If you get laid off, sulking on the couch and watching TV might not be as detrimental as you'd think.

That's according to Sprinkles co-founder Candace Nelson, whose leap from investment banking to pastry making helped drive the early 2000s cupcake boom — all thanks to an unconventional source of inspiration from Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart.

Nelson spent her early career focusing on school and climbing the corporate ladder, only to be thrown off course by the dot-com bust.

Suddenly, she was without a job for the first time in her professional life despite "doing everything 'right,'" she told the "Thirty Minute Mentors" podcast on Tuesday.

Nelson spent hours moping on the couch — which is where the idea for Sprinkles started forming.

"The funniest thing happened as I was sitting on the couch, watching hours and hours of 'The Oprah Winfrey Show' and 'The Martha Stewart Show,'" she said.

Seeing the way those two women managed their own business empires provided a blueprint for Nelson, at a time when she felt there weren't many options "as a woman looking for inspiration for her next move."

Nelson had previously considered stereotypically feminine, domestic fields as "regressive," she said. But watching Stewart changed her mind: Here was a mogul who was intentionally using cooking and gardening to build profit as a businesswoman.

And in Winfrey, she saw how empathy and inspiration — rather than cutthroat competition — could help inspire success. Winfrey now has a net worth of $2.5 billion as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Forbes.

"They're leading by example, and look at the ripple effect that follows," Nelson said.

Emboldened to pursue a passion, Nelson enrolled in pastry school, where "the business side of [her] brain didn't magically disappear," she noted. Instead, it told her to make and sell cupcakes, which she thought could be turned into an everyday indulgence with better marketing.

Less than a year after launching Sprinkles, Nelson's connection to Winfrey came full circle. The cupcake chain initially started with a single store in Beverly Hills, which built an enthusiastic local following. 

Near the end of the store's first holiday rush, Nelson and her husband — Sprinkles' other co-founder — got a call from one of Winfrey's producers. Winfrey apparently loved the cupcakes, and wanted 350 of them in Chicago by 5 a.m. the next day for her show.

"This is as we're winding down the day ... and I said, 'yes,'" Nelson said. "Because when opportunity like that knocks, you say 'yes' and figure it out later."

Nelson and her husband turned back on the ovens, booked a red-eye and schlepped hundreds of cupcakes across the country to be ready for Winfrey bright and early. Nelson had a near-out-of-body experience watching Winfrey wax poetic about the desserts while filming the show, she added.

"I can understand how someone like Oprah Winfrey can, and does, have such a positive power over people she's never even met," Nelson said.

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