Every morning, Jim McCann awakens with one goal in mind: to move his company, 1-800-Flowers.com, forward.
“We are in a constant state of reinvention,” says McCann, the company’s CEO. “It’s like Andy Grove’s book, ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’; we’re very uncomfortable when we’re not moving forward. The most uncomfortable state for us is if we’re status quo. If we’re status quo, the world is continuing to change and we’re just not changing.”
That’s because innovation seems to come naturally for McCann, who parlayed a single flower shop in Manhattan into the world’s premier florist and gift shop. He accomplished this by thinking differently about how to interact with his customers and employees, along the way rewriting the definition of what a flower shop looks like.
In the 30-plus years since McCann started the company, he and his brother, Chris, who serves as president, have expanded through organic growth and acquisitions to become a public company with thousands of employees and annual revenue in excess of $700 million.
Beyond the well-known 1-800-Flowers.com brand, McCann’s holdings are widespread and include Cheryl & Co., The Popcorn Factory, Fannie May, Harry London, Ambrosia, BloomNet and 1-800-Baskets.com.
Smart Business sat down with McCann to discuss the power of innovation and how to build meaningful relationships with customers.
Q: What are some of the ways you applied innovation to adapt during the recent economic downturn?
We looked at this as a great opportunity, especially to find talent, but we did some other things as well that helped the company. We made sure that we were able to know the customer and serve them well. We took care of the finances and preserved our cash position. And we decided to invest for the future. The investments we made were in talent, technology and new business lines.
What a great opportunity to attract people that we otherwise might not have been able to attract. We also put money into video, social networking and mobile applications. And, we launched new businesses — Celebrations.com, a social network, and 1-800-Baskets.com. People thought we were crazy to do this in the midst of a recession, but they’ve proven successful.
Q: You’ve also been on an acquisition spree, not just in recent years but over the past decade. What’s been your strategy there?
The idea of following a strategic planning process is important to building your business. There may be things that are easier and quicker, but they don’t fit into the diagram that we’re developing to build 1-800-Flowers.com. We’re a public company, so the challenge is that the outside world may not understand why we’d buy rather than build. At that point, we tell them to trust us. We can’t detail the whole plan, but we explain to them that this piece isn’t just willy-nilly; it’s part of something larger.
That may scare away some investors in the short term, but those longer-term investors who have seen us make moves and watched them come to fruition will make their own judgment and, hopefully, trust us that we know what we’re doing.
We can’t not do things because some people don’t understand. We have to keep thinking ahead and looking at good opportunities for the company to grow and become better.
Q: How do relationships fit into the equation of interacting and serving your customers?
We have 30 million customers, and we still spend a lot of time trying to create relationships. You can measure relationships, but it comes down to the quality. You’re measuring the quality of a relationship. When we look at a relationship with a customer, the more engaged we can be with a customer, the better the relationship is.
I need a lot of help running our gift shop at 1-800-Flowers.com, and if I get the help from customers, that makes my job easier. It makes my input better, and I think it makes it more interesting and more fun for our customers to be part of the process.
I’ve been trying to do that for my entire life. Today, we’re doing this through technology, and it’s been getting easier every day because of the evolution of the new technologies. Whether that’s Facebook or Twitter, it makes that engagement not only easier and possible, but if you’re not doing it, you’re missing the boat. I want my life to be fun, more interesting. I want to have more and better relationships, and technology allows me to expand the realm and depth of relationships with vendors, staff people and customers. It’s all about the relationships.
