realize until I had 65 pies in the oven. And I couldn’t even smell it, because I had baked a scent blocker into the topping. I didn’t test the crumb. I didn’t verify it. I didn’t check with her. I just put it on 65 apple pies and put them in the oven the night before Thanksgiving—pre-orders.
I ruined all of them.
We realized the error around six o’clock at night. I called my husband and said, “There’s nothing I can do. I’m going to call grocery stores, buy frozen pies, and give them away for free.” And he said, “No—you’re never going to forgive yourself if you do that. I think we should try to fix it.”
So we went to Whole Foods, bought 200 pounds of apples, and posted in our Facebook group that we needed help at the bakery—bring your own peeler.
And they showed up. About 25 people came the night before Thanksgiving in pajamas, with peelers. We peeled, sliced, and rebaked 65 apple pies.
That was my mistake—but I fixed it with help. And it was a communication error. I assumed someone would understand what I meant, when they didn’t have the experience or context I had.
I use that example a lot with my staff. We still joke about it to this day—and also that I lock up the baking soda in a safe.
But it’s true: if you don’t communicate clearly, you cannot expect people to do what you want. You have to tell them exactly what you’re thinking. And if it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.
Denis Horrigan: There’s also a lot of leadership in that—pardon the pun—but eating it.
Taking ownership of a mistake rather than pretending you’re infallible. That kind of humility probably ingratiates you with your staff and your community. It’s a great, if unfortunate, story—but it shows humility.
Michelle Nicholson: Exactly. And I think that’s really important. As a leader—staff, entrepreneurship, everything underneath you—the key is that their mistakes are my mistakes.
It’s never them alone. Ever. I don’t care if they’ve done something insane in front of a customer—it is still my mistake.
I hire them, I guide them, I lead them. If they make a mistake, it is ultimately on me. I would never ask them to shoulder it alone, because they’re working within my vision.
Seeing Potential in People Over Time
Denis Horrigan: So you’ve had great success over the past five years, and we love telling the success story. You’ve mentioned challenges—the bread box, the baking soda incident.
Are there other stories—not failures, but learning moments—that you think are important for people to hear?
Michelle Nicholson: Oh my gosh, there are so many lessons I’ve learned. But they’re not all bad-ending lessons.
There are stories of staff members—like someone who was perpetually late for work. She’ll laugh when she hears this, but she was always late. Every day.
She’s my events coordinator and front-end manager now.
There was a moment where I remember thinking, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to have to let her go.” And I stopped myself right before having that conversation.
Instead, I bought her an alarm clock. And told her to put it on top of whatever she was already using. It was particularly obnoxious.
And you know what? She’s still late sometimes—but she’s incredible.
And I think back to who she was then versus who she is now. I was at a front-of-house meeting recently, just sitting in. I wasn’t part of the agenda.
I sat back and listened to her talk to the staff—speaking my values for the business as if they were her own. And I actually had to step out of the room because it was almost emotional.
To see what she had become, how confident she was, how she carried the vision forward—it made me think about the fact that I almost lost her. I almost decided she wasn’t worth saving.
And how much I would have missed out on if I had. I don’t even know if I would’ve regretted it at the time, because I wouldn’t have known.
But being able to watch her become who she is—and what she’s done for the business—I can’t imagine if I had followed through with letting her go.
From One Location to a Multi-Building Campus
Kevin Leahy: Awesome. Take us—where you are now as a business. You’re not on the front porch. You’re not in the parish anymore.
Michelle Nicholson: No, we are not. I am proud to say I now have four front porches. I was very insistent that each of my buildings have a front porch still, though I don’t know if anybody else fully understands the meaning behind that besides me.
But no—we were very fortunate. Just a few days after we signed on the loan for the bakery, which was the entire business idea initially, the woman who owned the café that was already existing—about 20 feet to my left of the building, the rotting, condemned building we were going to rebuild as a bakery—called me and let me know she was moving to Maine and asked if I wanted to buy her café.
