April 6, 2026 – MetaCTO Garrett Fritz and French Florist Michael Jacobson

0:04 Jim Beach : Broadcasting from am we are too busy today to have the introduction, so I’m going to stop and just start going. We have a cram pack show. First up is Garrett Fritz. I’ll introduce him in just a second. It’s an amazing tech story, but in the second part of the show, I just want to stress how amazing this is. It’s Michael Jacobson, he has redone the floral industry, and I think I want a franchise. It’s amazing what Michael has done. It’s in the second half of the show right now. We’re going to talk with Garrett Fritz. He graduated from someplace called MIT, maybe you have heard of it, and then has had quite a series of tech jobs increasing significantly over time, with responsibility and working his way up to Chief Technology Officer. These are all the companies that have the names that you’ve never heard of, like just the weird internet names that they’re using now. But now he has created his own business designed to help us small business owners. It’s called meta CTO, and they help us, non technical founders, create apps that monetize and build all of the rest of the digital products that we need here. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

1:15 Garrett Fritz : Hi, doing well. Thanks for having me

1:16 Jim Beach : So tell us about meta CTO and all of the variety of services that you offer.

1:23 Garrett Fritz : Sure. So me and my co founder, Chris fitzkin, founded meta CTO about three years ago as a culmination of our as you mentioned in house, CTO head of product experience for different tech companies throughout the Southern California area, and what we’re doing here, and aiming to accomplish is that same role that we served in house the CTO, just at scale for for various different entities. And so our customer base is kind of bifurcated between two real domains. There’s the brand new startup. So someone who’s got an idea for an app or knows their industry really well and knows a disruptor, but has never built a consumer facing digital product or SaaS product, and they have, like, a rich uncle or a bag of money or something that they can they can fund this startup venture. And the other half are, you know, revenue generating companies, mid market companies, small businesses that just don’t have an in house tech team, or they’re running a lot of their operations off of a spreadsheet, and they want to optimize, consolidates and and improve their processes with with some actual custom software development in a tech team, without having to, you know, invest In an internal in house Tech Tech development team,

2:42 Jim Beach : All right, and how have you done over the last three years? How do you measure your growth, employees, millions in revenue projects. How do you share how you’ve done with us?

2:55 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, so how we measure there’s, there’s a few KPIs, obviously, top line revenues is a big one for us. The thing that we’re really happy about is we’ve for X our revenue since year over year since starting. So the first year was obviously some some point close point of contacts, referrals, that sort of thing. And and now we’re year into year three of this, and we’re looking at tripling what we did last year in top line revenue. Now that turns out, from an employee basis, which we’re pretty happy about, is that we went from kind of a global army of contractors and software engineers to now primarily US based for even our engineering talent. And so we’ve been able to do that pretty heavily with the assistance of our AI enablement. But that sort of thing has really resonated with our customers and clients. There’s no, you know, there’s no offshore team that’s servicing them. They’re all pretty high talented set of senior US based engineers, product managers, designers and so now we’re excited about that as well.

4:04 Jim Beach : Yes, I always prefer US based support. I think that makes a huge difference. I didn’t understand, though, how you said that the AI is making that possible. Is that? Is that what I heard? Yeah. So how does that help?

4:19 Garrett Fritz : Well, it’s probably no surprise to you or your audience, that AI’s been kind of a big disruptor in this space here, for really every single industry, and the one that is really been smoothed out or seen the impact is literally software development. I mean, that’s really where a lot of these tools were first targeted to solve some pain points there. So where do we, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago, even, we would be hiring, you know, programmers, coders, people who we value the skill set of knowing how to write an if statement, for loops, literal syntax across different languages. That skill set is not so valuable anymore, because the AI code writing is really good at that. Particular thing, getting the code, like the actual letters and on the keypad written. What is valuable now is the problem solving, the ownership, the stakeholder mentality, and really the engineering think work which is valuable, and now that time suck of actually writing code is no longer the bottleneck or the pain point, and we don’t really need to pay an army of kind of mid range to lower end programmers to do, to do that work anymore, and now we can take us based engineers and and staff that are now leveraged on those, those AI tools. So it’s a lot more bang for our buck in that scenario.

5:42 Jim Beach : You know, I’ve never done programming with AI, but I did ask 5.2 the other day to create an agent for me. I’ve never gotten that far yet with AI, and within about five minutes, I was blown away by how much we had done. I had done I hadn’t done anything the AI had done, but I had a pretty cool little tool. It was an impressive display for me. And so I’ve really, yeah, the programmers are going to be gone fast. It’s the people who can tell what to program, though, right? What I had to do is spend a long time writing the perfect paragraph telling it what to do, and then tweaking it, and then tweaking it and tweaking it. Is that how your project managers or your programmers do it now is just tweaking, tweaking, tweaking the paragraph that tells the AI what to do?

