Michael Jacobson - Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition: A Smarter Path to Business Ownership

In 3, 2, 1.

Welcome back to Becoming Preferred, the podcast where we help you become preferred in the markets you serve.

If you thought the flower business was quaint, slow or low tech, get ready for a wake up call.

Our guest today is Michael Jacobsen, CEO of French Florist.

He didn't just take over an old business, he engineered a dramatic transformation.

Starting from a struggling six hundred thousand dollar operation, he built a high performance franchise model that now generates millions in annual revenue and triples the profitability of traditional flower shops.

Michael's mastery is the fusion of timeless artistry with modern operational technology.

In this episode, Michael is going to share his framework on how to spot a broken business model ready for 10x growth or how to design a high tech performance franchise that protects quality while maximizing margins.

If you're ready to learn how to apply disruptive tech and scalable systems to any industry, old or new, you've come to the right place.

Join me now for my conversation with Michael Jacobson.

Well, hey Michael, welcome to the program.

We're delighted to have you, Michael.

Great to be here.

Thank you so much.

Hey, I'm excited about this.

When this came across in the studio, I was looking at your background and I love watching young entrepreneurs and how they build businesses and the ideas that they have in that fresh thinking.

So, so congratulations, first of all, on having the courage to go and do your own thing and.

Cause it takes guts to do it.

And in today's world, it takes a little fortitude.

But I want to get into that story of how you got here, but let's go backwards just a little bit.

And that wasn't too long ago.

So you're back in high school.

You're going to go to college.

I know you went to the University of Washington.

I think it was school business.

And what are you going to be when you grow up?

And how did we get where we are today?

Yeah, definitely.

So when I asked that question in kindergarten, right.

Uh, my dad trained me.

He's a doctor, right.

So the kindergarten teacher would ask me and I said, I want to be a neurosurgeon.

Right?

Cause that was the answer that my dad trained me to say.

And you know, if there's a alternative dimension out there, maybe I am a neurosurgeon.

A job sounds kind of fun.

But when I was in middle school, I discovered a little something called sales.

Our school had just banned soda from the vending machines.

And I was like, wow, people are really upset about this.

Everybody wants soda.

And so I had the bright idea to Go and buy some sodas, a 12 pack from the grocery store, convince my mom to take me and put it in my locker.

She know what I was doing and.

But I put it in my locker and I started selling them out of my locker and I started making money and I ran out of locker space.

Ended up kind of growing that business.

And so I was like, you know, I had a problem on my hands, a good problem, albeit, but rented my friend's locker next to mine.

Then I got really hungry at lunch because I was spending the whole time selling, right.

So I'm like, okay, how am I going to solve this problem?

So got my first business partner.

I'm like, hey, you do the first half of lunch, I'll do the second half.

So we could take turns eating lunch and make money together.

Anyways, we shut that down before we got caught actually.

But I was like, this is something that this is really cool.

And I got to do this in a way that is, you know, a sixth grade version of legal, for lack.

Of a better term in middle school.

That's cool.

That's awesome.

So when I got a taste of that I was like, wow.

This whole thing of solving a pain point and.

And you can make money from that and then through time it's.

How do you combine that There's a whole lot of terms like conscious capitalism and how do you do it in an ethical way as you grow up and go through the after college what am I going to do with my life?

Spent some time.

My aunt got really lucky.

My aunt runs an orphanage and was able to spend some time volunteering down there.

And her whole thing is live a life of service.

And so, you know, the journey has been an interesting one of.

But corporate wasn't a part of that path.

I didn't really feel like, you know, big corporations are doing things necessarily in an ethical way.

You can just a cog in the wheel and I'm not really using my business entrepreneurial shops in a big company like that.

So it's been a really fun journey and it's kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing now is I feel like it really does.

I found that intersection between how to live a purposeful life and a life full of intentionality.

And we work in a beautiful industry and my passion working in business as well.

Understanding the economics of it and providing value to the marketplace.

Right.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

And you're the CEO, chief executive officer of French florist and even how you got that store.

Now let's talk about that because I mean you didn't just run a flower shop, you redesigned the entire operating model.

So at the time I think you got it, it was about 600k a year struggling like a lot of businesses.

But now you've turned it into this almost $10 million plus powerhouse and a national franchise.

So let's go back there.

So you're working in the flower shop and I kind of agree with you.

Well, I do agree with you.

When you see the entrepreneurial, once you start to taste it, when you realize you can make money while you're not working, it ruins you because you're not trading time for money anymore, you're trading value.

As you were telling the story, you give the people what they want.

And it's really not that tough.

As long as it's in demand and people want it, they'll, they'll line up for hours, days to go buy the latest iPhone.

So build it at what they want.

