Scott and Christine Vogel are the owners of Nothing Bundt Cakes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. As they left comfortable positions in corporate America, the Vogels fought to make their dream come true in their new home city. Using their experience, dedication and a partnership with our business team, they started a delicious movement that has been nothing “bundt” the best for our West Michigan community.

 

 

Transcript

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00:06 Lynne Jarman-Johnson: Money I’m home, from finance to fitness. Hi everyone, I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. We have a sweet podcast for you today, introducing you to the founders of the local fabulous Nothing Bundt Cakes, and our business partner and dear friends Scott and Christine Vogel. Thanks for joining us today.

 

00:26 Scott Vogel: Thanks for having us.

 

00:27 Christine Vogel: Happy to be here.

 

00:29 LJJ: I really want to find out about how you came to West Michigan, because from what I understand, after really getting to know you guys, you were really on a very fast-paced, high level positions, and not at all a suburb raising family. It was boom, boom, boom, boom, and then all of a sudden, here you are in this wonderful community.

 

01:00 SV: What’s fun for us to talk about it is, is that Consumers Credit Union has been with us in the journey. So if we take a full step back, we were out in Boston, we had lived all over the country, and so a big part of that is I would work in companies who are going through hyper-growth, or were stumbling and was part of a talented team, we come in and revitalize the company. And so I was very, very fortunate and worked at Cure, the single-serve coffee company for a number of years, I went through their hyper-growth, and an opportunity for us to come back closer to the Midwest. The family came up to be with Bissell. Now Grand Rapids had never been on our radar before, and so the opportunity seemed right. We had two young children and one on the way, and so we up and left Boston and we came to Grand Rapids, and literally we fell in love with the community.

 

01:54 LJJ: Christine, at this point in time, you don’t have Grand Rapids on your radar at all. What’s your thought process as you’ve got an entire family that you’re thinking of uprooting and bringing?

 

02:05 CV: So, we knew we wanted to move closer to the Midwest and being from the south suburbs of Chicago, if you’re from the south side you go to Michigan in the summer, from the north side you go to Wisconsin in the summer. So, while Michigan wasn’t my home, it was kind of my home away from home. And while I had never been to Grand Rapids per se, I was in Michigan every summer since I was a baby, so the thought of coming here was a no-brainer. And then when we came to Grand Rapids and started looking at homes, it was like a suburb that I grew up in, and it immediately felt like home.

 

02:46 SV: So, for us, we made the decision, we said, “Oh my gosh, we can’t leave here.” And frankly, Chris said to me, she goes, “Hey, if you’re going to take another job and you have to move, I’m staying here.” [laughter] And so that was a good signal…

 

03:00 CV: That’s true.

 

03:00 SV: Is that we said to ourselves instead of moving potentially over five to seven years, let’s make a stand and make Grand Rapids our forever home, and that’s when the search began of… So, what are we going to do? And the opportunity to join the franchise of Nothing Bundt Cakes came up. We thought about starting a small appliance company from my background and everything else, but we love the opportunity where you buy into amazing recipes and then also a fun brand name, but it’s old school baking and frosting. But the beauty of the platform is it allowed us to give back to the community and we wanted to feel like we were in a small community again where we could play a positive role in it, and then could we support our family make this our forever home.

 

03:46 SV: And so that was this intersection that was this dream and the big pie in the sky, and then we said, “Okay, let’s go for it,” And we were crazy to do it, but we did, and we actually can… We were talking about this driving in, we said, “Oh my gosh, we really don’t have any regrets.” We might have aged 20 years [laughter] in the last year or two, but it’s been an incredible journey and it’s so fun to be sitting here three years later with people we partnered with at the very beginning of the journey. And that’s what makes it special.

 

04:24 CV: And also… And it was such a good fit for us because Scott has the business background, and I grew up cooking and baking, but also after college went to culinary school for baking and pastry. So, while I’m not the baker, I know the ins and outs of what needs to be done to make everything work. So, it was kind of a good pair for us.

 

04:44 SV: And to add to that is if anyone asked me if I make the cakes, I said, “They’re good because I don’t bake the cakes. [laughter] You don’t want me baking the cakes.”

 

04:52 LJJ: You know, looking at you, you have three young kids, they’re healthy, happy, fun.

 

05:01 CV: Crazy.

 

05:02 LJJ: Crazy.

