I don't believe in mediocrity.
In my humble opinion, life is too short for doing anything half-assed or cutting corners. If you're going in, you may as well go all the way because close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
That's how Grow & Bloom started. I could never find a job that satisfied my creative needs and my systems-and-builder brain at the same time, mixed with my love of horticulture. So I built one. Grow & Bloom was my way to merge floristry with horticulture, connect people to nature, and make it all a lot more accessible.
This is how I got from there to here, and what I had to unlearn along the way.
A lifelong affair with plants
Long before Grow & Bloom, there was a lifelong affair with plants. It wasn't a straight line. I dropped out of high school in grade 10, after a family upheaval and a move to a new town. Later, I went back to adult education night school and earned my diploma one credit a month. My first green job was in a greenhouse at 19, and at 25 I went to horticulture college, where I earned an almost perfect GPA.
From there I ran garden centres, became a company buyer, managed nursery stock and worked as a district gardener for the City of Brampton, with my own quadrant of the city and my own crew. I merchandised every garden centre I ever worked at. On the side, I sold resin jewellery and terrariums at pop-ups and craft shows under the name Botanista. Later, Saje gave me formal merchandising training.
Every one of those jobs fed one side of me. None of them fed all of it.
All in
I signed the lease in March 2017, and Grow & Bloom opened that June. I bootstrapped the entire thing. I funded the whole operation myself and handed almost half of it to someone I didn't even know.
We were one of the first boutique plant and flower shops in the area, before the big plant boom. The partnership dissolved. I carried on.
Chasing the empire
Through the years, I let outside influence shape my judgement and my decisions. We're programmed to measure success the way the world measures it: daily sales, the bank account, the size of your team and how many locations you have. We all go blindly chasing that version of success, trying to build an empire without any idea what we'd do with it once we had one.
The pandemic was hugely successful for us. The plant shop wasn't laid out for full-service flowers and wedding design, so I expanded. The Dundas location started as our flower hub, and we funnelled flowers to the shop on Richmond Row.
At one point it was two shops, a lot of staff and half a million in sales. By the world's measure, I'd made it.
I was also endlessly stressed, trying to keep every ball in the air and manage a team.
When it cracked
It came to a head when I realized my team and I weren't aligned. As my confidence in my own design language grew, I started holding the work to a higher standard. I was taking on bigger creative jobs, and not everyone wanted to come along for that. We wanted different things.
Then the downtown building changed hands, which gave me a way out. Downtown was already losing foot traffic, and it never recovered after the pandemic.
Leaving Richmond was one of the hardest things I've done. That shop was incredibly beautiful and magical. High ceilings, old yellow brick, huge windows, in a highly coveted spot on Richmond Row. I had plants from floor to ceiling and all sorts of magical things in there. I swear the incense was embedded in the walls. I felt like I wasn't just leaving my dream, I was leaving a part of myself. It felt like failure, and I was deeply upset.
But on the day I stood in that empty shop, stripped bare of everything I had built, I realized something. I was the magic. Not the shop.
So I moved everything to Dundas and kept a few people working with me.
Then the construction came. To keep things floating, I took a job teaching at Fanshawe College. Not bad for a high school dropout. My paycheque paid my part-time staff.
I got through it.
Listening
Somewhere in all of it, I started listening and paying attention to what was actually going on.
The construction cut walk-in traffic way down. At the same time, I realized I wasn't a shopkeeper or a "retailer." My identity is a lot more complex than that. I'm a creative with a very deep affinity for nature.
Obviously I was afraid to shift too quickly. So it's been a slow, ongoing unwinding of what I originally built. The beginning years were about retailing products. Now I'm selling my art, my skills, my education, experience and my perspective.
What success looks like now
Success to me is autonomy.
It's smarter profit margins from condensing overhead. It's smarter, more informed buying. I no longer buy in the hope of selling things. I buy because I've sold them, or because I know I can.
I make my own schedule. I'm no longer expected to stand in a shop for eight hours waiting for someone to walk in when there are other creative projects to do. If I need time off, I block it out without feeling guilty.
My decisions aren't influenced by staff anymore. If I bring people on, it's as freelance help, because I want their help. I'm not obligated to employ anyone.
The work and the clients are so much more aligned now. I get to pick and choose what I take on. I'm not pressured to say yes to every inquiry that lands in my inbox, because I don't have such a big nut to make every month. The work is more about joy than it is about performance.
It's more inspired, too. I have the time and space to think about ideas and actually test them out. That's hard to do when you're filling a ton of fast flower orders a day.
As for the future: a lot of the industry is focused on producing beautiful images and videos. There's a place for that. But I find myself asking a different question. How can I make the industry better?
Sure, I'm still stressed. But I'm more free than I ever was.
My advice? Everyone will have an opinion about what you're doing and how you should be doing it. Wolves don't concern themselves with the opinions of sheep.
The empire was never the point. What if the goal is to build a business that supports the person doing the work, rather than a business that consumes them?