It made me chuckle.

When I was in middle school, we had a two floor building and I was always, you know, causing the teachers lots of grief just by my nature.

And we had a drinking fountain on the whole second floor that didn't have a handle on it like at all.

Couldn't use it.

You had to go down to the first floor and we had to do speeches and somebody nominated me for president, school president.

And of course teachers were advising not.

I was probably not a good example to do that.

So in my speech, I got up the speech and all I said, I looked at the audience, I said if, if I'm elected president, I will personally within 24 hours put a handle on the drinking fountain upstairs.

And so.

And I got a standing ovation and I want a landslide victory.

Unbelievable.

Isn't that amazing?

The power of what.

And you coined it as soon as you were talking about that in middle school, I should have quit right there.

But you're right, it's finding where the opportunities.

But I think you have to have the eyes for that too.

And you start to see it because a lot of people don't think that.

So you decide you want to get into business.

You went to work for an uncle.

Where did you recognize the opportunity there?

So you start working there.

And I've seen pictures of before and after and what you've transformed that into.

So tell me what's going through your head at that time.

So I came up through finance in undergrad and had interviewed on Wall street and all that stuff and I'm very happy I didn't take Those jobs, I ended up going into consulting, which I don't know if it's any better or worse, probably along the same lines as Wall street, but anyways, my uncle called me because I have a background in finance and he wanted to sell his flower shop.

So I said, sure, I'm happy, you know, his family, I was happy to help him sell.

So actually that was the original intent.

I was going to come in to help him sell the business and it wasn't worth a whole lot, but was just happy to produce a side project because that fire in my belly wasn't being lit by corporate.

And I was just looking for, you know, something fun to do.

So that's how it started.

It was really unsuspecting.

And I came in and I looked at a bunch of flower shops.

When you're going to sell a business, what are the things that you might do?

You might go around to see what other businesses are selling for, what multiples they're going for.

What are they doing well?

What are they not doing well?

Right.

What is this shop worth?

So I was just doing a bunch of like, external research and studying my uncle's business.

What is he doing well and not so well, and where the opportunities to maybe make some refinements, spend two or three or four months cleaning some stuff up to try to maximize the sale price.

What I saw was amazing.

Really opened my eyes to how antiquated the floral space is.

But every single floral shop struggles with the same exact issue, if not the same issue.

Very, very similar issues.

And there's the three, not just one, but there's actually three very systemic issues in the space.

You know, one was there's a lot of intermediaries, folks like 1-800-flower, right.

They take your order online and they syndicate it to a local florist.

It's a fine business model in a sense, but the problem comes in, they take about a 40% commission after all of their fees are considered before profit goes away.

Yeah.

So that's crushing the florist, that alone.

But on top of that, you have a really antiquated supply chain.

Again, a lot of intermediaries, not a lot of innovation has happened there.

So there's an opportunity on the supply chain side.

And then lastly, and there's a few, there's other buckets of things that made this industry incredibly antiquated.

But the third big bucket, as the technology in the space is also.

I walked in and there's a mix of six between the two printers and fax machines.

There are six of Them and all of them were being used for various means where they were probably spending 13 or $14,000 on printer ink per year.

I was like, why don't you just build a really small little iPad application, run all this stuff digitally and like iPad cost a few hundred dollars, like it's going to pay for itself in three months.

Right, right.

So I think that I was just able to come in with fresh eyes and understand like I think florists are amazing people.

Some of the most creative, passionate, warm hearted people I've ever met.

They're working crazy long hours, typically 50, 60 hour weeks, six days a week.

And they're like not making money.

Right.

So they have to be doing it for some reason.

You know, the livelihood is a part of it, but they're, you could make more hourly somewhere else.

There's another reason that they do that.

And so I fell in love with it because of like the team and the infrastructure and the bones and the emotion and it's a very, very special industry.

But nobody was doing it right.

And as a matter of fact, the number one player in our space, 1, 800.

And again, I don't mean to really call them out.

That's not what I'm here to do at all.

But we're here to make our company the best company we can.

But pragmatically speaking, if that's the market leader, talk about a good company should be creating value for the marketplace.

I would go so far as to say that they're destroying value for the marketplace.

So, you know, and again, not to say they weren't innovative at one period of time, but, but especially from the client experience standpoint, really it's not even about the florist if I'm allowed to say that.

It's about ultimately the client experience.

And when you're giving or receiving flowers to somebody, you're telling them that you care about them, you're thinking about them and that you love them.

So we're in the business of love and we're not necessarily like we're franchising right now.

And so we have some prospects that come to us and they're marine veterans and I have a friend that's becoming a doctor and works in the emergency room and they're like literally saving lives out there.