6:38 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, and you can think of it a little bit as, I mean, the metaphor is pretty close to how the work was done 510, years ago, where we would have an engineering manager and a product manager who would write lots of Word documents and PowerPoint presentations of the specifications they wanted to see. They would hand that to the human developers and programmers. They would go off for a week, two weeks, writing actual software and code, and then they would come back and show it to the product managers, and they would say, yeah, that’s kind of what I wanted, not really go back and do this. And so it’s the exact same thing, except if you take away the week long typing of the coding, and now your iteration loop is now almost instant. With writing that spec and seeing the results, you can kind of see how, how, how much more efficient it is now that the iteration loop is is drastically reduced, and why we don’t need people to actually type out all those, all that actual physical code anymore, and and that experience that you had is that, oh, wow, look at what my agent has done. Is not an unfamiliar one to a lot of our clients that actually show up at our door there. They usually have a lot of some experience with tools like, you know, chat, GPT, replicable, that kind of thing. And they say, Well, I’ve got this, this piece of software, I’d say it’s 90% of the way done. How do you get it? But, you know, I can’t actually ship it or make money off of it, and so we adopt a lot of those projects, and it does speed up some of the, you know, product thinking and flow and business logic stuff like that. But, you know, you’d be surprised at a lot of the gaps that the what the industry is calling vibe coded projects, are leaving your leaving you susceptible to, or the door open to in terms of security and vulnerabilities and just also user experience traps, which is where we come in and take things across the finish line.

8:38 Jim Beach : When you tell your customers that you’re using AI. Does that inspire them? Or how do they respond to that? Do they ask about is it actually reducing my cost?

8:51 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, so it’s, it’s never the language of, hey, we’re using AI, so now we don’t put in any work for you, right? It’s really, it’s really framed. It goes over and all right, just give us $10,000 we’ll give you a little bit of AI, and then we’ll be done. Yeah, yeah. So it’s a bit of a packaging, and a lot of it is a lot of the same kind of talking points that I’ve covered with you here. But really, what they’re paying for when they’re talking to folks like us, is the 30 years of experience in building, you know, applications that consumers love. And so, you know the name of the company is meta CTO, but we do everything. We have a creative director, we have product managers, we have people who have been, who’ve been serving on boards of multi million dollar companies. We’ve seen and shepherded through a sick, you know, nine figure exit deal for startups. So we’ve got the chops and the expertise to really bring to bear a lot of business consulting experience in addition to, oh, we can bring your product across the first. Fine, and so what’s really great is now you don’t have to pay us to do things that are relatively simple to do that, but are just time intensive. You’re instead getting us for what we’re valuable for, which is that problem solving, that thinking, that critical sort of assessment, which is resonates really, really well with our with our clients, all

10:25 Jim Beach : Right, and so what’s the number one bucket of things that you’re doing now? What are the different types of outputs that you’re being asked to do?

10:36 Garrett Fritz : So in the in that second realm of domain that we service those small businesses, mid market companies, companies that make anywhere between 500,000 to 30 million in revenue a year, that shows up a lot in what I call spreadsheet to App Services. So these are things that maybe the CFO or the COO has created, or in terms of running, you know, these actual businesses, and I guess you probably won’t be surprised, but a lot of people will be surprised. A lot of these really successful revenue generating companies with 1000s of employees, a lot of them are still running off of text messages, really long emails and spreadsheets and so in in our world, we would call that being held together with popsicle sticks and duct tape and so. But it works, and it works. It’s been working for 510, 15, sometimes 20 years. And so when they come to us, they’ve they know that they have this large infrastructure and kind of skeletons in the closet of how their business operates. But then they’ve also had a taste from replied of wow. And you know, there I could get some of this into an actual usable, repeatable, version, controlled piece of software, but still, the problem scope is too large for them to take on themselves. And so we’re actually getting a lot of people through the door that that kind of have a sense that, yeah, that maybe custom software is the way to go, because I’ve tried a little bit of it, but need, need some help to actually understand our business, understand our niche, understand the problems we’ve been trying to solve these tools, and then get it across the finish line. And what’s nice about that is, when we’re playing around and creating these essentially internal SaaS products for these companies that are replacing 1520 different spreadsheets and emails and kind of legacy workflows. What these businesses are seeing as well it worked for us is this something that I can now white label and make revenue on, and we help them kind of turn that into now a tool that is basically spawning off a SaaS business for them. So it’s more than just, hey, can we optimize what we’re doing here? It’s now, how do we turn meta CTO into a profit center instead of cost?

12:56 Jim Beach : Right? Is that actually happening where a cost is now becoming a profit center. We see that. Do you have examples of that?

13:06 Garrett Fritz : Yeah. So we’ve got two folks, one in the construction industry and another one kind of in more of like payroll, labor compliance kind of stuff, and we are about to launch now the in both of those, the white label versions of the internal tools that we’ve finished building over the last year. And so what’s interesting about that is the branding is obviously a little bit different than the parent company that funded the report, because they primarily worried that their competitors wouldn’t want to pay them for for the services. So it’s a little bit of a fun kind of strategic exercise when it comes to that. But yeah, we’ve in both those industries, we have been able to ship the the white labeled version of the internal tools. Now they’re still negotiating the contracts for those, for those initial sets of customers, but it’s already shown promise that there’s a, you know, there’s some, some juice on the, on the in the bones for that initiative.

14:17 Jim Beach : Sounds like that would, sounds like it would be a good one. So Garrett, let’s switch a little bit. I think we understand the business now. Congratulations on building it sounds like you’ve done a great job. Talk to us about the entrepreneurial journey. Was it hard getting those first customers? If you had cash flow issues, what have been the issues you’ve had to deal with? And just give us some birthing lessons. How did you get the business up running?