 

[laughter]

 

05:02 LJJ: That’s all good. You really have an amazing partnership, because you’re… It has to… It has to really center on the stability of the two of you. How do you keep all of the balls up in the air? Because you’re both working, you’re both running an extremely successful business and raising these beautiful kids.

 

05:26 CV: I think part of how we make it work while we both work and run the bakery, I am majority of the time at home with the kids, and Scott is operations at the bakery. So, while we work together, we’re not 100% of the time together…

 

[laughter]

 

05:46 CV: Which…

 

05:47 LJJ: Gives you the space.

 

05:48 CV: We give the space, but we’re doing our own things while working on the same thing.

 

05:53 LJJ: How important is communication in all of that?

 

05:56 CV: Oh, it’s huge.

 

05:56 SV: Well, I think we’ve learned a lot. I guess, when we went into this journey, you say to yourself, “Either this is going to make our marriage, or break your marriage,” right? The cool thing is, is we’ve learned so much about each other and what it takes in a partnership to make things happen.

 

06:15 CV: And what works and doesn’t work.

 

06:17 SV: What doesn’t work. You learn a lot about yourself, but the other thing is, what Christine isn’t saying, is when the froster doesn’t show up, or the baker doesn’t show up, believe me, she’s in there and we will, as much as I joke I don’t bake, sometimes I have to and we’ll bake in shifts, or we’ll frost in shifts. The thing that a lot of people don’t realize in small businesses, and I didn’t realize this being from corporate America, is that you are the IT department, you are HR, and you are that whatever hat when something doesn’t go right or bump in the night, and believe me it will. And I think what it’s taught us is to really be grateful and enjoy the moments that are going well, and when the curve balls come, which they will, you navigate them together. And you, believe me in time you do it with more grace than you… We probably did at the very beginning, but it’s been incredible, and that’s the springboard for us that if you surround yourself by… With amazing partners, you are positioned for success, because not every day is sunshine.

 

07:21 LJJ: I can remember clearly walking into Nothing Bundt Cakes the very first week it opened.

 

07:27 SV: We do too.

 

07:28 LJJ: Yes. You know isn’t that…

 

[laughter]

 

07:29 SV: It’s a positive thing.

 

[laughter]

 

07:32 LJJ: Isn’t that just fun?

 

07:33 CV: Yeah.

 

07:33 SV: It is, and that’s what I hit on partnerships and how exciting it is, because day one Consumers was there with us in the journey. We had no clue what we were getting ourselves into. And actually, ignorance is bliss. If you really knew what you’re getting yourself into, I think less people would take that plunge to start their own business. But what’s so exciting is for us to sit back here, and I remember early on we were worried about liquidity, and making sure, “Gosh, if everything goes wrong, we need to make sure we have the cash in hand at home.” So instead of buying the vehicle that we had outright, we needed to get a loan, and we were struggling to get a loan even though our finances were in order because we were new business owners. And I remember Consumers was like, “Sure, we’ll give you a loan, we will take care of you.” And we were so grateful for that moment because, newsflash, everything did go wrong in that first year, and we needed that liquidity, and it allowed us… If I look back, those little decisions amidst probably some bad ones that we made, but a lot of good ones, that kind of partnership has helped us. And then when we’ve collaborated on things of making a difference in the community or how we mutually benefit by partnering, man, it has made a huge difference.

 

09:00 LJJ: I will say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a business that is as community-focused from the get-go. That’s part of your mission and vision and values.

 

09:09 CV: And it is. And that was one of our biggest things. We wanted to have a business that we were able to give back, and we’ve always said from the beginning we might not have a lot of money itself to give, whether it be to a charity or to give to our church, but we have a lot of cake, and it is amazing what you can do with cake.

 

09:33 LJJ: The smiles that comes on a face when you bring a cake.

 

[laughter]

 

09:37 SV: Well, and it goes back to our mission statement is… It is to deliver happiness one bite at a time to the community we love, and that’s the reason why we opened the bakery. And then if you take a full step back to… In my past, I would do expensive focus groups and all this research to determine the optimal non-profit to drive the most revenue, and it just never felt right. And I get it, it’s business, but there’s something to say you can have the worst day in the world, but if we feel like we’ve made a little bit of a difference, it’s awesome. And the other thing to share is with our team, we made such a commitment to our team bringing them on board and we didn’t cut their hours. At the beginning no one was coming in. It was kind of, I mean Lynne you came in, which was awesome… [laughter] But it was amazing because people were like, “All you do is bundt cake, really?” And so, it took a while. So, the time when no one was coming in it was like, “We have this team, let’s just start baking and frosting and let’s play as many roles as we can in the community to help the community.”