And here we are like playing with flowers.

How do we justify that?

I feel like we're creating a more loving world through it.

And even if it's, you know, call me cheesy, but I do believe that even if we make a 1% difference.

It's a worthwhile mission.

And so that special of an industry, that's really the root is love the client experience should and could be something a lot more than what it is today.

So that's really what our mission is.

No, it's interesting, your approach to the business, because you're right.

When you're 10 years old and we say, hey, Michael, what do you want to be when you grow up?

You're not going to go, I want to go run a floral shop.

So we don't think of it as a business model like in today's world.

A lot of the younger generation, they all want to become influencers, YouTubers.

Isn't that wild?

Yeah, they see a few.

It's totally wild.

And yet there's some great business opportunities.

And you coined a phrase, entrepreneurship through acquisition and creative playbook, which I think is an interesting term.

I've never actually thought of it that way.

Buying an existing business and then turning it around because it needs disrupting.

So sometimes the least sexiest companies and everybody wants to go tech.

But tech, as you know, can eat your lunch real quick and it gets expensive really, really quickly.

But there's other really amazing businesses where you've got a mom and pop, they started their own business, maybe out of necessity or keep the printing presses going for themselves, whatever.

And they don't know how to even scale it.

They don't know how to bring the technology to the table.

So for today's generation, we have all the tools in the world.

Like in my day, when we started, we didn't have those tools at all.

We didn't have Internet, we didn't have that.

We had yellow Pages and if you remember what those were.

And so we had to go through that process.

Well, now there's no excuse.

I've got everything at the tip of my fingers.

I can look at it.

Competitors, I've got AI in order.

Yeah, you've taken something and you've evolved it, which I think is brilliant because you've taken a model.

Now you have some principles around this that I think are worth highlighting.

It's not just buying a business that could use a revamp.

There needs to be some intrinsic value to the business in the first place.

Like you said, flowers, you know, we have about 12 statutory, I call them statutory holidays a year, Mother's Day, Father, all the.

Where we would buy flowers.

But then there's birthdays and anniversaries and all these other things.

So we love those kind of holidays.

If you're in the flower business, and so what are the things that are the rules there?

In other words, if you're going to go outside the floral industry, you're going to go pick another industry.

What would be the two or three variables you would look for or recommend to anyone if you were coaching them?

Hey, make sure it has this and this.

Where would you go with that?

Yeah, that's such a good question.

I'm in the floral industry, so I can speak to that.

And I'm going to leave it up to you, Michael, to help translate that and how that might work in another industry.

I look at coffee shops and I'm like, I have no idea how to make money in coffee shops.

I look at bakeries, I have no idea how to make money in bakeries.

We figured it out in floral.

So I can talk about floral.

I don't know if it applies to other industries, but I think what has made our industry really special is how, how much pain there is in the space.

So I suppose I can translate in the sense where if you're going to solve problems or solve pain and make sure there's pain, like solve real actual problems, create actual enterprise value.

Nothing against private equity.

Like truly, I think private equity has done a lot of great things.

I think they've done not great things too, but the name of the game for them is to buy a company, get a bunch of returns over a 3, 5, 7 year period and then flip it, right?

We take a little bit of a different approach where we want to build something for the world that's kind of fun and cool.

It's not all about the financial returns.

Financials are great and you know, for, as a for profit business, it's the fuel that allows us to keep going.

But I think that like for us having a deeper why, why we exist and a deeper mission and like the financial is just the fuel that gets to power that mission further and further.

That makes it a lot of fun to, as an entrepreneur, for me at least I can speak from my own experience.

I don't know if yours is, you know, I've heard other folks say it enough times for me to see that think that it's a pattern that you're going to have ups and downs, certainly have and certainly will continue to, but having that deeper like why of something beyond the financial motivation, it makes it way easier to get through the tough times.

And, and honestly I think that it kind of goes hand in hand with making money.

I think that if you make decisions purely out of profit, you kind of miss opportunities that if you're working on something out of passion, you ended up doing a better job on it and you end up getting somehow end up getting a better financial return on it too.

So again, I came up through finance.

I like that game.

It's fun to play, but sometimes it's just like a gut feeling too where I'll make a decision or investment and I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is going to be a positive roi.

And that's as far as I need to think about it, have to do that in a disciplined way.

But the biggest ROI hits that we've had have been investments, though let out of emotion more than, more than anything else.

I think, I think you're right.

As Wall street, as you know, finance itself is about the next quarter.

And the decisions we make doing on a quarter by quarter basis are definitely different than if we look at a two to three or four or five year play.

We were playing checkers versus chess.

And you're in it for the long haul.

And I agree with you.

You build a business that you learn to love.

I love our business.