14:44 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, for our industry in particular, this kind of software consulting business, it is a pretty substantial chicken in the egg problem. It’s kind of hard to have the team unless you have the customers who are paying for the team, and it’s hard to get the customers if you. You don’t have the team ready to execute on it and and that’s, you know, not an unfamiliar problem for any new new business or entity. But for us, we kind of started with the egg, which was a pretty big Rolodex of clients and customers that me personally knew and was able to onboard and same with my partner, who has the equivalent experience as me again with being an in house CTO and head of product for various tech companies throughout the region of and this is over the last 1520, years. So right when we opened the doors, not only were just both of us able to service those clients with a few other kind of co founders that we brought on initially, but we had paying customers on day one, which is an unusual perk to have when starting a business like this. And so we took that and leveraged that, those initial profits and revenues into direct marketing. And so it wasn’t until really year the beginning of year three, under year two, that we actually started paying for things like Google ads, culture, clutch positioning and some other aggregator sites there. So the first two years has been entirely word of mouth referrals, that kind of thing, to get the team built out, the infrastructure in place, and really with the with the help of of that AI development, we’re able to kind of pocket a lot of that, that change, and put that into our marketing spend, and that is now started to become our primary source of of leads and revenue. And we sort of pass that inflection point of just people that Garrett and Chris knows to people who are discovering that a CTO.

16:50 Jim Beach : All right, so how much do you spend on marketing? Is it the normal 10, 15% or something like that? Yeah, that’s

16:58 Garrett Fritz : And even beginning of this year, when we’re halfway into year three. Now we’ve decided that kind of that is the business. We’re going to sacrifice a little bit more of our profitability in favor for growth. So we’ve actually brought that marketing spend, and not just like spend on Google ads, but also on the people who support the marketing so this is our Director of revenue, our marketing folks and sales engineers, is now closer to 35%

17:34 Jim Beach : Of our of our revenue. That’s a lot. Okay, you do want to grow.

17:39 Garrett Fritz : We do want to grow? Yes, that is the that is the idea.

17:43 Jim Beach : And have you determined a niche? You said earlier, 50 or 500,000 to 30 million? Is there a niche in that?

17:53 Garrett Fritz : You know, our industries that we service are all over the board, and I think that’s one of our value props. Like I said, we’ve got folks in real estate construction. We’ve got a few dating apps out there, couple of sports things, some gambling. We are industry agnostic when it comes to people we can service, and that’s something that we can tout as one of one of the things that differentiates us between someone else’s when we it really only takes about a week or two for us to be in there with with the companies we service, to almost start figuring a little bit more about their business than than some of their own analysts and employees. It’s it’s really that that expertise that we can sort of blend in and really understand that that business and that industry that that makes us valuable and stand out over someone who would just, you know, build you an app based off of exactly what you asked them to build. And, and then we kind of pair that ability to understand what they’re trying to solve for with, you know, just experiencing creating digital products, and what comes out of that is really something that’s unique, bespoke and and services their needs a lot better than what they originally thought they wanted when they first talked to us.

19:08 Jim Beach : And what about financing? Have you been able to grow on your own Rolodex? You said, I loved that line. You grew from using your Rolodex. Have you also been able to rely on family and friends and your savings to finance the company. So far, you know,

19:23 Garrett Fritz : We’ve been incredibly lucky that we haven’t needed to dip into any sort of financing kind of trickery to get through the door. We’ve always been able to make payroll. We’ve been able to pocket for that first two years, like I said before we did the marketing, kind of a war chest to fund the next couple of years of growth and expansion as we invest in now our top layer of really leaders for the next five years of the business and that advertising spends. So yeah, Chris and I took a very modest, just kind of pay the bill paycheck for the first year or so. Yeah, but we didn’t have to, like, take out a business loan. We didn’t actually bite into our savings. But that’s, I guess, one of the benefits of not being in our 20s anymore, like, we’ve got a little bit of, like, I said that that network that was able to start up our our our business, without having to kind of suffer through, like, what’s our roadmap for the next or, I mean, sorry, what’s our runway for the next six months? Are we going to be able to make it? It’s just been a profitable business from from

20:31 Jim Beach : Day one. What about culture and why? And recruiting people who are in their 30s and expect to have a strong purpose with their work. How do you handle all of those issues?

20:47 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, that’s a that’s probably one of the bigger challenges that, you know, we’re not gonna say that we’re the best at recruiting and hiring. That’s that’s something that’s important, you know, for us, obviously, and we’re putting a lot of effort into it, but like we’re engineers and problem solvers and and the people, is still an ongoing challenge that we’re we’re actively going out and pursuing, obviously, as a small business, the first key people you hire do make a big step in forming that culture. But in addition to just customers being what comes through our Rolodex, so does good people that we’ve worked with over the last 20 years. And so right now, if you look at the company, the employees that we have, especially in the leadership positions only, I guess 85% of them have worked with either me or my business partner before in a previous life. So we have been able to bring on people that we already trust, we know align with our mission, our values and our culture. And we’re now bringing in the like the first sets of again, people who are don’t know Chris or Garrett to be in important roles and but we do have kind of a foundation of 12 folks here already that that kind of are aligned with how we originally envisioned this, this business running and the people,

22:16 Jim Beach : And do you have an office, or does everyone work at home? How do you handle that?

