10 Years of Bloom & Wild: 10 things I've learned

THE EARLY DAYS

Know yourself:? Work out what you’re personally uniquely good at and how this will enable you to succeed at what you’re trying to do. And similarly what will be critical for the success of your business that isn’t your skillset/where you’ll need help. In my case, I knew I over-indexed on understanding customers and caring about their needs, chasing down the details, and taking a methodical approach. I knew I wasn’t a creative genius, a deep floristry expert or a tech guru, and so I surrounded myself with people who were.

Keep it simple: ?In the early days, obsess over your “minimum viable product”. We worried too much about creating things that were too simple and ended up with many features in the early days which we didn’t need, and which slowed down our pace of learning. (We still have some of these features now as it can be much harder to remove things than to add them). But make sure you’re then listening to and observing your customers and iterating fast on what’s missing.

SCALING UP

Continuous improvement:? As you scale, understand what your customers love and why, and strive to make it better month-in, month-out. Since the early days, our customers have consistently called out our bouquet designs, our branding and “finishing touches”, our sensitive approach to marketing, our simple ordering experience, and our customer delight team going above and beyond. I’ve therefore personally stayed close to and championed these areas, even as we’ve grown our team and hired professional leaders in each of them.

Limit your bets: ?Be really honest with yourself about whether new things are going to work. You can make a limited number of bets at any one time and they all consume a lot of your and your team’s valuable time. We’ve prioritised too many things without enough evidence, and stuck at them for too long when they weren’t working. We’ve finally got better at making these more difficult prioritisation decisions as we’ve entered a more difficult economic environment.

Continue to challenge:? Consider unusual approaches rather than sticking to your existing path. For us, the biggest example of this was when we realised that to really achieve our ambition outside the UK, we’d need to grow through acquisition as well as through scaling the Bloom & Wild brand internationally. This was a lot more work than just launching in more countries, but bringing bloomon and Bergamotte into the Bloom & Wild Group has been transformative as we seek to build Europe’s leading and most loved gifting destination.

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP

Lead by example: You’re the final safety net for everything - you should view leading your business as ultimately “on you”. In the early days (and sometimes still now when I lose my self-discipline) this can mean trying to solve everything yourself. It should mean empowering your team to solve everything, but always being there for them when they need you. Like a goalkeeper - you want the best possible outfield players on your team but you still need to make some saves and the shots can come in from anywhere on the pitch. This is a 24/7/365 job and one of the unique things about being a founder - you have flexibility to organise your own time but conversely not everything schedules itself around your holidays.

Find your balance: You have two jobs as a founder and CEO. You have a business to run and you need to keep the lights on / not run out of money / make sure you’re hitting your metrics. But you can’t just do this, you also always need to have a greater vision of where you’re ultimately trying to get to. And then you need to find the right balance of your own and your team’s time between these two competing objectives.

Keep your eyes on the cash: It’s your job to look after your company’s cash, even if you have a great finance team (we do). This means really understanding your financial position, and your unit economics and what drives profitable growth vs where you shouldn’t invest. To be able to do this, you need great data that’s easily accessible and consistently reliable. And you need to set a culture of frugality, either ubiquitously or discerningly, with exceptions where you’re convinced it’s worth making a bet. We’re making a bet for our second decade that customers will turn to us for gifts beyond flowers and plants, but even here, we’re just as disciplined about how we frame the opportunity as we are in our more mature flower business.

A WINNING CULTURE

Care: ?Be kind and respectful to everyone you work with. Get to know as many people as possible on your team and prioritise taking a genuine interest in them and their lives. People are surprised that I do this (I get lots of feedback asking me how I remember so many people’s names) but it’s one of the aspects of my job that I most enjoy, and it’s 100% worth the effort. As a startup founder and CEO, you have the privilege of having the final say over hiring, and you are the ultimate custodian of your values and making sure people behave consistently with them. This means you can and should be surrounded by people you love working with

Higher purpose: ?You’re asking a lot of people to join your business versus the many other career opportunities they have. You probably can’t pay your employees more than more mature businesses can, so you need to create amazing professional experiences for folks, a sense of meaning, and a culture that people love being a part of. We’ve heavily embraced sustainability and working with charities over the last few years and this is really energising for our team. Similarly, I’ve learned that you can’t build your culture alone - at Bloom & Wild we’ve benefited from some amazing custodians of our culture and I’m hugely grateful to them for the role they’ve played.