Heroes in Business - Jim McCann, Founder 1800Flowers world’s largest floral 1.5B annual sales

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Top 5 ways to show you care. Jim McCann Founder 1800Flowers world's largest floral 2Billion annual sales, finds the best ways to show appreciation and adoration. Interviewed by David Cogan, founder of Eliances and famous celebrity host of the Eliances Heroes radio show broadcast on am and fm radio, internet and syndication.  

Up in the sky, look, it's captivating, it's energizing, it's Alliances Heroes. Alliances is the destination for entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, inventors, leaders, celebrities, and startups, where our heroes in business align. Now, here's your host flying in, David Kogan, founder of Eliance's. Oh, I am so excited again, as we just have the most incredible people. It's truly amazing. And remember, we share their secrets with you. That's what this is all about. And thank you again for the feedback we have when I interviewed recently the founder of Craigslist. And thank you again for the feedback. We have, when I interviewed recently, the founder of Craigslist. And we also have the founder of Angie's List. Bring those two together.

Listen to the magic. Make sure you go to alliances.com, E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. It is the only place where entrepreneurs align. I have one word for you today, and that's flower. Two words. What about flower and flowers? Well, you're going to hear some amazing story today because I'm so excited. We have with us today Jim McCann. He is the founder and chairman. Are you ready for this? 1-800-Flowers. I think everybody in the world knows it. I remember it for sure. Easy to remember. And he grew this to become one of the world's largest floral and gift provider.

Are you ready for this? With over two, that's $2 billion in sales. Welcome to the show, Jim McCann. David, how are you today? Excellent. All right. I'm going to throw that one word to you. What does the word flower mean to you? Well, remember, I'm in the kitchen, so it means a lot of different things to me. But at the end of the day, it's a magical way for people to express themselves and connect to all the people they care about in their lives. And it's interesting because, right,

somebody, to bring joy to somebody, right, they give gifts of flowers, when somebody's sick, flowers. Why do you think that came to be of the flower representing everything? Well, you know, we hear people say that flowers like God's artwork. And the answer to the question is an anthropological one and sociological and in some way physiological. Beauty does cause our brain synapses to behave differently. Fragrance causes the same kind of reaction. But if we look back and we've tried to

understand how the tradition evolved, and it goes back to Neanderthal man. I mean, we have evidence that the Neanderthal man was buried in ceremonies that included flowers as part of the rituals. So it's back even before I was born. How did you go about picking, though? I mean, you would have been successful with anything that you picked. 1-800-FILL-IT-IN, you would have been successful with it. I've read about your background. But what made you?

How did you then end up picking flowers? I don't mean to give myself too much credit because it wasn't really a picking kind of thing. And pardon the pun on the picking flowers. uh i i've only i've been very lucky david i've only had two career type jobs i've done a lot of odd jobs worked for my dad who was a contractor and as a kid and and as a kid irish catholic kid from queens new york i had a genetic requirement to be a bartender several times in my youth uh. And that led me to meet a fellow when I was tending bar at night in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. He owned a flower shop across the street. And he was a customer who'd stay late into the evening. And

as we were closing, he'd be the last at the bar. And we had a chat on a regular basis. And he told me, hey, good news. I'm selling the flower shop across the street because I have this new business idea I thought flower shop that's interesting the neighborhood I lived in in Queens had a flower shop on the main intersection corner guys seem to be quite successful it didn't seem to be rocket science and it was a little serendipity I had bought a building in a tough section of Brooklyn fixed it up and it just sold it. I had bought a building in a tough section of Brooklyn, fixed it up, and it just sold it. And I had about a $10,000 profit in that building. And I asked a customer of mine at the bar on that Saturday night, I said, how much are you going to be asking for

that flower shop? Serendipity, he said, $10,000. So I thought the stars are aligned. Maybe this is a way for me to get into a business that I could afford to get into. And one that seemed to me from the outside that I could be able to understand pretty quickly. So I didn't go looking for a flower shop. I was looking for a business of some kind. And this happened across my path and my receptors were up looking for an opportunity. So you take again, one small Manhattan flower shop, but you grew it to billions of dollars in revenue. That's unheard of, of a flower shop. It is. And we were fortunate along the way. We went in with the intention not just to be good florists, which was first and foremost,

but to build a business. So six months, now I had a full-time job in my first career, which was I was running a home for teenage boys. And I love that work and it's in a not-for-profit world and it really touched me and I did that for quite a while. But we went into this flower shop idea with the idea of how do we build a business so six months in I opened up the second shop and every six months I'd open up another shop and then every three months and then I had a whole lot of shops

and I discovered David not good planning there was no real synergies of scale there and so I had to rethink things and so what we did is our DNA was to say, this could be done more efficiently and more conveniently for the customer. What technologies might change our business? And so that caused us to go look for an 800 number and then embrace the internet and then embrace social and mobile. And now when we call those waves, retail, Internet, 800 number, social, mobile. And now the most exciting of all is using the tools of technology to mimic the relationships we had 40 years ago with the 40 customers who really made that Upper East Side of Manhattan flower shop go, but mimic those relationships using technology with the 40 million customers we have today. And so we've always been embracing technology. And today's wave is the most exciting, and we call it engagement commerce.

