Michael Jacobson: CEO of French Florist

Episode 720

On this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, we’re joined by Michael Jacobson, CEO of French Florist—the Los Angeles-based floral brand that has transformed from a single struggling shop into a $9.5M+ powerhouse poised for national franchise expansion. Michael is on a mission to disrupt the floral industry with a blend of creativity, operational excellence, and a commitment to customer experience.
In our conversation, Michael shares what it took to transform French Florist, from the unsexy but critical work behind the scenes to building a brand that puts feelings and customer experience first. We dive into the systems and mindset shifts needed to scale a family business, the power of storytelling in a traditional industry, and why focusing on values before revenue has driven French Florist’s success.
Whether you’re a founder looking to reinvent a legacy business, a brand builder wanting to understand operational excellence with heart, or someone who loves hearing about bold transformations—this episode is packed with insight and inspiration. Now on The Kara Goldin Show.

Resources from
this episode:

Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super excited for today’s guest, we’re going to dive into a story about transforming an overlooked traditional industry and turning it into something extraordinary. So I’m joined by Michael Jacobson, who is the CEO a French Florist who took over his uncle’s flower business, flower shop, and has scaled it into over $9 million business that’s now poised for national franchise expansion with a background In finance and software, Michael has disrupted the floral industry by bringing in all kinds of goodies from other industries, plus a relentless focus on customer experience and values first, brand ethos, obviously, family too. So bringing all of that into the limelight and French Florist has really stood apart. So I can’t wait to hear how he’s turned this business into a category many wouldn’t even dream of touching and what it really takes to build a modern, scalable brand in today’s world. And I have to tell you the arrangements. I got a gorgeous arrangement from Michael and his team, and French Florist does not disappoint. It is so, so awesome. So highly, highly recommend it. So Michael, welcome

Michael Jacobson 2:14
to the show. Kara, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here

Kara Goldin 2:18
absolutely so Okay, so let’s get into the definition. So what is French Florist, and what makes it different in the floral industry today, from maybe calling up that local 800 number or going to your local flower shop down the road?

Michael Jacobson 2:33
Yeah, 1,000% I think you certain with the tough questions, the most important ones, right? Why are we consider ourselves special? You know, the way that I look at that question is, we certainly think that we have good ideas. We certainly think that we offer the best quality products, the best client experience, the best customer service. The reality is, we could say those things all day long, but it’s actually not our place to say that. It’s the marketplace that gets to decide that, right? And so what makes us special? It’s, you know, we do have the best quality. We do have the best we do have all of those things. But for any good company, they have to have those things. That’s table stakes, and it’s not even our place to say that. I think the companies that end up saying stuff like that aren’t even the companies that, like a luxury company doesn’t call themselves luxury. I’m passionate, but I don’t say that I’m passionate, except I just, I just did the except I just, I just did there, right? But so where does that leave us? What makes us different, if those things are table stakes for us, I think that we as a company understand more than any other company that exists out there, how special flowers are. And I think that it’s a very simplistic statement to say that, but I think it’s there’s a lot of truth to it. We feel very lucky to work in the industry that we do. The reason we feel lucky is when you’re sending a flower arrangement to somebody, whether it’s for Happy Birthday, Happy anniversary, it could be for something sad, like a funeral, and you’re sending your condolences no matter what the occasion is. You’re telling that person that you love them and love be is the flowers. Flowers are love. And I’m yet to be convinced that there’s a more powerful emotion that exists in our humanity than love, and that’s the industry that we get to work in That’s pretty remarkable to us. So what makes us different? I think that it’s a little bit of a softer concept, but I think it’s an important one. We have an obsession over the client experience, not we’re not just saying that it’s it’s because we understand how special it is that the industry that we’re in, and when somebody is sending flowers to somebody, we recognize what they’re doing is they’re creating a more loving world, right? And that there’s a halo effect with that as well. So I think that clients can sense that how deeply we care about the work that we put out into the world, and we. When they do order with us, we we’re going to hold that responsibility of delivering those flowers with a lot of weight, because we know how special it is, and so it’s from the highest level that we do have a heavy culture of innovation, doing things a little bit differently, going above and beyond 11 out of 10, surprise and delight. There’s a lot of stuff that we do that we do that helps differentiate us from a more tactical level, but, but that from the highest level, it’s probably the level of passion that we have in at the DNA of the company.

Kara Goldin 5:29
So you took over your uncle’s flower business when it was, it sounds like it was, you know, he was having a tough time. I mean, it’s, it’s an incredibly competitive industry, I think, owned by, you know, just a couple at most. And what was the moment where you decided that you were all in, that this was the business that you wanted to get into?