22:21 Garrett Fritz : We are work from home, so we’re kind of distributed. We have folks all the way over in DC, Chicago, Minnesota, but we do have a big footprint here in Southern California, just because that’s that’s where we were, that’s where our network is. So we do, twice a month, get a co working office and kind of hang out, do some do some work together, those of us that are in the US, and then we’ll fly the other folks out in the leadership positions quarterly for the board meetings. But yeah, I mean, we have no desire to burn a bunch of cash on permanent workspace. The big thing that still differentiates us is from, from those big return to Office tech companies as a value prop, is you can still work from anywhere. No big deal there. And we have a lot of trust in our people and and that affording that flexibility is important

23:17 Jim Beach : To us. Fantastic. Garrett, you’ve done it very well. I just very impressed you’ve done the marketing, the finance, the culture, everything sounds like you’ve done a great job. So congratulations, and we’d love to have you back to learn more as the company continues to grow. How do we find out more? Hire you apply for a job all that.

23:38 Garrett Fritz : Yeah, all that can be found at our website, www, dot, meta CTO calm, that’s all one word. Metacho, if you want to just say it all at once, but yeah, that has a lot more description of how we tackle problems. We have some collateral on there for efficient ways to apply AI to our industry, whatever it may be. So some, some free, some free value right there on the site, and you can certainly reach out to us at just hello at meta CTO calm as well.

24:08 Jim Beach : Fantastic. Garrett, thank you so much for being with us. Great stuff, and we would love to have you back. Thanks a lot. Absolute pleasure. Thank you, and we will be right back. You. You. We are back and again. Thank you so very much for being with us. You know we recommend here a very simple model. Go find an idea, copy it, make it better, and then you will win. And that is what I think our next guest has done. Please. Welcome to the show. Michael Jacobson. He has gone out and found a product that’s been on sale for millennia, and figured out a better way to do it. He is the founder of French florist franchise.com and they have done the. Floral business better than anyone else has ever done it with significant better results, something like 70% more margins, things like that. Very impressive. Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

25:13 Michael Jacobson : Awesome. Jim, it’s a generous introduction, and I’m well today. Thank you for asking. I trust you’re doing the same, and I think that what you hit on is so spot on. I remember I even when I was in like, middle school, and I’m sure a lot of folks can relate to this. You have that. I don’t know if it’s something that you’re born with or maybe you’re exposed to pretty early, but you have that fire in your belly where you want to go and do something entrepreneurial, right? And when I was all the way past Middle School, past high school, and finally, into college. I was evaluating, you know, Do do you jump and do you do the startup that doesn’t pay any money? And I ended up not doing that. I joined a nine, you know, nine to five corporate consulting job. But if I can speak plainly, it was soul sucking. I didn’t like it, and I’m being kind of polite when I say that, too. It really it didn’t feed that fire in my belly. As a matter of fact, I kind of felt like it was extinguishing it, right? But I didn’t know or want. I didn’t know how I didn’t, and you can sense it in my voice right now, too. I was super hesitant to join a startup. It was just super risky, right? Like, there’s too many unknowns about it. How do you even begin to try to make that decision? And so when I had the opportunity to purchase an existing business that was really, real, real cheap. It was really cheap. So it was almost as close to the startup as you can get to it. But it was an existing business. It was an old flower shop, and used that as a jumping off point where, technically it was generating revenue. It was generating, actually no profit at all, but it had a few employees. There had an existing system. They had gone from zero to one already, and that’s a really tough part, and so that’s where I started, kind of in my entrepreneurial journey. And there’s something real, kind of sexy about starting something from scratch, but I’m here to tell you that taking an existing business and building on top of that is totally underrated, and it’s worked really well for us so far.

27:19 Jim Beach : Fascinating. Why flowers? How did you go? Oh my gosh, flowers, that’s the new industry that we have to figure I mean, what about it made you think that that was sexy or interesting?

