Jim McCann

What kind of car do you drive?
I have a SUV.

What's your favorite place to go?
Home.

What website do you like to visit?
Oh, there are so many web sites I like to visit. The frustration is you never have enough time to visit the ones you most like to see. But, I have a new favorite every day.

What are some of your favorites?
All weekend long my kids are giving me a hard time about my Facebook page.

What was your worst moment in business?
But when we were too stupid to lay down because we were out of business, and we didn't know any better. And we fought through it, and somehow came out the other side.

What's your favorite drink?
I like wine.

What's your favorite food?
Lasagna.

What's your idea of fun?
I'm lucky in that fun for me is business, family, social, and they're so mixed up that I can't tell where one begins and the other ends.

What personal weaknesses do you forgive in someone?
Forgetfulness, shyness, insecurity. I'm a recovering shy person.

What about business weaknesses?
The ones I can't forgive are lack of integrity. Everything else is forgivable, as long as there's honesty.

What movie star do you like?
I think George Clooney is a really hot star. I like everything he's in. But then again, if Robert DeNiro is in a movie, I'll watch it twice as often.

Who's a business hero of yours?
I have lots. Wayne Huizenga, who did Blockbuster and many other companies, is a hero and a friend. Don Keogh I mentioned before of the Coca-Cola Company.

What personal qualities do you admire in business?
Tenaciousness.

And what about in life, personal qualities?
People who want to make other people feel more comfortable, who go out of their way to be a host in almost any circumstances, are the people that other people want to be around.

Are you doing anything green, anything for the environment?
We certify all our farms around the world to make sure that they're green. We all kinds of initiatives to make sure that all our packaging, and all our recycling efforts are up to snuff throughout all of our companies. So we have a whole team of people who are driving us nuts making sure we're as green as we can be. So we call it being green all over. And when you're in the flower business, it's pretty appropriate.

What was your greatest moment in business?
I would say any moment that, when you're sitting around the dinner table, and all the sudden your kids, who really haven't been listening all these years, or made believe they weren't listening, are all the sudden talking about business, and they have suggestions. And why are we doing it this way? And when they use the pronoun we about what we're doing in business, that's a great moment for me.

What's your dream?
My dream is that life continues as it is.

What is your present state of mind?
Fantastic.

CNBC:
What did you do before you got into the florist business?

JIM McCANN:
My first "real" career I was working in social services. I worked at a place called St. John's Home for Boys. It’s here in Queens County, on Rockaway Beach. And it was a wonderful opportunity for me as a young person, because I had the opportunity to live in a group home with 10 teenage boys. And then I had a chance to run a group home, and then run all the group homes. And then work in the administration of St. John's. I knew I was attracted to the work, but I didn't realize how good for me it would be. I hope it was good for the young men I worked with as well, and I do get signals every once in a while that it was. But it was a great chance to learn all about yourself. And people think it's funny that I worked as a social worker and now I am working, running the world’s largest florist. But in fact, as I think about it, I had the same job 25 years ago or 30 years ago running a home for teenage boys as I have today. Now, granted, not as many people at work today are carrying knives and guns. But it's the same work in that my job isn't to do anything anymore. It's to help and incite other people to do things. To do things that they didn't think they could do. To accomplish more than they could. To set goals for them, and set rewards for the attainment of those goals. Create an environment that's stimulating and exciting and fun, and see them do things that they couldn't imagine doing before they came to work here. It's the same job I had at St. John's. It's a different audience, but the same job.

CNBC:
What was your motivation, when you first got into social work?