People ask me all the time, we're going to take it to this now.

And no, I'm really not interested.

I'm really not.

I work for four of Warren Buffett's companies and you know, he doesn't even spend all the money.

99% of it's going away to charities.

But he's frugal, wears old suits, drives older cars, eats at McDonald's every day.

You know, it's not about that, it's about the game.

He loves playing the game.

And if you find something that's admirable and long lasting and like you said with flowers, they always put a smile on people's faces, typically, or let them know how we feel about them.

So it's an emotional purchase.

There's nothing logical about flowers.

And people buy first with emotion, back it up with reason and logic second, you have to do that map.

But at the end of the day, it's an emotional purchase, right?

Happy occasion, a sad occasion.

It's designed to convey a message.

So it's an interesting business.

What I'm always interested in though is spotting the disruptions.

And if you look at there and there's some really good books out there on this, on the subject, but you start to look at things and go, how could I build this better?

How's the mousetrap?

And you saw Uber, did it with rideshare and Airbnb.

And these companies grow so fast.

You're seeing it with AI, you're seeing it with all the tools.

Well, let's kind of move into fusing artistry with analytics.

Because you took a very traditional business, but now you brought some technology into it.

That's right.

And I'm curious about that.

So how do you use tech data, proprietary software?

And you talked about the iPad when creating it there.

What did you end up bringing to the floral industry into your business that makes you different from, say, everyone else?

Yeah, we created a ton of tech.

We have a lot of folks approaching us here and there that want us to slice out the tech and license it, become a tech company.

We're not a tech company.

We happen to have built the best tech that exists in our space.

We're not a tech company.

We're a plural company.

Right.

It goes back to that original principle of solving pain is one way to create value.

Right.

And now we've solved enough pain where our company is running pretty well, and now we can work on like, innovation.

And how do you take the high moments of ordering flowers?

Because it's an incredible thing.

Really, truly.

I think people have forgotten, but when you do order flowers, that's my soft pitch is order flowers and order flowers for no reason at all.

Your mom deserves flowers on more than just Mother's Day.

Buy it on a random Tuesday.

I promise you it's even more impactful than buying it over on Mother's Day.

So anyways, my.

My soft pitch there.

But so I'll answer your question on tech like one thing.

How do you buy flowers?

Supply chain is a difficult thing for us traditionally, for our industry, traditionally.

And so that's a really important pain point.

How do we solve that?

The old way is the FL flowers are grown on a farm.

And again, just as a point of reference in orchid, they might see at a grocery store somewhere.

It actually can take six or seven years to grow an orchid.

So it's an incredible amount of work just to grow it on the farm.

A lot of the times and years of planning to do that, the flower gets cut at the farm, then it goes to a processor, then from the processor to a consolidator to a logistics agency in the country of origin.

Right.

Where best roses come from Ecuador.

Best hydrangea lilies come from Colombia.

We have tulips coming from Holland all over the world.

Right.

Thailand, Mexico, Canada, some local in the States as well.

And so it goes to logistics agency in the country of origin, gets on a flight and lands in the US Goes to another kind of logistics receiving agency, gets trucked to a wholesaler, to the retailer.

Kind of we do what we do and process it the flowers again and design them and put the work in that we do.

And then finally it gets sold to the end consumer.

So it's a remarkable amount of people involved in that supply chain.

Not only that, but people are writing invoices on paper and pen and you know, so how do you like as a retailer, how do you buy flowers?

You make sure they're fresh, how do you make sure they're going to last?

Because you only air to out of them.

You got to have a week or so out of those things.

Yeah, yeah.

So anyways, this is just one really niche example of how we utilize technology.

But one thing that we've done is we created a predictive analytics for every single one of our locations, has an AI associated with it.

And we can forecast based on the patterns of even if it's raining outside that dampens floral sales, what time of year it is, what year over year growth is, what week over week growth is.

Right.

All of these external data sources sources and internal data sources, zero party data that allows us to forecast what customers are going to order.

All of the inventory or all of the products that we have have recipes to them.

So we have all the raw materials for it and we can forecast.

And essentially a flower buyer report gets spit out and it says, okay, if you're going to buy your flowers for Tuesday through Thursday, here's the list of flowers that it forecasts that you need.

And right now it's about up to a 92% accuracy.

So we're continuing to evolve that.

But it's a heck of a tool to get you really a lot, a lot closer than just literally doing it by the seat of your pants.

And so doing that allows us to limit waste, it allows us to buy more appropriately.

We're not tempted to use older flowers because our flowers are just in time inventory.

Right.

And so folks are getting the freshest stuff.

And so that's just one niche example.

But there's just been this flywheel where like we've, we're solving pain point after pain point, whether it's marketing, whether it's ops and supply chain, whether it's like any finance and automating.