27:32 Michael Jacobson : It’s a great question. So it was actually the economic opportunity that drew me into it first. So I’ll talk about the economic opportunity that we saw, but I’m about seven years into it now, and there is such a deep love and an incredible amount of like soul that I get to put into the company, and so much joy that I get from it far, far beyond the economic opportunity. So I’ll give you both sides of in coin. On the economic side, you have 99% of florists. Of local florists are single unit, owner, operator, mom and pop. And the average flower shop is doing about 350k in revenue, pretty, pretty low. And so just wildly fragmented. And then if you look at the dominant market leader in our space, the dot, and this is the only time I’ll talk about the competition, we’re really not here to compare ourselves to others. We’re here to make ourselves the best company that we can be. But pragmatically speaking, if you look at the consumer experience, typically the companies that do the best are really optimizing for who’s going to provide the best client experience. The number one player in the floral industry is one 800 flowers right now, and I’ll have to, you know, make sure I stay polite, but, but they provide less than a great experience. I’ll put it that way, right? And flowers are so special their love when you’re when you’re giving somebody flowers, you’re telling them that you’re thinking about them, that you care about them, that you love them, and I mean that in a pure sense, right? Like there can be friendship, there can be parents, siblings, it can be romantic, it can be a mentorship, like whatever it might be, right, all those different pure forms of love. And for the dominant market player to treat that as a transaction, and the industry somehow got so far away from how powerful of a vehicle flowers really are, and so that, combined with all of that kind of operational, pragmatic stuff, we’re super fragmented. There’s no economies of scale. The technology sucks. There’s intermediaries like crazy. We just started solving those issues and really like obsessing over that client experience, and it was really fun. So economically, we’ve done really well. We our first store was doing about 10 million in revenue out of one location, and so we opened up a couple more stores. Those stores all did over a million dollars in their first year. And so, you know, we made the decision essentially, to franchise, to partner. With existing flower shops that kind of want to level up and get to go to the next era that can benefit from the economies of scale. We chose franchising because it’s a lot of folks that they want to be in business for themselves, and there’s so much power in that I’m I’m really of that mindset where I want to be in business for myself too. But you’re not in business by yourself, right? You have an incredible amount of resources. You have all of the resources of a big business, but you’re in business for yourself. You’re the owner, you’re hiring the employees, you’re setting the culture. It’s your profit at the end of the day. And so that’s that’s why we did a little bit of the history of where we were, where we are today and and moving forward. That’s why we launched our franchise program, wow,

30:38 Jim Beach : 10 million out of one facility, the average is 300,000 Yeah, that’s just mind boggling. How much better you’re doing it than everybody else, and more

30:50 Michael Jacobson : More important than anything else, Jim, I have to say we’re having a lot of fun doing it so that, and that is the most important

30:58 Jim Beach : Part to us, all, right, does France? Does the French method of flowers have anything to do with it, or is it just a good name?

31:07 Michael Jacobson : It’s a great question. Okay, our name is French florist. We are an American company. How does that make it? How does it make any sense? That’s a great question.

31:17 Jim Beach : We sell Brazilian flowers.

31:20 Michael Jacobson : You know, we do import our flowers from Ecuador, Colombia, Thailand, Holland, Canada. We have a lot of local farms in the states too. But we, we borrow the ideology from the European and specifically the French way where look at American culture today. People buy flowers as a luxury. They buy for Mother’s Day, for birthdays, those kinds of things, but we reserve them for holidays and for occasions Europe, and you can see it in the numbers too. They purchase flowers way more frequently. If they’re not enjoying them daily, they’re enjoying them weekly a lot of the times. And they purchase for no reason at all. And our philosophy as a brand, kind of at the highest level here, is that flowers actually are not a luxury. They’re a reminder that life can be beautiful. They’re love. And we don’t view love as the most powerful human emotion that exists. I am yet to be convinced otherwise. And it’s the most powerful gift that you can give somebody to show them that you love them. It’s like the most it’s a material product. It dies, but it’s still a material product. And when you give it to somebody, even after it dies, the emotions and what folks remember about who you are and the feelings that you wanted to convey those stay, they stay, and they feel very permanent. So this is something so interesting about flowers in general, that Americans, I think, that the the competitive landscape has made us forget over the decades and how special flowers are. Europe has not forgotten that, and we hope to bring a lot of the European and really this, specifically the French, way of looking at flowers, back into America as well.

32:56 Jim Beach : I would have to agree. I grew up in a home that we always had flowers, not, you know, just for big events, but I would say, every week there was some sort of new florist activity. And my mother was actually a published floral arranger. She was in a French, not a French, I don’t want my mind is on French flowers now, cathedral flower arranging for Sunday services and things like that. And she was published, and the first person in our family to be published, and we were all very proud of her for that. It was a big deal when it happened for her, and it was an important part of her life, you know, just going to the church and arranging flowers, and then doing the same at our house, and then growing them and having, you know, a formal flower garden out back for house, flowers that she grew and, you know, I guess that’s part of the Southern way. But yeah, we always had fresh flowers. I remember,

34:04 Michael Jacobson : We need more of that.

34:06 Jim Beach : Yeah, Elton, who lived around the corner from us, went through $100,000 of fresh flowers. I guess it’s got to be a month, I guess, oh, my God, a month at his house, and we all knew that, and that was one of the, you know, the neighborhood little stories, and you would see the tour van stopped in front of his house and talking about flowers and stuff, I guess so. Did you know that was a big Atlanta? Yeah, I didn’t.

34:39 Michael Jacobson : I’m learning a lot of fun facts on this call. I clearly he’s unbelievably talented, and we’re going to attribute that to the flowers, right? Can we draw the causal relationship? Yes. Can we do that?

34:52 Jim Beach : Atlanta? You know, it was two hours from any of his venue performing venues, like 80% i. The West Coast, of course, and so he could get home and get back to his bed that night after most shows the airport, there’s a tiny, little private airport really close to his place, so he can get in and out fast and get home to his bed.

35:17 Michael Jacobson : Yeah, yeah, there’s nothing like home that’s, that’s That’s wild. It’s, it’s so interesting. I mean, I don’t think you need to spend $100,000 on flowers in order to reap the rewards. I think that you can probably go over to your neighbor’s house and, you know, when they’re when they’re away on vacation, and pick flowers out of their garden for free and bring them to your house, and you get the same benefit. You know, as long as you don’t get caught, you don’t have to pay 100 grand for us. It really is about the flower, and we try to lead through almost like we’ll call it inspiration, but also education as well around look, if you want to go to Trader Joe’s or the local farmers market to grab your flowers each week, we think that’s equally as beautiful. You don’t have to do that through us, but we really want to remind folks how special flowers are, and if folks buy more flowers, we’ll consider our Mission complete.