JIM McCANN:
Well, I don't know that I had any grand vision. It seemed interesting. I had a friend who worked at St. John's. And I had asked him about it all the time. And my first career, I thought it would be as a policeman in New York City, because those were the wonderful role models in the community I grew up in - policemen and firemen. But then, along the way, I got sidetracked and say, "Well, maybe I'll give this social work thing a try," and I got hooked. And so it lasted for 14 years. The last 10 of which I was in the administration. The wonderful thing about social work is it's as fulfilling and as challenging as anything I could imagine, but it doesn't reward you financially, [LAUGHS] because you are working in a not for profit social work world. So those are the people doing the good work every day. And so many of the people I worked with are still doing that work. So I admire and respect them - and thank them every day - but I was always doing things on the side, to try and compensate for this [LAUGHS] lack of wonderful income. And one of the things I decided to give a try was retail. And there were some people who put a coat and tie on and went to Manhattan and did something, but I could never figure out what they did. And then there were retailers, merchants in the community. So I worked in those shops, I was familiar with retail. And I was fulfilling a genetic requirement as an Irish Catholic kid from Queens - I was tending bar in New York City. One of my customers, I called him "scotch and soda," owned a flower shop across the street and said he was selling it. And I thought, "Jeez, can I work there a couple of weekends? Maybe I would have an interest in being a buyer." I did work there a few weekends, and I did have an interest, and I wound up buying the flower shop. And so, for the next 10 years, then I kept my job at St. John's so I wouldn't have to worry about putting food on the table for my young and growing family. And then I worked every other waking hour growing my flower shop business.

CNBC:
Did you always want to make your florist business grow?

JIM McCANN:
We knew from the start that anything we wanted to get involved in, I knew that I would want to grow it. I would want to make as big a business as I could. And, I marvel now at the young people today, because back then, I wasn't quite sure what an entrepreneur was, and certainly didn’t know how to spell it. But in that time, one of the things that happened in our social fabric of our business world, in that entrepreneurs have become celebrated - more celebrated than frankly ever in history - and it's a wonderful thing, because it gives people lots of different career paths. My entrepreneurial career path was accidental, in that I wasn't smart enough or diligent enough or hard working enough to give myself those career choices by good schooling and going to a good business school. So I was more an "accidental" entrepreneur, because who was going to hire me to do anything, except for me? And so, that’s how I tripped into an entrepreneurial world.

CNBC:
How were you planning to make the business grow?

JIM McCANN:
When we opened up the flower shop - the first flower shop - it was only six months later that we opened. Well, we bought the first one. Six months later, we opened a second one. And the plan was to go as fast as we could, to build up a chain. And it seemed to me that there weren't any big players in the floral business at that time. There were no national chains. No one had "McDonald-ized" the flower business. Yet, it was enjoying a great deal of popularity, and I thought, "Well, maybe it's possible. Maybe this is one of those few little areas that hadn’t been 'chained' yet." So I thought we would have a shot at it. So right away, we started to open more shops. And every year we opened up one, two or three new shops.

CNBC:
Were you always ambitious to have a large business?

JIM McCANN:
I think it’s part of my DNA - or let's say our collective American DNA - that whatever we were going to be involved with. Whether it's a not for profit world or it's in the for profit world, is to try and grow it. When we were at St. John's, our goal was to "How could we help more kids? How could we create more programs? How could we create more foster care opportunities? And a breadth of treatment alternatives that would fit the number of kids who needed care?" Because it seemed like it was insatiable demand for services for these young men. So we have tried to grow it, and do it as best as we could to maintain quality and grow at the same time. So when we got in the flower business, it wasn't very much different. We went into the business with the idea to try and grow it as big as we could. And we are still trying to do that. And we are still a long way short of where we hope it'll be.

CNBC:
So when you started, you tried to open new shops?

JIM McCANN:
Opened up the first shop in Manhattan, on First Avenue and 62nd Street. And it seemed to go pretty well from the start, although there were some interesting hiccups along the way - as there always will be. And then we opened up a second shop. And the next year, we opened up another two, and another two. And then in one year, three. So as much as we had fiscal - that is, money to do so - we opened up more shops.

CNBC:
But you weren’t satisfied with that?