Excellent. And we're going to learn more about that because right now you're engaged with me, David Kogan, host of the Alliances Hero Show. Make sure you go to alliances.com. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. Why? Because you know it is the only place where entrepreneurs align. And we have with us again, the founder and the chairman of 1-800-Flowers. You know that, 1-800-800 flowers. And he grew it from one small Manhattan flower shop, paid $10,000 for it, and now to the world's largest floral and gift provider, over $2 billion in sales. So Jim, I mean, you've got this crystal ball. Tell us now about this engagement. Well, I think it goes back to relationships. And when we served at, worked at one shop on the Upper East Side, we became a little

centerpiece of a community within a big metropolitan arena. And those customers would come into our shop on a regular basis, David, but it wasn't always to transact. They came in to say hello, make themselves a mug of coffee, drop off their dry cleaning while they were running around on a Saturday afternoon doing errands so that they wouldn't have to go up and down. They'd ask for restaurant recommendations. So we became a part of the community. And engagement commerce is about trying to mimic those kinds of things now and thinking about the relationship you have with customers and changing the word

from customers to community. And what gets me jazzed up every day now, more than ever, is the potential to really engage with your customers that they feel like and they genuinely are a part of your community. And marketing doesn't become marketing anymore. Marketing becomes how do you serve them? How do you invest in relationship so that when a gift purchase is appropriate and the gifts that you have are the appropriate way that they would like to express themselves in their connective activities that we get fair consideration so it's it's unhinged and and unlocked a whole other level of engagement that here before you only thought about let me run some ads and now it's how do i create classes that teach people how to make their own flower

arrangements at home how do i teach them how to make charcuterie boards when they're going to be entertaining on the weekend how do i invite them to a virtual dinner where we have interesting discussions? How do we invite them to a forum where they learn about what are the challenges of caregivers in this day and age? And how do we bring our experts to the table on their behalf? Or the very basic one, which is how do we help our consumers when there's a death in their community in their family in their workplace and they're not sure what to do to express themselves so we the way we do that is we provide we go and get the expertise the inputs and we create a whole digest of services and inputs and lo and behold customers find that of value.

Tell us about this Celebrations Pulse and the Connectivity Council that you've also created. Well back in March of last year, March of 2000 when we all learned about this thing called COVID, we were based here in New York so we were the early epicenter of it. And I started writing a letter to our customers on Sundays. And I sent it out to them with an idea that I'd share how I was feeling, what we were learning, what we were thinking, how it impacted us as people in terms of the context of our families and our relationships. And I made it from the day one that we would never sell anything to our customers, never ask them to buy anything.

And lo and behold, the feedback we began to get from these customers was nothing short of amazing. So we've been doing it every Sunday since and it's taken many forms, but consistent. We've never tried to sell anything to a customer. We try and approach it from a service point of view. And that's caused us to change our vocabulary, David, from thinking about these people as being customers to think about them being a community.

And now they share this pulse, the Celebrations Pulse letter. Every Sunday, they share it with their family and friends. They ask if they can send it to other people and get other friends on the list. And so we have a circulation between seven and eight million now every Sunday. And it's changed my life because I never thought I'd be able personally to share as much as we do or frankly to tap into these wonderful people that I get to meet that I find beneficial to myself and share them with our community. So it's been a it's it's changed how we think and how we behave and how we feel about our stakeholders, now our community.

And where can someone learn more about the Celebrations Pulse? They can come to the 1-800-Flowers.com site. They can subscribe or they can just come to CelebrationsPulse.com. What do you see as the, you know, you talked about really kind of part of what is the future here. What do you see as beyond? I mean, you've grown this company, you know, to the billions now from $10,000, you know, 1-800-Flowers. You were one of the first to do it with the 1-800-TOLL-FREE number.