I did not want to buy her café. But it was 20 feet from my bakery building. So I did end up saying yes.
I reached out to my community for help on that because I had just signed a loan, and even the SBA isn’t going to give you two in the same week. So I ended up doing a crowdfunding campaign. We raised $14,000 in 48 hours.
Kevin Leahy: Oh wow.
Denis Horrigan: Wow. Wow.
Michelle Nicholson: That crowdfunding campaign allowed me to put the down payment on the café. And the café actually opened about six months before the bakery. So we opened the café in August of 2021, and the bakery opened in March of 2022.
By the time the bakery opened, we were already out of space in the café. So we needed more seating. There was a building behind us that was the garage for the bakery building. All of my buildings are historic—they were built in the 1800s.
That building was being renovated, so we took that as well and added seating for the café as a placeholder while we built the new café. We called it the Door Yard. That opened in March of 2023.
We started construction on the new café in 2024. It’s a post-and-beam building we built in the original town schoolyard—so it was a vacant lot, but only about 20 feet to the right of the bakery. So the bakery is now in the center, appropriately.
We opened the café in October of this past year, 2025, and moved all café operations into the new space.
For point of comparison, my old kitchen can fit inside the refrigeration of my new one.
So now we have this entire café in this palace of a building, and our bakery has remained the same. The Door Yard has remained as well—we use it for events.
And the original café building, which was built in 1684 and was the original general store for the town in the 1700s and 1800s, we restored it back to that. So we now have three buildings on Main Street—12, 14, and 16—and one behind it.
Our campus, as we call it, consists of a bakery, a café, an event space, and a country store.
We see a traffic count on weekends of probably 1,500 to 2,500 people coming from all over New England to see us. To get New England’s best cinnamon rolls on Sunday mornings, where they line up 30 to 45 minutes before we open—every season, every weather condition—to get them hot out of the oven. We only make them on Sundays. And yes, to get bread and shop the campus.
And I think maybe slow down a little bit, too, because it’s a quiet spot. There’s nothing else around us. Your friend said we are the center of Hebron—we are, geographically speaking, that’s correct. There’s not much else there. We are the middle.
And I love seeing high schoolers walk to us after school to get cookies and lemonade. I love that the Garden Club meets there every Friday. We’re part of the community—that’s where we were supposed to be. But we also bring in other people who are looking for that sense of community.
Concluding Thoughts
Denis Horrigan: It’s such a cool story. It really hearkens back to almost 1950s images of the center of town being the café or soda shop. It’s so cool. And I do know—you’ve got to get there early if you want cinnamon rolls or any of the baked goods, because lines are long and you do sell out, if I understand correctly.
Michelle Nicholson: We do sell out. We don’t like to have leftover product—we want everything fresh. So it is important to get there early.
Our bread at this point, we’ve got a good handle on—we usually have it through the end of the day. And the café also uses our bread, so that helps. The bread you get your sandwiches on is made fresh before service.
Denis Horrigan: Wow.
Kevin Leahy: Well, we always say we’re not claiming victory—we’re not done yet—and I’m nearly sure you feel the same way. But congratulations.
Michelle Nicholson: Thank you.
Denis Horrigan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really inspiring. It’s exciting, it’s funny. I really appreciate you taking the time to share it with us and our listeners.
And the other thing—I don’t know if you want to shout out your SBDC person also.
Michelle Nicholson: Her name is Michelle.
Michelle Augustine. She’s amazing. I think you can request her specifically. The SBDC is an incredible program. I really try to promote it—there are a lot of amazing programs under the SBA umbrella that I like to highlight.
Denis Horrigan: Well, you’ve been a great advocate. Thank you for doing that. Again, thank you, Michelle Nicholson, the Flower Girl—awesome shop in Hebron. Go visit early and often. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll talk next time.
Michelle Nicholson: Thank you.