JIM McCANN:
It became less clear to me how we could become a national company going a few shops at a time. And then there was this episode one morning in the mid '80s, when I was getting ready for work in the morning, and I hear a story on the news about a company - whose name was its telephone number - who is going to be launching something called 800 FLOWERS. And I said, "Well, that’s a great idea." And here I am about to make the decision to make the flower business my full time business. And I hear the best marketing idea I had ever heard - in any business - and it just sort of struck me. And there I was, shaving. Now, that might sound peculiar, but I do have to shave my neck in the morning. And when I heard this idea, I realized I had also injured myself and I was bleeding, because I was so enthused by the idea. [LAUGHS] And it gave cause for me to become the Fulfilling Florist of the New York area for this new company. The new company didn't do so well. And it crashed and burned. And I got in touch with the ownership there. And, one of the worst deals of my life turned out to be the best deals of my life - that is, I wound up buying what was left of this failed company. Not the smartest move I ever made in the world, but it turned out to be good because we had no choice but to make it succeed. And over the next five, six, seven years, it turned from a colossal failure into a pretty good success story.

CNBC:
So at the time there were no 800 numbers really?

JIM McCANN:
It sounds silly to say, but the 800 numbers of those days - that was the new technology. In the mid '80s, people were going to call a toll free number, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to place an order for flowers? No way it was going to happen. And I spoke with everybody in the flower business, and they were all of one voice - "This will never work. You can’t change consumer behavior. This isn't going to work." The irony is every day we all try and get a little bit smarter. We read more, we talk to more people, we try and learn as much as we can. But sometimes you get too smart, and you know that "nothing can be done." "That can't work, that idea can’t work." And it’s the young, naïve person, who doesn't know any better, who makes an idea work. And I have a friend, who runs a big private equity firm in New York who always says to me, "That the best ideas he ever hears are the ones he laughs at first. That it’s too preposterous an idea." Whether it was Fred Smith's FedEx idea, or so many others. Google taking over the world? Come on. Or Facebook. "And people are going to go do what?" And the first time you hear them, you go, "Nah. No way." And those are usually the best ideas, because they are the most radical ideas.

CNBC:
So then there were more new technologies that came along, not so long after that?

JIM McCANN:
Well, we had some success. In the 1980s we re launched 800 FLOWERS. We realized that not enough people know what 800 FLOWERS means. And I remember someone asking me, "Well, why don’t you call your company 799 Flowers?" And I thought, "Oh, [LAUGHS] maybe this wasn’t the best decision I have ever made in my life." So we had to rev up our marketing efforts. And then we put the "1" in front of "800 FLOWERS" to make it clear to people that it was a telephone number, because so many other people were advertising 800 numbers, and people were starting to get that this was a new technology. And then in the early '90s, a young lady - who still works with us, Donna - came up to my brother Chris and I, and said, "You know, I think we need to play around with this online world." It's not yet called “the Internet." And, because we were a company that just had this five or six or seven year success now, with having changed our industry fairly dramatically by introducing this new concept, we had our antenna up - paranoid, if you will - about what new technology might come along to change it again. So because of our "heritage," we seem to have an antenna up looking all the time for the next change technology - including this online world had the potential. So I am glad we listened to Donna, and I am glad we started to play around then. And in 1992, a year or so later, we launched on CompuServe. And then in 1994, we became the first merchant of any kind on AOL - betting on two bright young men that we got to know named Ted Leonsis and Steve Case at AOL - and we thought, "We don't get it, but we know that they get it. So let's hitch our wagon to their intellectual star." And that turned out to be a wonderful bet for us.

CNBC:
If you were to give advice to other companies, what would you say about "keep your antenna up"?

JIM McCANN:
There are two things that I see every day in the business landscape. And one is the people that I admire most, the people that I respect and go out of my way to spend time with, because I think they're just great entrepreneurs, great business people. Is that they have the ability, they get hit in the gut like all of us, but they recover quicker. They don’t dwell on their mistakes, they don't get all upset about it and say, "I'll never do that again." They recognize that making mistakes are part of the game, and if they only focus on their mistakes they'll get so conservative that they don't take chances anymore so as not to make mistakes, but they’ll not be doing the best they can. And I think of all my entrepreneurial role models, and I have a dozen of them, they've all had colossal failures in their time. They have a sense of humor about it, and they recover quickly. So my first bit of advice that I give to my son who's an entrepreneur, or to my other son who's working in a very entrepreneurial environment, to my daughter, who’s worked in all kinds of entrepreneurial environments, is realize that you're going to make mistakes, treat them as a joke, make sure there's humor in it, make sure there’s a lesson in it, and get over it. Recover quickly. Dust yourself off, get up, and get on with it.

