1-800-Flowers CEO shares the best business advice he received from JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon

The bedrock of every relationship begins with trust and communication. It’s a leadership sentiment that has catapulted the floral and foods gift retailer and distributor 1800-Flowers.com into a $3 billion company and helped it navigate new and shifting disruptions to the retail market since its 1976 launch.

In a wide-ranging interview with Fortune’s Executive Exchange, the company’s founder and CEO, Jim McCann, shared his approach to innovation, his acquisition and expansion strategy, and the best business advice he received from JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.

Once a single brick-and-mortar store, 1-800-Flowers has transformed into a sprawling online marketplace with a portfolio of brands selling everything from lush flower arrangements to baked goods, greeting cards, and other gifts.?

“We do 25 million different gift orders a year,” McCann tells me. Cultivating relationships, he stresses, is at the core of the business, which sees an uptick in orders around Valentine’s Day and Christmas. But what’s helped propel the company to new heights, McCann says, is an almost myopic focus on building customer relationships and brand loyalty.?

“We really are in a relationship business. And as such, it’s causing us to say, ‘What do we spend our time and our dollars and our technology on to be true to the fact that we want to be in a relationship business and help our customers have more and better relationships,” McCann says. “That’s our guiding light in terms of where we spend our capital.”

As for the best business advice he’s ever received, that bestowment goes to JPMorgan’s CEO, who offered him some sage words on championing organizational change.

“[Dimon] said, “Jim, you spend way too much of your time evangelizing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You spend too much energy and time trying to get everybody in the organization to get it,” McCann recalls. “They don’t all need to get it. They just need to have the faith that you get it and that if they do their job of moving things from here to here, and everybody does that, it’ll roll up into a beautiful noise. A beautiful crescendo.”

Leadership Tip of the Week ??

Former PepsiCo. CEO Indra Nooyi recently offered a mini-master class on leading through periods of uncertainty. One of her five tips: “You have to build resilience, agility, and adaptability into the company. That’s often talked about but rarely practiced. Study past setbacks. Look for leaders who have navigated through crises and failures.”

Leadership Next

Soon after Eventbrite cofounder Julia Hartz led the company through its successful $230 million IPO in 2018, the Covid-19 pandemic decimated the live events industry and the company lost 90% of its revenue.

Yet as the world reopened, Eventbrite bounced back—pulling in $3.3 billion in gross ticket sales.

In this episode of Leadership Next, Hartz joins hosts Alan Murray and Michal Lev-Ram to discuss how both Eventbrite and live events rebounded from pandemic era losses, how Eventbrite is democratizing access to live events, and why women are uniquely suited to lead a company through crisis.

Listen to the episode and subscribe to Leadership Next wherever you listen to podcasts, or read the full transcript here.

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