Some of our bookkeeping, some of this stuff is relatively basic, but it creates this flywheel where we've been able to grow from 600k revenue to 2.7 million the next year to 4.8 million the next year, to 9.6 million the next year.

And that was at a one location, 11 3,000 square foot place.

Right.

So we opened a second store, did really well over a million in sales in the first year or third store.

And so we're like, wow, we have something really cool here.

And we started to do a lot of revenue where we can buy.

Here's where like the flywheel starts, right.

As our revenue goes up, our buying power goes up.

So now we can start to cut out those intermediaries.

And instead of buying from consolidators or wholesalers, we go straight from the farm and can import directly and charter our own planes.

We've been able to get not only a way fresher product, cutting out many days, if sometimes up to a week in the supply chain.

So that translates to a week longer in the client space at home.

But we're also getting it for a way lower price too.

And so.

And we can pass it.

You're getting advantage of scale too.

So you got.

Exactly, yeah.

So that allows us to invest heavier into the client experience, offer more competitive pricing.

So it was really cool just solving actual real pain points.

So tech is one example of that.

And hopefully that one example kind of showcases one of the ways that we utilize tech to.

But again, like all of the decisions that we've made are how do we enhance the client experience?

And putting that technology solution in place allows the person that's running that flower shop, the manager or the owner in the case of a franchise, it makes their job way easier to run that flower shop.

And so they can buy their time back and allocate that to way more higher uses of time, which is focusing on the client experience.

Right.

Ultimately, like the root of everything is how do we enhance the client experience.

You know, I'm reminded FedEx was a client of ours.

And I know the FedEx story.

And when you were back in school, it was just kind of coming to be.

Right.

And they had the spoken hub concept for delivery and they brought technology for delivery delivering which who should have invented FedEx was the postal system.

Right.

But they were always behind the eight ball.

So a lot of times people get entrenched in their businesses and they don't evolve them.

And when you're adding technology to it, same in my business, we're adding technology to.

So for instance, we had the pandemic, Zoom comes along, go to meetings.

Well, it now gave us a tool to where it's my preference for doing zoom meetings.

Normally we would have you come into studio, you're going to lose a day or two and kind of go from there.

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And now back to my conversation with Michael Jacobson.

You know you mentioned Holland and what I'm reminded back in the 16th century you had the big tulip bust, right?

So the flower industry went, but they didn't have the technology back then to monitor to know what was going on.

So what you're doing in your supply chain is you're identifying all the key points and I'm assuming you even have producers who go, hey, we got an oversupply of these.

Do you want them?

Here's a better deal.

In which case you can now create different things with it and take advantage of opportunity as well.

Is that right?

Yeah, that's right.

I think the percentage changes, but the last I looked a few months ago is about like 17% of our orders a custom where meaning somebody will call in, right, and say hey yeah, I have a hundred bucks and I just want something really beautiful.

So we'll ask them a few questions to get the general gist of what they're looking for.

What would they want to create?

And our designers have so much fun with that because when you give a creative that that ability to flex, they get to use whatever flowers they want.

So we do buy whatever's in season is typically lower price and the producers are producing a lot of.

So just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's bad quality.

As a matter of fact, it's actually sometimes better quality because they're producing a lot of it because it's in season and so they get to use that.

They put their soul into the design and like, you really see the end product and it's very special.

So, yeah, I mean, a lot of the supply chain actually is a lot more flexible than you might think.

People think that we have very high waste.

I think traditionally the industry has had a high waste, but we've gotten our ways down pretty decent.

Even with buying good deals, stuff that's in season, stuff that's not necessarily on the product catalog, we do have those folks that are calling us saying they want something custom.

Let's talk about buying a franchise or investing, going the franchise route versus starting your own or buying something that's already exist.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

And the acquisition, it's something, you know, I remember I've looked at it as an entrepreneur.

I still keep my eyes open.

There's, you know, donut shop, whatever.

There's a franchise for it.

It seems like there's a franchise for it.

Like, who's perfect for a franchise?

When should we be just, hey, I'm going to go do it myself?

I've always taken they'll do it myself approach work with franchise groups.

I see the magic.

I've seen them develop and evolve.

You know, literally worked with hundreds and hundreds of franchisees and not everyone's designed.

Some places will sell a franchise to somebody who should never buy one a thousand percent.

They should never be in business.

So how much screening and how much work do you guys do on that back end versus just, hey, we got another location Versus who's perfect?

Who's the perfect candidate?

That, hey, I'm going to look at a franchise option.

Not just maybe around Floral, but it could be, but any franchise in general.

What are the things we should be looking for and when shouldn't we do it?