CNBC:
Do you give them lessons about technology also?

JIM McCANN:
No, they now give me lessons about technology. Just this weekend my annoying entrepreneurial son, I say annoying because he made me feel very old this weekend. He said to me, "Dad, people my age don't wear watches anymore." I said, jeez, you know, I didn't notice it, but I did notice it, and it wasn't until you mentioned it to me that fewer and fewer people of his young age are wearing watches, because it’s all on their cell phone. And the other thing is, "When only old farts like you wear your phone, your blackberry on your belt." And I said, you know, I did notice that too. So it's official, I'm an old fart.

CNBC:
What advice would you give people about keeping an eye out for new technology?

JIM McCANN:
Well, funny, we had that chat a lot this weekend, how do you keep your pulse on the new technology. So, here I am, officially an old geezer, and the way I do it is I have these bright, wonderful, young, talented, tech-savvy people around 1-800-Flowers. And so I look over their shoulder all the time. And I formalized it, because once a month we’d get together for a dinner called what have you learned lately. And I try and invite a real mix of people from different departments, new to the company, tech savvy, young thinking people, and I ask them to come to that dinner with their ideas. Articles they've seen in a magazine, or articles that they've seen online, because they already newspapers, but they never have a paper, they're only reading online. And that's how I try and stay current. That's how I knew about Facebook so long ago, or MySpace, or Second Life, it’s because these young people say… In fact, I just heard from a young lady over the weekend, who put some graffiti on my wall at Facebook, and I said, well, Crystal, you were the young lady who told me about Facebook two and a half years ago. And so it was looking over your shoulder after one of those dinners to see what you do on Facebook that’s kept my interest in the space, and why it’s an important area for us right now.

CNBC:
Could you talk about technology and how it's important for the company in general?

JIM McCANN:
If you look at our evolution in terms of our involvement at 1-800-Flowers with technology, first it was this new technology, eight hundred number, long distance telephone calling. And then it was all these other experiments that yielded our involvement with the on line world. And then the Internet. And then the web capabilities within that. And then it was things like Second Life, and Facebook, and MySpace, and all the other involvements we have today. And you don't have to be a fortuneteller to see what's coming, a visionary to see what’s coming. In the pipeline is everything is going mobile. So we're nuts today about how do we embrace the mobile world, and how do we embrace customers who don't want to send a product, but they want to send a virtual gift. So we’re spending a lot of time and a lot of attention on wheres the world going next? And we’re just hoping that we guess right, or that we guess enough things that one of them actually works.

CNBC:
So how does technology help you connect with your customers?

JIM McCANN:
Twenty-five years ago a customer would come in the shop, and I'd remember that his sister's birthday was the next Saturday, and I'd remind them, and customers really appreciated that. Well, today, how do we do that? Well, we have twenty-five million customers who want us to remind them all the time about the birthdays, and the anniversaries, and the holidays. And they like for us to give them wonderful gift suggestions. And they like to be served up in a very visual kind of way with three different ideas, because of what we know about their sister. So, it's the same thing we did twenty-five years ago, only now there’s a whole lot of technology in between to make sure we do it actually even better than we did it by remembering twenty-five years ago.

CNBC:
So how do you do it? You send emails or newsletters?

JIM McCANN:
Well, a customer can ask us to remind them about the important occasions in their life, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or other things that they'd like to be reminded about. And they can choose to be called by us with suggestions, they might want to get emails, or they might want to keep a widget on their desktop that we populate with suggestions that automatically integrate into their calendar. So, it’s a variety of ways. We make sure we invest in the technologies so our customers have choices on how they’d like to interact with us, and be reminded.

CNBC:
It is kind of ironic, because a lot of people think that technology is impersonal.

JIM McCANN:
It’s ironic, and technology seemingly is impersonal. And in many ways it is. And I had a florist in our BloomNet Network ask me a question not too long ago, and she was feeling concerned about all the communication technologies, and you know, all the email, and cell capabilities, and people linked all the time, and IM'ing all the time. And her concern was, well, with all this connectivity, is our role going to be de-minimized? And my response was, no, I don't think so. In fact, I think our role in helping people to express themselves and connect to the important people in their lives is actually more important and more required in a world of constant, less than personal connectivity. There is nothing more personal than someone expressing themselves to someone with a beautiful floral bouquet, with a thoughtful card message. It breaks through all of that impersonal connection that we seem to be overwhelmed with every day, and makes it very personal.