36:08 Jim Beach : So Michael, let’s break it down and start to learn some lessons. What are you doing? Different? What are you doing, 10, three times, 30 times different. You’re 30 times bigger than the normal store. What are you doing? What’s the point? Or the is it corporate accounts? What’s the secret sauce? Damn it,

36:27 Michael Jacobson : I’ll give you the secret sauce. All right. So I wish I could sum it up in one sentence, if I were to Yeah, it’s in the water, because it’s like the New York bagels. So there are so many different pain points in our industry, and we just followed the largest pain at any given time for quite a long time, and now that we’ve solved for a lot of that pain, now we’re finally starting to do some really incredible innovation work. So how do we take an already great experience and elevate it to an extraordinary one, something that folks can remark about, or, in other words, create a remarkable experience, but, but where we started was, I mean, gosh, I wish it was a sexier subject, but we were spending so much darn money on printer ink because everything was so paper driven. And I’m like, God, if we just developed, like an iPad application or something, we would, you know, you could buy 10 iPads for the amount of ink that we spend in four months. And so that’s exactly what we did. We bought a couple iPads, we developed a little application, and we digitized some stuff. That became the genesis for our investments in technology on the back end, so our operations run incredibly smoothly. That allowed us to really focus on the more important part, which is ultimately spending our time. Our highest and best use of time, is focusing on how do you when a client walks in the door, they order off of the website, how do you just create such a remarkable experience that we’re we’re building that loyalty for life with them, even on that first transaction? And that wasn’t necessarily I wish I could take a lot of I wish I could sit here and say, Wow, you’re so smart. But the reality is, our industry is in a pretty bad position, and us just following relatively modern practices got us pretty far. But on top of that, as we started to grow, we just relentlessly invested back into the organization and really understood our why, why our company exists, and it’s kind of the kind of get to the punch line, which is, we exist to create a more loving world. And we are a for profit company right now and and we probably will be for the foreseeable future, but, and the reason for that is the business can be really powerful as a platform. Some folks will look at the economics and the financials of the business as the ends. That’s the end goal for us. It’s not it’s a means. It’s a means to further serve our mission and perpetuate that further into the world, right? And so if we make any decision that we that we make, and it comes from, is this serving the client well? Is this helping us get the name of flowers, not French forest, but flowers out there more. And then then we believe that that will help serve the business better. Folks will trust us when they do want to order flowers, because we care more than anybody else, to hold that kind of sacred relationship between sender and recipient and make sure that we deliver that to the fullest potential that it has. That folks will, you know, keep coming back to us. And so we, you know, that was kind of the decision making framework. It’s hard to say, like, I mean, there were a trillion different decisions, but like, creating really strong principles and making decisions that align to those principles time and time and time and time and time again, even when you’re tempted not to, right? But we invested into a much more robust supply chain. We got higher quality flowers at lower prices because we were going more direct from the source. Our clients were getting better products, additional double down in investments in technology, both on the front end and back end. And then we really started investing into brand and marketing as well. What does it feel like to interact with our brand? And how do we want to come off? What are the types of things that we want to be saying in the world? So, you know, to put a pretty bow on it, it was really three major, major investments. One was technology. That’s where it started. The second was supply chain. And then the third would be marketing.

40:16 Jim Beach : Still don’t see 30 times growth in

40:18 Michael Jacobson : That, you know, you know you’d be, you’d be surprised. I mean, you’re if you go, I don’t know last time you walked into your mom and pop flower shop, but you know, for when I came into this one, it was green and purple paint on the walls. It was papers flying everywhere. Really paper driven processes. You know that the I’ll let you in on a little bit of education as well on how our industry works, or used to work, but this is what we’re trying to change as well. If, if you place an order online with one 800 flowers or any and there’s a bunch of different competitors that are very similar to that type of model, they syndicate that order to a local flower shop, that business model is fine, but when the problem that comes in is, when the florist receives that order, they only, they only receive 60% of the dollars after all the commissions and all of the fees, they’re only getting 60% order one 800 hours taken up to a 40% commission, and so the florist is getting crushed. So, you know, they they clearly don’t have the ability, they don’t have the budget to create a great client experience. If they do even try to make a profit, they have to cut corners by using older flowers, cheaper flowers, designing an arrangement that doesn’t look like the photo that the person is ordering, and it just turns out to be like a that’s just such a poor experience for the florist, and if a poor experience for the florist, how do you expect the florist How do you expect the florist to create a great experience for the client at the end of the day, which is the most important step? So that’s what I when we disintermediated. It wasn’t just on the downside of the supply chain, where we were getting closer to the farms and buying the flowers directly from the countries of origin, but also disintermediating and not relying on any of the we call them order aggregators, like one 800 flowers, or FTD or Teleflora, all of those types of competitors. And with that additional budget, we were able to really invest incredibly heavily into all of the different buckets. And you’ll have to take my word for it, it’s with a heavy amount of client obsession and a willingness to invest pretty aggressively, we were able to get that one store to where it is today. So and we have about about 20 stores open now, about 15 of which are franchise locations. And so our corporate stores kind of continue to serve as our test kitchen. We continue to invest incredibly aggressively. We take all those learnings and apply that to the system at large.

