Georgetown Cupcake co-founder Sophie Kallinis LaMontagne stressed the importance of businesses adapting to change in an interview Friday on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
“We wrote out a business plan like all entrepreneurs do, but you’re business plan kind of goes out the window the first day you open your business,” LaMontagne told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton.
“I think the most successful businesses are the ones that are able to adapt to change. For example, we opened that first day, we thought our bakery would be a quiet, neighborhood Georgetown bakery,” she continued.
“Our customers came in, they wanted cupcakes then and there, and we were not set up to do that. It would have been very easy for us to say, ‘You know what, actually you have to go fill out this form and come back later,’ but instead of doing that, we actually listened to what our customers were telling us and we changed the way we did business,” she said.
LaMontagne and her sister, Katherine Kallinis Berman, launched the bakery on Valentine’s Day in 2008 in Washington, D.C.’s upscale Georgetown neighborhood.
“I think the first thing that happened to us was that we had a Washington Post food critic come in and write a story on us, and that gave us a lot of, you know, ‘foodie cred’ in the D.C. area,” Berman told Hill.TV.
“Then Frank Bruni, who was the food critic at The New York Times, he had come in, and he wrote a piece for The New York Times’s Diners Blog, and that really put us on the scene,” she continued.
Since Georgetown Cupcake opened 10 years ago in Washington, it has expanded to other major U.S. cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Atlanta.
Berman and LaMontange’s interview is part of Hill.TV’s weekly “Disrupters, Innovators, Job Creators” series presented by Zip Recruiter.
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