Jolie Goodreau bought her bridal store off a conversation at a football game.

She wasn't looking for one. She'd spent fifteen years as a special education teacher, certified through high school with a master's in self-contained, mild-to-moderate education, and she was ready to leave the classroom. She just didn't know what she wanted to do next. Then a friend mentioned that two sisters in her Louisiana town were ready to sell the bridal store they'd started back in 2010. Jolie had never worked in bridal. The extent of her experience was having worn a wedding dress herself, back in 1992. She met with the sisters every Friday for six weeks while they walked her through the business, brought on a friend with a degree in fashion merchandising as a partner on a 65/35 split, and in 2015 she owned Olivier Couture Bridal Boutique.

She told Mindi on this week's episode of the BOSS Podcast that she never thought past the first couple of years when she bought it. Eleven years later, she's still there.

The early days were rough in a way Jolie can laugh about now. Her first buying market came three weeks after she took ownership of the store. Nobody had told her to set a budget. Nobody had told her that minimums existed for a reason. She and her partner walked in and, in her words, went "a little bananas." They said yes to everything. By the time the orders started arriving, she remembers thinking, what have we done. It took a couple of years to recover from that one market. Even her husband, who has a finance degree, didn't step in. His advice going in was just to have fun. Looking back, Jolie calls those first years an expensive hobby. She didn't need the income. She needed something to do that wasn't sitting still. It wasn't until her business partner retired a couple of years ago that the store stopped being a hobby and started being something she had to make work.

Some of what surprised her had nothing to do with dresses. She didn't anticipate how much of the business would live and die on Saturdays, or how hard it would be to find employees willing to give up their weekends for it. Bookkeeping has been the steadiest source of frustration. She's not, in her own words, "mathy," and every time she gets a handle on QuickBooks, the platform changes on her. She leans on her CPA more than she'd like to admit. Staffing has had its tricky stretches too. She runs a small shop on purpose, which means she can't always offer full-time hours, and that's made retention its own ongoing project. The exception is the employee who's been with her since before she owned the store. Eleven years, same person, still on the floor.

What's kept Jolie in bridal after all of it is the part that has nothing to do with running a business. She talks about a bride who came in years ago for her own dress, came back to the store pregnant with a friend, and came back again with the baby. Jolie remembers her. She remembers where most of her brides are getting married, because she's made it her business to know the venues around her: who runs them, what the food is like, whether she's been to a wedding there herself. There's a venue a few miles from her store run by a woman named Bridget who sends brides her way, and when a bride mentions Bridget's name, Jolie already knows exactly what to say back. She's never wanted Olivier Couture to be a big store. Staying small is what lets her be the one on the floor who knows the story behind the dress.

The other shift Jolie points to took longer to make than the bookkeeping ever did. She and her original business partner were both people pleasers who hated confrontation, and it showed in how they handled the store's policies. A return here, an exception there, because neither of them wanted to be the one who said no. She's since learned to hold the line while still being kind about it. When a bride calls asking for a refund because a wedding fell through, Jolie can be genuinely sympathetic and still stand by the contract. She's also gotten more direct about walking brides through what they're signing instead of just pointing at the line and saying sign here. Now she reads through it with them, point by point, and closes with the line she and her team use to lighten the moment: no matter what happens with the engagement, you're getting a beautiful dress out of it. You can go on a cruise with it if you have to.

Jolie is closing out this year the way she opened her time in bridal, in the middle of a leap. Her house of twenty-two years is sold, and she's building on five and a half acres lined with old oak trees, with a move date already on the calendar for early December. It's also the first spring in eleven years she won't be spending on the road, now that her youngest son has finished four years of college baseball. Eleven years in, the store that started as something to fill her time is still teaching her what it takes to run one well.

You can hear the rest of Jolie's conversation with Mindi, including how she named the store after buying it and what she'd tell a newer owner about building relationships in her town, on this week's episode of the BOSS Podcast: https://youtu.be/Y6Od-BgbakA?si=iSLBeMI3amTzjKNj