42:46 Jim Beach : And does your your store look the same as my local florist? You pointed out that they were purple and green or something and orange, and obviously we’re looking down on them. Does your store look different? It’s just a collection of flowers with a backdrop, right? I mean, this, it’s a great question.

43:06 Michael Jacobson : One of the things that I really love working on, it’s a really incredible creative challenge, is take, for example, you go on to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, they have all of these luxury companies, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, all of you know the list goes on for probably too long. And you go into one of the stores, they immediately give you a glass of champagne, and you start browsing. You see a white t shirt, a plain white t shirt going for $750 you know, you want to fall over when you see that, but, but that’s what it is, right? And, and they, but they create a $750 experience in the store. It’s a beautifully designed store. They give you not cheap champagne. They give you nice champagne, right? And and so one of the creative challenges that we’ve embarked on, and I don’t know, hopefully we never stop, is, how do you create a $750 experience for $40 or $50 how do you create a champagne experience when somebody walks into a flower shop and have it feel like just this incredibly rich experience, but we don’t have to charge them an arm and a leg for it. So so our stores do look different, and they’re a little bit more so most of our orders come from online. So our stores are a little bit more of a production. It’s like a it’s like an artist’s workshop. They’re beautiful. There are flowers everywhere. It’s more of a showroom. You can certainly walk in and buy them, but it’s not your typical florist where you see a bunch of different tchotchkes. It’s really open concepts. It’s beautiful. You can see everything that’s going on, and you can see how robust our operations are. And I think that transparency is really cool, where you can kind of see. The artisans that are creating the art, our floral designers and in and we continue to invest into what our store looks like, not because most of our stores come or most of our orders come from online, but if somebody does want to walk in, if they have some sort of consultation for an event, if they are doing events, and most of our orders are not events, they’re just everyday occasions, happy birthday, just because I’m sorry, right? And then we have, of course, the holidays, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, but, but we continue to elevate what the stores look like. The current iteration of them is more of a showroom, and it’s it’s beautiful, and we keep trying harder and harder every single year to further elevate the design of the store and have it feel like a million dollar experience, but not required you spend. You know, you don’t have to spend a million dollars with us in order to access it, and it’s been a fun challenge. So no anyway to answer your question, no, we don’t look like your normal florist. We we look like a store that could belong on Rodeo Drive, but, but we’re not on Rodeo Drive, and we don’t charge Rodeo Drive prices.

45:59 Jim Beach : And are you drawing most of your clients from the local area? Or you say online, that implies that I could want flowers here in Atlanta. Are you going to be able to service that? Or is that another one 800 flowers that I get helped by? So how? Yeah, corporate. Same amount of weddings is normal. Same amount of birthday work is the the buckets divide up the same Yeah.

46:25 Michael Jacobson : So we’re a hyper local company. We believe that we should never ship flowers in a box, and we should never basically syndicate the order to somebody who’s going to do basically like a 100 Flowers model, right? That’s the model that we’re fighting against. So that’s obviously against our ideology of if, again, if we take the framework that every decision that we make has to put the client first, and we can invest in technology and a bunch of internal operating stuff that doesn’t necessarily serve the client directly, but enables us to operate more efficiently and spend our time more on client experience. So But ultimately, it really is always about that client experience. So we so we don’t have a store opening in Atlanta until I think we have, we we do have a franchise location opening there, and maybe about seven or eight months. So until then, we don’t service that area. So we’re hyper local. We have white glove delivery. We hand deliver all of the flowers right after they’re made. And so it’s a really elevated experience where the flowers are treated right the whole time, and you’re really getting that full experience of the potential that’s ours can be so and then 95% of our revenue is online. That holds true across that’s kind of a blended average across all of our stores, but all of our stores are pretty, pretty close to that. And yeah, most of our orders are not B to B, honestly, Jim, we have a remarkable opportunity with B to B and corporate accounts, events, weddings, partnerships with event planners. We have an incredible amount of opportunity with subscriptions and and we also are revamping our loyalty program right now. I think that we’re really trying. We don’t have to do everything to an extraordinarily, remarkable degree. But there are a few things that we’re going to cherry pick into business and really invest into properly, and the Loyalty Program is one of them as well. But we’ve been able to do really well just serving everyday occasions. And that’s honestly 95% of the results that we have today are just through a focus on that, but there’s a lot of untapped potential. So we’re we’re not slowing down anytime soon.

48:48 Jim Beach : I’m still just blown away. Are you always in a good part of town? Do you is the part of town area specific? I used to run a business summer camps, actually. And we were in inside the cities, not out in the woods. We were at your local big university, and we discovered one of the most important things was how far we were from the nearest Porsche dealership. We did not amazing far from the Porsche dealership, and so, yeah, that was a big indicator of where our clients were. What about you? Are you only in La Jolla? You’re in San Diego, right?