Definitely.

I love so much of what you said.

You know, we've kicked up a lot of dust in the floral industry.

We like to do things different.

We've challenged the status quo.

When we made the decision to franchise, we did it for ultimately because we think it'll create a better client experience again.

Everything really is promise a derivative of that.

But when we made that decision, you know, franchising, I had a really dirty word to it.

When I first learned about it, I was like, I can't name that many great franchise systems out there.

There are a few.

Chick Fil A is an interesting example.

Right.

Or Theory Fitness seem to be doing good things.

So there's a few out there.

But most of them similar to the Floral Industry, like most florists suck.

Sorry.

But most franchises suck too, if I'm allowed to say that.

And so we are approaching it a little bit differently.

We don't use like outsourced sales, we don't use brokers.

In 2025, we had a 0.3% acceptance rate in terms of how many leads came in versus how many ended up getting awarded.

So our screening process is super robust, to say the least.

I think that as a franchisor, our primary responsibility is creating a community of owners and we own a bunch of corporate locations that we own and operate.

I feel like we're like, now we're just one owner in the ecosystem and we're marrying other owners in the ecosystem and it's like they're almost like business partners where.

Yeah.

And what I've learned too, when I set my pride aside, the only way that we've been able to grow truly is by bringing extraordinary people into the organization and for me to get the heck out of their way.

And I think franchising can be very powerful.

Again, it depends on the system.

But if we choose franchise owners that have an edge or have a superpower that they can contribute to our system in a meaningful way, I think it's the same thing.

I think that we've been able to crack the code and on average or flower shops do triple the amount of revenue than your average flower shop does in the first year alone.

We've been able to unlock the supply chain.

We have an economies of scale, we have better tech.

So we've been able to figure some things out.

We haven't been able to figure everything out right, but we figured out enough things that somebody who wants to lean into that where it's one plus one is greater than two, that's the idea.

And we take that as like their franchise owners actually doing the more difficult part of running the flower shop, making the hiring, coaching, promoting firing decisions.

They're putting the money on the line, they're building it out, we're helping them through every single step of that.

But they're the ones that are actually going and doing it.

And ultimately they're the ones that are client facing.

So they have the most important job.

Folks that are attracted to like one plus one is greater than two.

I think like kind of what you were saying earlier too, if you start it yourself, it's kind of like a sexier idea.

I didn't start this business by myself.

I took this business over and it was so underrated.

I joined a few startups in college too.

One out of the four that I was involved with is still around today.

The stats are like 95% of startups fail.

So it was really cool to join a business that had some bones to it.

I could leverage that and really help take it to the next level.

So we've had some really, really smart folks join our system.

We've had a president of a hundred plus million dollar private equity firm quit his job and he's opening up six flower shops.

We have a marine veteran I was talking to you about is opening up a couple of units.

We have a lot of kind of ETA entrepreneurship through acquisition research fund folks that are looking to acquire a flower shop and convert it to French florist using our engine.

We have some corporate refugees, right?

They work corporate, they've done really well for themselves but they like want to be their own boss.

They want to live a life after W2 kind of a life, right?

Y want to go to that 10am yoga class, like whatever you want to do, right?

You can go and do.

No one's going to tell you no.

So you know, the folks come from all over but I give you some of the principles that what we look for is you'll hear different answers from.

Our ops team will give you an ops answer.

Our finance team will give you finance answer on what they look for when we talk to candidates.

But what I look for is what's your why I get?

You want to make money.

Money is a great thing, helps enable you to do more things that you want to do in life.

But I'm really curious about what are those more things that you want to go and do?

And I don't really care what it is.

It's not my place to judge.

Like, you want to go and spend more time with the kids, Amazing.

I support that.

You want to go on vacation and have a bunch of fun in the world?

Amazing.

I support that.

You want to go start a charity, Amazing.

I support that.

But I just want to know what your why is and I want to help you get there.

And I want you to love the flower.

I didn't come in loving the flower industry.

I learned to love it.

So that part can be learned.

But.

But I wanted to see that little spark in your eye that after you talk to our team you're like, oh my God, I get it.

Yeah.

No, it's interesting.

So people always want to know, should I do this?

Can I do this?

Like I say, I've always been, hey, I'll go learn the system because you're buying A system.

What you're doing is you're buying.

You figured out all the bugs, you've figured out all the ways to scale it.

You figure, so if you're looking for a business that you want to scale, something you want to grow, franchise system is great, then it's finding something you can believe in.

I think you have to be, I call it being a product of the product.

In other words, if you don't like working with customers, if you don't like that emotional component, this is the wrong kind of a business.

Right.

Don't do it.

There's other things to go do.

And in today's world, we're still going to have service business.