CNBC:
Let’s talk about flowers a little bit.

JIM McCANN:
Technology has aided flowers themselves too. As a florist, I'm tickled to see the variety of flowers we can make available to our customers, the fact that we source them from all over the world every day. Thirty years ago, we had two or three different colors or rose at max. Now we might have fifty different varieties of roses with a hundred and fifty different shades and colors. And they last longer, and they're bred better, and they're just, you know, and a wonderful array of colors. My favorite spring flower is a peony. Well, those two or three weeks a year when peonies were available, I went nuts using peonies in everything. But now, as one of our floral sources told me the other day, it's springtime somewhere in the world every day. And I saw, in our lab last week, some of the most beautiful peonies I've ever seen in my life, and in fact we, my daughter had them in her apartment this weekend when we visited her, and it was just incredible. Now, twenty-five, thirty years ago, you saw peonies two or three weeks. Now they're available almost year around, and that’s exciting for us as florists, because look at the variety and the quality and the colors we get to bring to our customers every day. And guess what? There’s more coming.

CNBC:
What do you think about technology being cold?

JIM McCANN:
Technology is cold? I don't necessarily think so. When your daughter finishes the New York City Marathon, and you give her a call, and she’s not up yet because maybe she got to sleep in today, and you leave her a message about how proud you are of her, and how she did so well, and she trained so hard, and balanced her career with her training regimen, and inspired her cousin to do it with her, and then have this wonderful party the night after. When you leave a message to tell your daughter that, and maybe you're even a little glad you didn't have to talk to her in person because you got a little filled up a bit? Well, that’s using technology, but isn't that using technology to do something that years ago you’d have to wait for her to answer, and maybe forget it, or maybe it wouldn't get to her for a day or two? So, I think technology challenges us to be more connected. And I think that’s very good for us. Because at the end of the day, what I learned most from working with those boys at Saint John’s Home, what I’ve learned most in my thirty years of being a florist and working with the wonderful people here at 1-800-Flowers is, no matter what we do, no matter what we’re in, it’s all about connecting with other people, whether it’s a handshake, or a wave from someone across the room, that you see at a conference you haven't seen in a long time, or it’s a hug from your significant other when you get home after a really long, hard day and night at work, it’s what motivates us to do everything we do.

CNBC:
Now it’s easy to look back and go, 800 number, great idea, Internet, great idea, but there are so many others that might just flop terribly. How do entrepreneurs know that they're going to hit on the right one?

JIM McCANN:
My job isn't even so much to be a florist anymore. My job is to be a cultural engineer. And one of the things we try and instill in our culture here at 1-800-Flowers is that it’s all right to make mistakes. It’s all right to fail, and in fact, pretty much a part of our dialogue here is making fun of mistakes. One of my entrepreneurial heroes in life is a fellow by the name of Don Keogh, who ran the Coca-Cola Company, and he makes fun of the fact that, it was on his watch they introduced the New Coke. And his line is, “If I hadn't been on vacation that week we never would have done that.” But clearly he wasn’t on vacation. But he makes fun of the fact that they took a chance, and they tried to do something new, and we try and learn from people like Don, and make fun of the things we do around here. So, we’ve made some good acquisitions over the year, and we have a couple of duds. And I'm quick every time we look at a new acquisition to make sure that I remind people that I’ve made mistakes on acquisitions. My batting average is pretty good. But I have made mistakes, so let’s not get so hung up on that nothing can ever fail, because something is always going to fail.

CNBC:
Let’s talk about that virtual gift idea.