49:27 Michael Jacobson : We are, we’ve opened a couple locations in San Diego, and, yeah, we’re in South San Diego. We’re up in Oceanside. We do have a location opening up in La Jolla as well. But it’s a great question, so I’ll let you in on the secret. The rent that we pay, we were not traditional brick and mortar retailer, right? It to the naked eye, it looks like we’re a retail brand, because we do have physical storefronts, but remember that most of our revenue is online, and the physical space that we have is meant to produce the arrangements more. As a production facility and deliver them locally. So that being said, from a SEO standpoint, search engine optimization, and now you have chat GPT, and even like Tiktok is integrating AI, where you have these other basically emerging search engines, they’re all very geographically sensitive for a business like ours. Like if you search for flower shop, it’s going to show flower shops near you. Or if you’re searching for a flower shop somewhere else, you might say flower shop in Atlanta, right wherever you’re looking to go. So the geocentricity that the where the florist is located still has to be very close to where clients are, because that it’s basically a digital investment and helps you rank higher in those search results if you’re physically closer to them. So our rent investment is actually we consider a digital investment as opposed to a physical rent overhead. That’s a very different way of looking at it. We do have a lot of sophisticated data that we use to understand who our client is, and can heat map across, really any city to a remarkably accurate degree, and understand where there’s a lot of heat, and we’re going to place our spores as close as we can to that heat. But one last kind of nuance to all of this, that so all of that holds true, but there’s something really important about where you place your location, and this is specific to flower shops. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all businesses, but I can tell you, it definitely applies to our industry. We don’t want to be paying like $15,000 a month rent. We want to be paying like $5,000 a month rent. So we’re going to get as close as we can to that heat. But because all of that revenue is generated online, we don’t need to be on Rodeo Drive. So our la store, actually, the one that’s doing $10 million in revenue is about a 10 minute drive outside of Rodeo Drive, and that allows us to not pay, in this case, probably $30,000 a month rent. And instead, we can pay $6,000 a month run, right? But we can still service that clientele. So, so there’s a balancing act that needs to happen there, and that it is one of the we don’t really have any secrets, but for lack of a better word, it’s one of the secrets that allows us to keep our overhead super low, ultimately, which helps profit, and again, using profit as a means to invest into our mission further, and invest into all the fun things that we have even coming up that I that hopefully we can share with you in a future episode at some point soon too.

52:29 Jim Beach : We haven’t talked about the franchise program yet. Let’s do that. Tell me about why I should buy a franchise and where is available. I’m great that Atlanta is coming, but I would have thought I could have gotten it. Tell me about your franchise, yeah, yeah, we have,

52:47 Michael Jacobson : We have had a lot of interest, which we have felt very lucky to be in the position that we have. We we have one sales person on our team, and I’m on the phone with him constantly. And the reason I hired him is because he’s not really a salesperson. He we really have a fundamental belief that we want to share this opportunity with whoever feels attracted to it. We’re not going to sit here and sell you on. Why do this? Why do that? But if someone did become interested in the program, we would take them through a series of steps. Ultimately, the last step being come to one of our locations spend about six or seven hours with us, and we’re going to open up the hood. We’re going to do a really deep dive on the tech, really deep dive on the operations and supply chain, really deep dive on the marketing, you know, etc, and and then we’re also going to give you full access to all of our existing franchise owners, and you can talk to them, because we can sit here all day long and say, we’re not sales people, blah, blah, but at the end of the day, you are talking to like our sales team, I guess in the beginning of the process, at least. And if you talk to our existing franchise owners and see what their experience is, that’s going to be the most realistic picture for you. But, but generally, I think, you know, a franchise can be really good outside of French florists, just in general, I think a franchise can be really good for folks that want to be in business for themselves, but not by themselves. That understands that the power of systems and process that’s predefined and experimented with already, and somebody who’s willing to kind of follow that system, and also what we’re looking for in our system too, is our business wouldn’t get it wouldn’t be to where it is today, with without the extraordinary amount of people, great people and partnerships, all of the team members that we’ve been able to pull in. And I’m not the smartest person in the room anymore, we own corporate locations, but and so we’re feeding ideas into the system constantly, but now we have franchise owners that are joining and also contributing ideas to a proven system. But just because it’s a proven system doesn’t mean we can’t further push it and innovate and make it even better. We have a ton of different folks that are contributing to this, like ecosystem and these community of owners, and then our responsibility as a franchisor is to run a meritocratic process, which means take the best ideas, see which ones bubble to the top and help enable the exit. Contribution of them with the resources that we have. So if you know, if anybody feels kind of attracted to that, franchises can be good for that. You know, there’s a lot of franchise systems, if I’m allowed to say this, that are not that great. So, you know, always look at it with a really simple eye. There are some franchise systems that are really great, even outside of ours. And if anybody was interested, you could email me and I’ll get you connected with our with the people that begin the process. My email is Michael French florist.com and you could also go online and just Google. You know, French florist franchise will pop

55:34 Jim Beach : Up, fantastic, and it’ll be a link on the site as well. Michael Jacobson, thank you so much for being with us. Fantastic job, a plus is all across, and we’d love to have you back. Thank you so much, Jim.

55:45 Michael Jacobson : It was a great time. Thanks for having me.

55:47 Jim Beach : We are out of here. We run out of time, but you know what we do? That’s right, we come back tomorrow, be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars in flowers. Bye. Now you.