‘Bagel Boss’ taps Purdue Psychological Sciences training for lox of success

Michelle and Jason Stele are Purdue University alumni that started Bella’s Bagels in Colorado Springs, Colorado.(Photo provided)

Written by: Tim Brouk, tbrouk@purdue.edu

Jason Stele’s (BS ’96) career jumpstart was made possible by who he met while a student at Purdue University.

These meetings were often by chance or due to the West Orange, New Jersey, native’s academic drive.

Today, Stele co-owns Bella’s Bagels in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The successful bagel shop welcomes more than 25,000 patrons a month, and Bella’s Bagels was named among Yelp’s Top 100 Local Businesses for 2025 in the “Food” category, which was earned from the quality and quantity of positive reviews from those thousands of customers.  

“At first, I thought that was so spammy — there’s no way,” recalled Stele with a laugh. “I wrote back to them, and I was waiting for them to ask me for my social security number or something. And they’re like, ‘No, this is legit.’”

But long before he and wife, Purdue Mathematics alumna Michelle (Lawrence) Stele (’96), rolled out their first batch of bagels, Jason Stele arrived at West Lafayette with a trumpet in hand and an entrepreneurial itch to scratch.

Musical meeting: David Leppla, former director of University Bands and the “All-American” Marching Band

When Stele started to tour colleges, the self-professed “band geek” was set on a Big Ten school to continue his trumpet performance while finding his academic fit. These college tours were more than 20 years before New Jersey institution Rutgers University joined the Big Ten.

Stele recalled Purdue not being on his list, but his amazing mother, Sharon Stele, had heard of Purdue’s strong reputation for band and academics. After (Buck)eyeing a competing Big Ten school, Ohio State University, mother, father, and son drove almost four hours northwest to West Lafayette.

Stele fell in love with Purdue’s campus instantly, and his ticket to Boilermaker country was punched after meeting David Leppla, former director of University Bands and the “All-American” Marching Band. The two clicked, and months later, Stele was a first-year trumpeter in the marching band as well as Boiler Brass and Purdue Concert Band. He recalled watching Boilermaker football titan Mike Alstott steamroll defenses from the Ross-Ade Stadium field and men’s basketball legend “Big Dog” Glenn Robinson rattle rims from the cherished Mackey Arena court.

Academic meeting: Adam Stetzer, former Department of Psychological Sciences PhD student

Stele found his academic fit during his PSY 27200 (Introduction to Industrial-Organizational Psychology) course, which was taught by then PhD student Adam Stetzer (PhD ’96). When the field of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology was introduced in class, something clicked. I-O psychology, a decades-long strength of the Department of Psychological Sciences and one the oldest such programs in America, tapped into Stele’s leadership desires. The lessons he learned in job analysis, training and performance appraisal were lessons he could carry into his future career.

“That was definitely something I was always interested in — human behavior,” Stele said. “(I-O psychology) was a slam dunk for me. It was enormous for me to be able to study human behavior in the workplace.”

Stetzer became a mentor to Stele, but the two lost track of each other in the pre-social media mid-1990s. Months after their respective commencements, Stetzer and Stele met again in Virginia — Stele as an I-O psychology graduate student at George Mason University and Stetzer as a manager at Bell Atlantic, which would become Verizon in 2000. Stele reached out to Stetzer as he knew he was working in northern Virginia.

With some HTML coding skills in his toolbox, Stele joined Stetzer in creating the telecommunications company’s first intranet website and were key players in getting Bell Atlantic into the early flickers of the digital age. The days of 100-500-page hard-copy reports were soon relics.

“We started saving the company a bunch of money to be able to not have to send around all that paper, and that was the spark for my career,” Stele said.

Life meeting: future wife Michelle Lawrence

Back to Stele’s first year at Purdue, the New Jersey teenager was successfully navigating academics as well as some old-school Boilermaker high jinks. The Purdue Nude Olympics was a racy “tradition” that dated back to the late 1950s and was eventually banned by the university in 1986. Despite the ban, smaller versions of the race continued for several years, but by the early 1990s, the students were starting to cover up.

But the event was still a spectacle, and it took place near Stele’s dorm room within Cary Quad Residence Hall. There, he ran into friend Kristen Cooper, who suggested he meet her friend Michelle Lawrence for a blind date the following week.

“And the rest is history there. We’re married almost 30 years at this point,” Stele said.

After living in Carmel for 13 years, the Steles uprooted for Michelle’s burgeoning career as a defense contractor and cybersecurity managing director to Colorado Springs, home of U.S. Space Command and Space Force facilities.

Stele’s tech companies were also becoming successful. He sold one and remained involved in other entrepreneurial opportunities remotely. But when COVID-19 hit, the Stele’s hunkered down at home. While Jason worked with his companies from the home office, Michelle began making bagels at an impressive clip. She’d been making them leisurely since receiving a bread machine as an engagement gift 20-plus years previous. A spark of selling these fresh bagels ignited. The Stele’s started taking online orders for weekend deliveries. During one of those runs, Jason was dreaming of a brick-and-mortar bagel shop of their own.

“When the community started building a new shopping center, that’s when I said to Michelle, ‘One day Bella’s Bagels is going to be over there,’” he recalled. “Because that’s what I grew up in Jersey with, where mom-and-pop shops were on every corner before Starbucks was the thing.”

That prophecy became a reality when Bella’s Bagels’ did in fact open in that very same location. Again, Stele’s psychological sciences training came in clutch from the “calming colors” on the walls to vetting potential employees.

“I have a pretty strong interviewing process,” Stele said. “I hire people who say what they’re going to do and do what they say. That’s a huge ingredient to our success and finding that set of traits during the interview process is a superpower of mine.”

Whether plain, topped with lox, or elevating the signature bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, Bella’s bagels are a hit but not without lessons learned — and fateful meetings.

“Our tagline is ‘baked for boosting happiness’ and that is truly our driving force,” Stele smiled.