JIM McCANN:
Well, you know, I look at one, people, like a sixteen-year-old named Cora that I know. She’s on Facebook all the time. She’s interacting with all her friends. She’s communicating with them. She’s gratifying their space. She’s telling them to look at something different. She’s getting an idea of a party, they're deciding what parties to go to, which ones they won't go to. They're collaborating on excuses. But the point is, when I say privacy, and about how we have to have all these private worlds, and a sixteen-year-old like Cora says privacy, she’s got something completely different in mind. She’s got all her personal information on there, you can find out about her in every way imaginable. Which is a little scary too, but it’s a very different idea. My concern is, as a florist, how am I getting into Cora’s consideration set, so that when her sixteen year old friend breaks up with a guy they all thought was a jerk anyway, that there’s something either virtually, or maybe less, very inexpensive that she’s sending into her to say, get over him, we all thought he was a jerk anyway, you should be glad you're rid of him, and by the way there’s a party Friday night and I want you to meet this other guy.

CNBC:
A ninety-nine cent flower?

JIM McCANN:
Ninety-nine cent flower would be nice. We’re struggling with the margins in the world, but yes, how do we get a set of products. And you know what? I can't come up with those ideas. So, I need to enlist a bunch of eight, ten, twelve, sixteen year old young ladies and young men, and tell us what gifts they would like to send to help them express themselves and connect. So, it can't be an old cracker like me trying to figure it out, it has to be some young person who’s figuring it out. And that’s what’s so exciting about this new technology. Our company, my job is to turn the place inside out. Let the customers run the company. What gifts should we have? What kinds of card messages should we have? What kinds of greetings products? And now we have all these panels of online customers who are working with us on merchandising. We have a panel coming in a month or so, flying in from all over the country, a couple from outside the country, just to spend the weekend with our merchants about our product line for next year. I mean, this is scary and challenging and exciting all at the same time. But I'm loving it

CNBC:
What about virtual gifts?

JIM McCANN:
Well, I think virtual gifts play an important role. We have a bunch of young people who are working on that for us, and we have a new concept coming out, that I can't tell you the name of, which is all about virtual gifts, because I want an eight year old or an eighteen year old who previously wouldn't have had the disposable income to come buy a gift from us, to be saying, oh, I want to go to this company, whatever it’s name is, that’s hip and contemporary and strikes their fancy, that they use to express themselves and connect, whether it’s with a virtual gift, or its’ a more virtual kind of expression. Maybe it’s a single rose in a bud vase. Maybe it’s a balloon. Maybe it’s a poem on a wooden tablet, or a lyric from a song, that it comes with a clip from that song. I'm not sure what they are, but I have a panel of sixteen, twelve, and twenty year olds who are working to suggest to us what gifts we should be in. They know a lot better than I do.

CNBC:
Tell me a little bit about Second Life.

JIM McCANN:
Second Life is one of those wonderful experiments for us, because it’s a new hot technology, and I happened to meet Philip Rosedale, who started Second Life, a couple of years ago, and he told me, Jim, you have to play in this world. And so we did, and we put together a small team, with about twenty-five volunteers from around our company, some of whom are home agents, some of whom work in our west coast offices, most of them have never met, and they came together and got us launched on Second Life. And what we’re learning about this world and other applications it might have is frankly startling. And I had an online, in Second Life, conference where I invited people, the public, to come and give us ideas for our company. And about fifty people came to that conference in all different guises and forms. Of course all the people from our company who have advertised on Second Life, they're all buff, and they're all really special looking characters. And they made my avatar, and it’s a football old bald guy. I mean, come on! At least give me a furry tail. Because you can have a furry tail in second life. But no, they made me look an awful lot like me. And so we had this conference, and I'm telling you, there were twelve jewels of ideas that came from our public in Second Life, of ideas on our company, different products we might want to consider, how many, we might want to do things differently. And one who told me, this is how I’d like to express myself, and I don’t know how. Can your people help me? Because there are people I’d like to connect with in a better way. Now, we all want that best friend who’s so good at expressing themselves and planning a party, and ideas to go to. And now, because of technology, we can all have that special friend, and they're a click away. We didn't make money online for a whole lot of years. We didn't make money with our 800 number for a whole lot of years. The trick is to take as disciplined and as studied a bed as you can, because you can't do everything, and pick on those things that even if they don't work, the learning from them will be so good, it’ll help you in the rest of your business.