I think it's a recession proof business.

I think it's a pandemic proof business.

Mine wasn't.

My business wasn't pandemic proof.

It was recession proof, but it wasn't pandemic.

Now it is because we've had to develop technology and where we've been able to go to the next level is through technology and add our technologies to it because we can produce.

Now we're in season six of the show, we edit, we use AI tools to speed up the editing.

The business has changed, you know, completely.

So it's finding that, that thing.

And like I say, sometimes it's in the least sexiest place we look.

So you start looking at what are you doing every day, what are you purchasing, what are you consuming every day?

And look at where those opportunities are.

How do you avoid getting distracted by shiny objects?

Because you're an entrepreneur.

And as an entrepreneur, if you're like me, I see new ways to make a million dollars every week on a business, maybe every two weeks.

But it's the energy behind it.

You got to find something.

How do you protect yourself, stay focused on task and say that as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, it's such a good question.

So, you know, in the early days of running the business, there were days where I didn't know if I was going to make payroll or not.

Right.

I actually had to dip into my savings more than once.

For sure.

It was tough.

I slept in the flower shop a few nights and you know, so we had to be scrapping at the end of the year.

We had 20 grand that I could leave in the business.

And it was like, all right, cool, we have 20 grand to go and invest back into the business.

Where are we going to put it?

And so we were forced to make an incredibly concentrated bet on.

We could put it in one or maybe two places, but 20 grand isn't that much to play with.

And so.

And we had to be right about it too.

Right.

There's not a lot of room to mess up.

Failure is not an option.

Yeah.

But as we hit a million, 2 million, 3 million in bottom line profits, it's, oh, shoot.

It's like, hey, we can make 6 or 7 or 8 or 15 or 20 different bets.

And, you know, we made some mistakes trying to do that early.

Right.

When we really started to be successful.

Because there are a million different ways to make money, but it's a trap.

And I agree with what you're saying is like, that shiny object thing is a real danger.

And I don't know what to say other than saying, like, saying no is more important than saying yes.

Yeah.

Having extraordinary clarity on what you want to go and do.

And I think just ruthlessly understanding what your North Star is and only making decisions as towards that North Star and those shiny objects are kind of like testing you on whether you're learning that later.

But I am learning it.

So sometimes I'm going to let you know how it goes.

It's hard because entrepreneur, you start going, man, what could I do with that one?

Oh, I could do this one.

Or I see a better way to do this.

Or it's just I'm at the stage where I don't have the energy for.

I love doing what I do.

It's enough, you know, between kids and grandkids, it makes a difference.

You know, it's interesting.

One thing I think, which is really kind of cool with what you've done here and what makes you unique is you're redefining what's essential, but you're also building a culture with people and how people see flowers.

So you're moving it from, hey, it's a luxury item to it's an essential part of our daily life.

Kind of like what Europe does.

You go everywhere, you see flowers.

So how are you using that, your marketing and product strategy, to change that behavior?

Because it's old.

We always think, like I say, it's a transaction.

Oh, geez, it's Valentine's Day.

And what's interesting with flowers, and this is something, you know, I talk about this, and I got this from Tom Peters, who's the management guru, wrote In Search of Excellence.

And he said the number one car dealership in the United States is Sewell Cadillac in Dallas, Texas.

And if you walk into their showroom, you see flowers, and it's flowers, flowers and flowers.

And Tom Peters talks about this, and he says, they have design bays where you can go and see what.

Here's 10 design bays where Mrs. Johnson can go see her new Cadillac.

So that's the real showroom, but it's all around design centers.

It's the feeling that they're creating.

You know, we're talking as guys and we're gonna go get our apartment, we get our condo, we move out of home, we get the big screen, we want the 75 inch TV, the nice couch, barbecue, we're set.

You know, we have what we need.

We're not thinking this table needs flowers, right?

You know, you do say is I need a Rolex.

And I promise you, you're not buying a Rolex to tell the time, right?

You buy a Timex for a lot cheaper.

So even men, we are very emotional on decision making.

You're going to buy the things that you work because it makes you feel a certain way, right?

Otherwise we would all buy the same thing and our kids would all be named the same and everything else.

But in northern climates particularly, and I'm curious how you make that work.

Does your business allow you from a supply chain point of view to go out?

Because you're predominantly Arizona, California, you've got locations, you've got New York work.

I know you've got a number of different locations.

Are you climate restricted at all in order to get there?

Because I'm assuming things are coming in on FedEx or overnight courier.

You know, that's a great question.

Yeah, no.

So we actually don't do any FedEx or third party where we have everything is in house.

Again, sorry to beat a dead horse here, but in order to optimize for the client experience, we have in house delivery team that is like a white glove delivery.