 

10:41 SV: And so, we gave away a lot of cake, and it… We didn’t realize the dividends, not intrinsically that we got from that, but also, we didn’t realize, oh my gosh, people tried the cake and actually drove people into the bakery. But the uniqueness about West Michigan is that it’s all about community that believes in the community itself, and it is about paying it forward, it is about giving back. And Consumers is that way as well, and like people in that regard are really drawn together, and that’s really one of the biggest springboards to the business. And we didn’t realize that giving back would actually do that and connect us with all these amazing people.

 

11:25 LJJ: What a fascinating story though about, “All we really wanted was to make sure that we did the research, and then we gave the money to the right… ” I mean, it’s such a different feeling isn’t it, to just joyfully give?

 

11:39 CV: It is. And to see the look on people’s faces, and when you bring a cake somewhere, for someone to say, “Oh, I got this for whatever it is.” We were doing the 4th of July parade, and a family came up to us and said, “My niece is going through cancer, and she can’t eat a lot of things, but she loves bundt cake. So, we give her it because that’s one of the few things that she can eat.” And it’s like to hear a story like that, that your cake can be a part of someone’s horrible, horrible thing that they have to go through, and that can be one of the bright parts of their day.

 

12:21 SV: Yeah, that’s a lot of the fun of it. And I would say the other thing, if we look at what we’re able to do in the community, to supporting our family to working with amazing partners and to support our associates and allow them, a lot of times our bakery is a springboard for them and see what they can accomplish post working with us, that’s joy right there, to see what can happen when people work together and to see what people as individuals are capable of. We’ve had one associate that was with us for over a year and a half and she found her calling to help refugees in Africa, so she just went off and did that. We have another individual, who followed their dream of being a line cook to another one who does photography at Goodwill. And so, it’s just, it’s been fun to play those small roles in all these amazing people’s lives.

 

13:15 LJJ: It sounds to me like everyone that comes in contact with Nothing Bundt Cakes and the Vogels becomes a family member. That’s what this sounds like.

 

13:28 CV: It is, and it’s funny because the name of our business, our personal business, is Ohana Ventures. And Ohana is Hawaiian for family. And that’s really what this has always been about.

 

13:41 SV: And Lilo and Stitch, which is a Disney movie, says, “Ohana’s family. No one gets left behind or forgotten.” So, our team, our partners, and why we even did this is centered around that core value. And frankly we take that step back of, this was never done for money. If we cared a lot about how much money we made, then we would have stayed in corporate America and gone after the corner office and in trying to grow revenue by two percentage points by picking the right charity and things like that. And the positive is, is what we have found by doing all of this, is we found like-minded businesses that aren’t wired that way. And what’s great is, a lot of them are here in Grand Rapids, which I think is… We have found why we’ve probably… One of the many reasons why we have fallen in love with the area. And again, Consumers Credit Union is one of those companies. If I look at how engaged you guys are in the community, we’re in all of you. And so that’s fun for us. And as we see you grow here in West Michigan, it makes our hearts happy and to continue to partner with you because you want to see great people in the community trying to make a difference succeed.

 

15:01 SV: So that’s why… Fast forward, here we are three years into our journey. Many more for you guys, but just to see you continue to be green and growing and making a difference, too. And we hope we can incrementally continue to do what we’re doing and then watch all these amazing people continue to grow too.

 

15:21 LJJ: Well, it is an absolute blast to grow with you. Who doesn’t want to join in a Cake Walk every once in a while. Seriously, thank you so much, you guys, for of your partnership and your passion and your ability to really bring smiles to so many people in the West Michigan area. We are very proud partners with you. Nothing Bundt Cakes, you can find them out in the Cascade area, and at so many community events. Christine we’ll have you back on, too. We are From Finance to Fitness and you are a fitness queen. I watch your Instagram Stories.

 

15:58 CV: I can talk a little bit about it.

 

16:01 LJJ: Yes, you can.

 

[laughter]

 

16:02 LJJ: And she eats cake every day. How does that happen?

 

16:04 CV: It’s all about balance.

 

16:05 LJJ: [laughter] Well, thank you everybody. Money, I’m home, from Finance to Fitness. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson. Thank you so much Aaron, our producer who always is doing such a phenomenal job for us. Thank you so much. Have a great week from Consumers Credit Union.

 

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