Career Switch Podcast: Expert advice for your career change · Lixandra Urresta

37: Starting a retail business after corporate burnout

·27 min·1 clip

Helene says Bloomberg gave her the work of two people, and she finally said, “too late.”

Alexandra Uresta introduces Career Switch Podcast as a place for people who are thinking about change. She frames the show around action, whether the listener is switching industries, changing professions, or trying to start a business, and she brings on Helene Godin to tell the story of leaving law for a bakery. Helene's path starts with burnout. After 22 years as a lawyer, she says the long work hours and long commute to and from New York City finally became too much, so she quit in 2010 without a plan. She did not rush into the next thing. Instead, she spent about a year studying the gluten-free market and developing recipes, using the discipline from her legal career to sort out what might work. The bakery opened in 2011. By The Way Bakery grew out of that stretch of research and repetition, and Helene describes the move as a deliberate answer to burnout rather than a fantasy of reinvention. The conversation stays grounded in the ordinary pieces. Alexandra asks how the idea looked inside a real family, and Helene explains that her teenage sons thought the bakery plan was ridiculous and rolled their eyes at the whole thing. That did not stop her. She says she knew she was making the right decision for her family and that, even while she takes their views seriously, she is also independent and driven. Her husband had his own reaction. When she described the bakery as a hobby, he told her she does not do hobbies, which captures how serious the shift actually was. A logo story adds some texture. Helene says she worked with Red Maxwell, a friend from Tufts who had become a graphic designer, and together they reviewed 15 logo options, mixed the elements they liked, and had him polish the final version. The episode keeps coming back to persistence. Helene presents the bakery as something built from work ethic, patience, and the willingness to learn a new field carefully instead of pretending the transition would be easy. Alexandra keeps the conversation moving. She repeats Helene's points in plain language and keeps pressing on what changed, what was hard, and what someone listening might carry into their own career switch.

As heard by us

Burnout becomes a bakery through patience, market research, and refusal to stay stuck.

A burned-out lawyer's pivot into a bakery gives the episode its shape, and the story works because it treats career change as steady work. Helene Godin lays out the practical steps with calm clarity: leaving a 22-year legal career, studying the gluten-free market, developing…

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Why you'd press play

A burned-out lawyer walks away from a 22-year career and starts By The Way Bakery from scratch.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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