Then you were one of the first, again, to do it online and able to secure the site, 1-800-Flowers, and so on and so on. online and able to secure the site when you have flowers and so on and so on. So how do you see just in general the future and what maybe perhaps some secrets of what startups and other businesses can do to help evolve like you have? Because you could have just stayed at the shop. You could have just had one shop, but you had the vision to grow it beyond that. I don't know if it was vision. I don't want to take credit for that, but I just knew it had to be bigger. And whatever I was going to be involved in, we were going to try and grow. It's just a DNA kind of thing. When I ran a home for boys, it was, wow, there's so many other kids who need help and service. How do we service

more of them in the not-for-profit world? And so when I transitioned to the for-profit world, it was the same, how do we do more? And I get terribly excited about what the future looks like because I think less and less about commerce and more and more about connectivity and relationships, which I expect will generate more commerce. So I think the more we think about how do we serve a community, how do we help them to become parts of subsets of communities? So we did a book club in our Cheryl's Cookies brand over the last couple of months, something I've long wanted to do. It was more difficult to do in person, but when you can do it virtually, wow, it works. And we had Jennifer Wiener, who's a wonderful author, has a hot book out this summer called That Summer.

And she was our first guest on a book club. And we thought, well, maybe we could get 50 people to sign up for a book club. So we put it up the first day and 500 people signed up. And there were more banging to get in. So we expanded our license to 1,000 and the 1,500. And three days later, we had to cap it out at 2,000 people. And we had 4,000 or 5,000 more people who wanted to attend. So we since distributed the video to them.

But people yearn and want and benefit from being part of a community, a common interest. And when you have someone who's thoughtful and talented and open like Jennifer is and was in that particular interview to her person and to interact with our community, the need for us as a people, which has been exaggerated by the consequences of COVID, to have good and healthy relationships in our life has been ever present since Eve came along. And now here we are in a very complicated world with lots of complicated challenges. And our job is to help you to have more and better relationships.

And we're very selfish on our motivation there, David, because if you do, there are gonna be more birthdays, more anniversaries, more new babies that you want to express yourself with a gift. And hopefully we've earned your consideration. Absolutely. And I think it's important to note too, is that you even have the foresight to acquire other companies, right? Harry and David, the popcorn factory and that. It's again, just the vision of going beyond, or DNA as you say, but beyond the flower part.

I mean, the flower industry. I don't think we can take too much credit for that. We're just basic. Our customers, you know, I always think of our business as that flower shop. And when people come into our flower shop, I want to merchandise it appropriate. And that merchandising scheme will change from spring to summer to fall, from Mother's Day to Father's Day to Christmas. So there's different merchandising. So what we've been doing is following our customer.

What else would they like to use as a gift to express themselves with? And what companies are the best brands in those fields? And we either birth it ourselves, we build it from, you know, we buy something small and build it, or we acquire it if it's like a Harry and David brand, which is iconic and serve their customers. And we had a chance a half a dozen years ago to buy that company. It had been on hard times. And go in there and say to the management team, who was awfully good, what do you need? And they said, well, we've been owned by financial investors

for a long time and and we want to grow more we want to plant more crops so we're famous for our pears that we grow in southwest oregon and now we have apples and kiwis and grapes and peaches and uh and and so these are people who love the agriculture part of it i love looking over their shoulder and learning about it so we followed our say, what else do they want to give? Let's buy a business when it's the best in the category, or let's create it when there's nothing there. So we bought Sheryl's, a little tiny cookie company. Now it's a very big cookie company, and it's got the greatest cookies in the world. Excellent. We've got time for one more question, and this came in from one of our

listeners and stuff, and I leave it from one of our listeners and stuff, and I believe it to be important too, is what can parents do to instill that type of almost DNA, if it's not the DNA, what can they do to instill into their children to make a difference in their mark in the world like you have so successfully continued to do? That's an interesting and good question, David, and something I think about a lot. I have grown children and six and a half grandchildren, and we have that conversation a lot around the house. And I didn't think my kids were listening when we talked about businesses and displayed our curiosity about how things work, but they were. I remember one of my heroes was a fellow named Zig Ziglar. And Zig is one of the great teachers and philosophers that I've

ever come across. He's passed now, but I remember when the kids were in the car and I had those little cassettes playing and they moaned every time I put in a Zig Ziglar tape. But lo and behold, they were listening. And several years ago, I was doing a speaking engagement with Zig Ziglar, and I invited him over for dinner. And it was one of the pinch me moments as a dad in my life, because my kids are sitting around the table with the man himself, Zig Ziglar, having this wonderful dinner late into the evening, and they were recounting Zig Ziglar stories to Zig. So it just said that my wife and I just said, well, even if they thought they weren't listening, it was good to know they were. So I think conversation around those subjects, displaying as parents and people of influence in kids' lives, the curiosity, engaging with

conversations, even though you don't think they'd be interested in the business of whatever it is. I think it's exposure, it's conversation and rewarding curiosity. Well, excellent. I mean, Jim, you bring beauty into the world. You give back to those struggling with health issues in the form of non-judgmental support. You've created celebrations polls. You're doing a tremendous amount for the community. That's a hero. Jim McCann, you can reach him at 1-800-Flowers.com. This has been David Kogan with the Alliance's Hero Show.