Do you remember your first job?

My first job was at a flower shop while I was in high school. I started the week of Mother’s Day, the busiest week of the year. I had no idea what I was walking into. Luckily, this family-owned and managed shop had the experience and systems in place to handle the amazing volume of delivery and arrangement requests they’d receive.

At the time, I didn’t know that taking a personality test as part of the application process might be a bit outside the box to work for a florist. In retrospect, because we would all be working in close quarters, sometimes under great pressure, like Mother’s Day, it made sense.

Once I passed muster, the shop owners called my parents to be sure I could stay and work late – till midnight or 1 am some nights for the Mother’s Day push. I didn’t mind working late because they brought in pizza and I was now part of a team. No one went home till all the orders were done for the next day.

Thinking ahead, the florist rented milk delivery trucks so we could use them as mobile refrigerators for all the extra flowers. That was a creative solution! Both the front and back store coolers were packed with flowers.

Inside the shop, on the back wall curtain of their front cooler, they’d pinned a whole variety of corsages made up with an individual number by each one. The customer could simply view them and tell a staff member the number and we’d go in the cooler and select the appropriate boxed corsage. Yes, back then women proudly were corsages!

I was hired to “decorate” plants. I cut the colored foil, wrapped it around a potted plant, added a bow, and then bagged it adding the card and delivery info. I did that for hours!

When the women in the office were done reconciling the books for the day, they would take the cash register tape and wrap it around the building. They kept track each year of how far it went around that building as a measure of their success.

This was a fabulous learning experience. I’d entered into the employment process for my first job with no idea of how to evaluate it. Only later when I went on to other employment would I come to appreciate how well run and managed this small mom and pop flower shop really was.

I keep that in mind when working with my franchise candidates. I don’t want them to enter into an investment opportunity without the right information. If you’re wondering about a franchised flower shop, you might want to consider the proliferation of cut flowers and plant sales in so many venues, from grocery stores to general merchandising retailers.

The product or service of a franchise is of course important; however, the systems side of the business and the team you’ll be working with are essential to the overall success of your efforts. Fortunately, the discovery process is designed to help franchise candidates explore the amazing options available, by looking at not only the products and/or services but the systems behind the scenes to discover the workings of a franchise before an investment is made.

What did your first job teach you??