Courtesy of H.Bloom. H.Bloom’s New York team, including co-founders Sonu Panda and Bryan Burkhart (back row, second and third from the left).
Three years ago, I knew nothing about flowers.
Today, I am chief executive of what I believe is the world’s fastest growing flower delivery service, operating in five cities, with $18 million in venture capital and more than 80 employees.
My background is in business, entrepreneurship and technology. I studied entrepreneurial management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for my undergraduate degree. After college, I moved to San Francisco and joined a software start-up, Callidus Software, as one of its first business hires. Our task was to figure out whether we could sell the software to anyone. Thankfully, we did. We grew the business to more than $100 million in revenue, taking the company public in 2003. I was 28 at the time. I ultimately became senior vice president of global sales, responsible for 76 employees in offices around the world.
It was an amazing first ride, but I was feeling dissatisfied for two reasons. First, as the 800-pound gorilla in a very small market, we were as big as we were ever going to be. Plus, the product was boring. If I described it here, you would fall asleep.
I wanted more. I wanted the chance to build something great, something with a product that people loved and that had a chance to be a really big business. However, I’m not Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t know how to code, and I have no idea how to create a market that doesn’t already exist. But I am willing to work really hard. So, I took a year off to come up with the next great idea.
I left the software company in 2009. My thesis was simple: try to apply technology to a really big, existing market that was bereft of technology, preferably a market with a product people love. I considered all sorts of industries before stumbling upon flowers.
It turns out that the flower industry is a $35 billion dollar market in the United States alone. That’s right, $35 billion. That was certainly enough to pique my interest. But I didn’t know anything about flowers, so I did the only thing I could think of to learn more. I put an ad on Craigslist, saying that I wanted to buy a flower shop. I got dozens of responses, and spent the next two weeks at Chelsea Market in Manhattan, sitting in front of one of the city’s best espresso stands, meeting with flower shop owners (and drinking inordinate amounts of coffee).
From these meetings, I learned that flower shop owners (there are approximately 22,000 of them in the United States) are extraordinary artists. They create living art every day that customers love. But they don’t have a background in technology, and they don’t necessarily enjoy the business side of things. Moreover, they deal with a huge economic challenge: spoilage. The average rate in the industry is anywhere from 30 to 50 percent. It’s a tough way to run a business. The only way that the shop owners can make money, as a result, is to mark up the price of flowers to five times what they pay for them. This was my moment of epiphany.
I knew that there was a type of customer – hotels, restaurants, retailers, offices, buildings, spas, and affluent households – that viewed flowers as living art, something to be enjoyed continuously. But their flowers died every week. These customers were perfect candidates for a subscription model: sign up once and receive this luxurious product, hand-delivered to your door every week. For H.Bloom, my new company, the subscription model was the silver bullet. It would allow us to buy only what someone had already subscribed for, thus reducing spoilage almost completely.
I emerged from my year off ready to start what I thought would become the Tiffany of flowers – a game-changing business that would eventually be a world-recognized brand. But I’m sure a lot of people thought I was crazy. I was leaving a successful career in enterprise software to start a flower company? Thankfully, a good friend told me to keep my own counsel. I had come up with the idea; the logic was sound; just make it happen.
And the idea worked. We launched H.Bloom in April of 2010 in New York City. We signed corporate customers, impressed them with our designs, provided them with 20- to 30-percent savings off the vendors they had used previously, and most importantly, we offered world-class service thanks to the software we built to make operations run efficiently. Soon after, we opened H.Bloom in other cities – Washington, then Chicago, San Francisco and most recently, Dallas – and they have done well.
As we thought about our growth plans, we realized that to grow quickly, we would have to expand to new cities fast. While we believed that our software would enable these markets to deliver our luxury flowers in a sophisticated way, we knew that it would take great people to make everything work. If we hired the wrong people, or didn’t provide them with the right training, the operation would simply not function. So, we decided to build our own farm team – a formal talent-development program – to groom future leaders and team members to run new H.Bloom markets. We call the program H.Bloom University.
Today, many of our employees – managers, future managers, sales people, operations folks and floral designers — are participating in the program. Five people have graduated successfully from the future-leaders program (called SEED) and are now leading H.Bloom markets. We have focused on all aspects of building the team – from defining needed positions, to recruiting the right candidates, hiring them, training them, providing them with a road map for career growth and constantly communicating the strategy, successes and failures of our business. We’ve also had to let people go. We view all of this as integral to building the team. We’re not good at it yet, but we aspire to be great.
And that brings me to why I’m writing for this blog. I love business and want to build an extraordinary one. I believe that building a team and developing talent is the foundation of any business, no matter how big or small, but it is often overlooked amid all of the other things that happen day to day. I hope to use this blog as a way to share our experiences and to get your feedback on what you’ve seen work and fail in your businesses. In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about the five main areas that we focus on as we try to build a team: recruiting, training, communications, career development, and leadership. I will also talk about team builders that I’ve met and that we try to emulate and some of the new technologies that we use to manage the process.
During new-hire training at H.Bloom, I always tell new employees that together, we have the opportunity to build a great company. With Building the Team, I am hopeful that together, we can discover how to build a great team.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/introducing-building-the-team-flower-power/?partner=rss&emc=rss