The flowers remain cold all the way from the farm.

Once they get cut and processed, they go into a cold chain.

So the supply chain stays cold all the way through the delivery experience as well.

And so we never ship flowers in a box via FedEx.

We're hand delivering them.

So, you know, it's a really nice experience.

If you haven't ordered from French florist before, you can give it a try.

And what I like to say is if you spend a hundred dollars at French florist versus another local floral shop or the grocery store or 1, 800 flowers, we don't care how much you spend.

I mean you can honestly go to grandma's house down the street and get free flowers like it's about the flowers.

But if you are going to buy flowers and you want it to be a special gift.

The money spent with us, we have a really premium positioning, like a luxury feeling of a company.

But.

But really we're a value based company and if you purchase from us, we want to make sure that we stretch those dollars as far as we possibly can.

So it's great.

I think that I want to just.

You brought something up that makes me smile a lot that flowers are not a luxury because that's so the opposite of what American culture is right now.

Like, people buy for Valentine's Day, they buy for Mother's Day.

And our name is French florist.

And so you're right that we are an American brand.

We're not a French brand actually.

But what we're doing is were borrowing from the European heritage and from the French specifically, their way of life and even more specifically.

Yeah.

How they view flowers and it's a lifestyle and they're not viewed as a luxury, they're viewed as.

Yeah.

An essential.

And it goes back to me saying that people wouldn't be buying flowers if they didn't know how special they were because of that extraordinary supply chain that we talked about.

You know, it goes through that crazy many, many years of growing these flowers and the whole process that it goes through, ultimately it gets delivered to your table and it dies like 10 days later.

Right.

And so we wouldn't be doing that if we didn't somehow like really intrinsically know that.

Hey, these are actually a really.

I think they're the most immaterial material gift.

Yeah.

And they're supposed to die.

That's what gives them meaning.

And it's really, when you look at them, it's again, it's such an extraordinary industry.

But what we want to do from a feelings perspective is just help remind people that like, no reason is the best reason.

And if you were to go and surprise anybody that you love, even if it's a friend, if it's a coach or a mentor, if it's your partner, like whatever it might be, and you go and surprise them on a random Wednesday night with flowers, it's going to be more meaningful than buying flowers for them on their birthday, for the anniversary, for Mother's Day, for the no reason at all.

And so it's like diamonds are the only other industry that I think have commercialized the word love.

Flowers are so much better and they're so much cheaper, you know, so.

And you get the same impact initially because after a while.

Exactly.

On your finger.

Yeah, that's right.

So no, it's a great Business.

And like I said, I think it attracts, as you said in the very beginning of this episode, attracts the right kind of people that you want to do business or people care more about things, but at the same time, they can have a business that makes money as well.

Hey, that last question for you, it's really, I call it the Lessons from the Industry Agnostic Entrepreneur.

So your story is an ultimate example of what being agnostic is all about.

You went through school, you got your business skills, you learned the theories, you got all the theories, but then you applied that to an overlooked sector.

All right, so what's the single most valuable lesson that you learned from scaling French florists that you believe is universally applicable to any entrepreneur looking to find a hidden opportunity in a traditional or a seemingly boring industry?

What would be the thing that you'd look at the most and go, this is something I should be paying attention to?

Yeah.

My mind goes to one plus one is greater than two.

Find the right people to partner with.

You can only do so much on your own and find the right people partner, and you're gonna go so much further.

So my biggest job right now is to ensure that we have the brightest minds in our organization and we hire just the best and then we partner with great franchise owners as well.

So that's taken us further than any individual contribution that I've made.

Most of this company has been built by other people.

Great answer.

Michael Jacobsen.

This was fantastic.

Thank you.

The website's frenchflorist.com they can get information, got beautiful displays of all the flowers like your website, good colors.

And they can get information if they want to look at that from an ownership perspective and take care of it.

Hey, thanks for doing this.

I know there's a lot of budding entrepreneurs out there and listen to the program who are going, you've got them all excited.

So now they're busy looking for things.

But hey, sometimes we have opportunities right in our own backyard.

So, Michael, thanks for doing this and sharing with our audience.

Thank you.

Michael, as you are listening to this episode, what is one idea that you've heard that's caught your attention and why does it matter so much to you?

And who is one person who you can share that with, either sharing this episode or just sharing that insight that occurred to you while you are listening?

Perhaps it is that even in a traditional low tech industry, applying modern technology and questioning how things have always been done can unlock massive growth and opportunity.

Or that building a business that lasts requires blending creativity with operational discipline, using systems and innovation to scale quality and the customer experience.

Thank you for listening, for learning, and for investing in yourself so that you can become the best version of you.

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Goodby.