First, growers would have to adapt the way they work; they'd be in the upscale-gift business, not just the agriculture business. Instead of crating 500 stems of flowers for wholesalers as they normally did, the growers would be wrapping 12 roses in lavender tissue paper, tying the bouquet with a pretty bow, and attaching a handwritten note and care instructions just so, for a single customer. Owades envisioned hooking the growers via computer to her company. But many of the growers, she'd soon find out, didn't even have fax machines.
Second, she'd need to get an overnight shipper that was used to moving lots of flat envelopes to take on weirdly shaped boxes and accommodate extremely perishable products.
Third, even assuming she could set up a failproof computer system that would enable her to promise exact delivery dates, how could she change the buying habits of potential customers? Could she get them to care?
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Research the needs of potential partners. To growers, Owades would promise sporadically heavy but consistent business. ("We'll get them orders the day after Valentine's Day," she says.) Owades also began to understand how the needs of the shipping industry were shifting in the wake of increased competition and fax machines. "When I was in business school I had studied the Federal Express start-up case. I knew carriers like Fed Ex were having to change their mind-set -- they had filled these planes with lovely flat envelopes and now were having to adapt to the challenges of moving boxes."
Evaluate yourself from your potential partners' perspective. Owades brought to the table knowledge of the catalog industry, access to capital (people had told her to call when she came up with her next big idea), energy, and smarts. "Gardener's Eden gave me credibility. I don't think you could attempt a project of this magnitude without that kind of credibility." But her visibility presented a problem, too. "If nobody's paying attention, you can stumble a little bit. That's one of the reasons I wanted to start big: with so many people watching us, the risk of competition was sizable. If it was going to work, we really had to carve out a niche quickly and establish ourselves." Her early goal: $3 million to $4 million in sales by the second year.
Think about financing. Figuring she'd need an expensive computer system, a splashy catalog, an 800 phone number, and cash to carry the company through several years of anticipated losses, Owades calculated she'd require $2 million. But she felt confident that raising money would, for her, be one of the easiest steps. "The financing didn't come last, but it didn't come until after I was secure, until I had one or two growers lined up."
Consider legal protection for the idea. This was simple: Owades didn't think she could get any protection.
Write a plan. In January 1988 she bought books on business plans, looked at a couple of samples, and decided that "most of them are too long and boring." Reading that the average plan is 45 pages long, she decided to bring hers in at half that. "The process of writing uncovered the logic of the business and brought up smaller questions -- not megasubjects, like what are the risks -- but what happens when the box is delivered and no one's home? Those little operational things needed answers from me."
Start recruiting a management team. In February Owades began mentally lining up her crew. When she called Fran Wilson, a former colleague at Williams-Sonoma who is now Calyx's vice-president of operations, Owades said, "I have this idea. I'm not quite ready to tell you what it is, but do you have any interest at all in doing something entrepreneurial?" Not only was Wilson interested, but she volunteered to sign on, sight unseen, to whatever the "it" was that Owades was plotting. ("I knew I wanted to be in a start-up," says Wilson, "and I knew I wanted a woman mentor.") Owades definitely wanted several experienced people on board from the start. "The hardest part of being an entrepreneur is that loneliness, feeling as if no one is holding a net underneath you. I was very conscious of not wanting to start this by myself the way I did with Gardener's Eden."
Find advisers to poke holes in the concept. After her husband, the first person who heard about Owades's idea was Barry Traub, a lawyer and businessman. Another informal adviser was Stanford Business School lecturer Irv Grousbeck, a cofounder of Continental Cablevision, whom she'd met when he was teaching a case study about the start-up of Gardener's Eden.
With them, Owades would speculate about why the company might not work. "It's such an advantage if you can get people to tell you where the problems might be. Being surprised is the worst thing for an entrepreneur."
Decide which kind of partner to talk to first. Owades now felt she'd zeroed in on her concept and was ready to begin considering potential partners. "I approached growers first, before shippers and financiers," she says. "I felt I needed to know there was at least one grower who was willing to do this."
Check out particular partner prospects. "I went down to the flower market and asked for references and found out who the important growers of specific flowers were. I was reading trade journals, too, and certain names started coming up more frequently," she says. Owades cold-called people to talk not about going into business together but about the industry, how they sold flowers now, and the feasibility of mail-order flowers.
Determine the criteria for a partner. "It wasn't just finding someone willing to work with me. The growers had to meet certain criteria: quality, specialization in a particular flower variety, and commitment to service. And then it was, who will work with me?"