Michael Jacobson 5:54
You know, I was the kid in middle school. That was our middle school had just banned soda out of the vending machines, and everybody was super upset. I kind of looked at that as an opportunity, like, wow, I can maybe, if I can get my hands on some soda, you know, convince my parents to take me to the supermarket, put them in my locker, sell them at lunch. People want soda, right? And, and I liked the soda too, right? It’s not great for you, but as a middle school kid, I liked it, and so, you know, that’s when I started to develop entrepreneurial spirit. I went through high school, went through college, studied business, didn’t want to take you hear about the statistics on how many startups fail, right? So I played it a little bit safe out right out of college, I took a job in corporate consulting, whatever that even means, right? And but it just didn’t feed that fire in my belly. And I saw, after a few months of working there, the wall that my ladder was up against wasn’t super passionate about it. And so I told myself, I would, you know, follow through with that commitment work there at least a year. They took a chance on me too. And, you know, and it was a great company, but again, just didn’t feed that fire more entrepreneurial spirit. I think that a lot of folks have, especially the listening to this podcast, right? And so my ear was to the ground on opportunities that were maybe a little bit more entrepreneurial. I get a call from my uncle, and he says, Mike, I am tired. I’m working six days a week, 60 hours, and not making any money. I’ve been running this flower shop for 38 years, and I want to sell it. And I studied finance, and it was tapping on me to help sell. I’m sure I wasn’t his first call, but, you know, I think he talked to a business broker, and the company wasn’t worth that much. And so he’s like, you know, any advice? And so I told him, I’ll, you know, I’ll happily come in. And that was the original intent, was I came in and was going to help him sell the business. What I learned, the turning point, the point of no return for me, was I came into that industry, and when I was looking at selling his shop, I would go around to other florists. What are they doing? Well, what are they not doing? Well, what are they not doing? Well, what multiples are the recent ones selling for? Like, all the normal stuff? What I found no, nobody had soda. And there were other like issues. There were systemic issues where the floors, they were in pain, that the students in middle school, they’re in pain, right? Because they don’t have soda and and if you could help them solve that pain, make their life a little bit easier. And these florists, I will tell you something. Florists are incredible people. They’re so creative, they’re so passionate. My uncle is no exception to that. They’re in the business for all of the right reasons. They understand how special flowers are, usually, and they continue to do it decade after decade, obviously not because of the paycheck. There’s more to it than that. So it’s really nice thing to see, but it was, it was hard to see. Almost every single florist is struggling with the same exact issue. And I mean, you alluded to some of the dominant market players out there. We don’t like to look at the competition that much. We’re here to, you know, build our own company and shine our own lamp and create, you know, put 100% of our energy on the client experience. One of the problems, though, with the leading competitors is they take your order from online, they syndicate it to a local florist, so they’re like an internet broker and problem, and they take like, a 40% commission, plus on on those orders, after all of their fees are considered. And so, you know, for more reasons than just that, but that being a huge one, there’s florists are getting crushed. There’s no technology. The supply chain sucks. The marketing, like everything. It’s a very antiquated space. And so when I saw that pain in the market, I my uncle looked at me a little bit of funny, but I told him, Hey, like, I want to take over the shop and see if I can work on it for six or eight months and see if we can kind of turn it around. And we started to do really, really well. And so we opened a second shop, we opened a third shop, all of them started to do quite well, and we’re like, Okay, wow, what are we doing here? Ultimately, you know, we made the very intentional choice to develop our franchise program that we have today to basically a, most importantly, give the marketplace our clients that we serve a. A better customer experience when buying flowers, because right now, it’s a shame that when you buy flowers online, in our opinion, it’s a pretty hit or miss experience. It’s not an experience in where it should be today. So that’s the first pain that we’re solving, but florists are the vehicle for us to go and deliver that client experience, and we can help florists in their journey as well. So a little bit about past, present and where we’re going

Kara Goldin 10:18
there. So you opened three of your own is that right? And then that was when you made the decision to think about franchising. Were you mostly focused you live in LA? Were you mostly focused on franchising outside of Los Angeles? Do you think that you’ll continue to own some of your own stores. How do you think about

Michael Jacobson 10:43
that? Yeah, it’s a great question, too. We I have a negative stigma with franchising, even to this day. Sure, a lot of folks do. There are mostly not great franchise systems out there. If I can speak bluntly, I think there are some very, very good ones out there. I think we’re approaching franchising in a way that studies those models in a similar way that we’ve approached the floral industry, where we’ve been described as folks that like to kick up dust, right? We’re going to go ahead and challenge the status quo. We’re going to question if it makes sense or not to do things in the way that it’s been done before. And if it does great and if it doesn’t, we’re going to invent a new and better way we view the same thing about franchising is there are some great parts about franchising, and we lean really heavily into those great parts. I think the reason that we’ve chose chosen franchising as ultimately, again, everything that we do is to create the best client experience. So everything, every decision we make, is a derivative based off of that. If we have a shop in Scottsdale, in Austin, in Boca, Raton, wherever. Right? I think that if we we can open up two or three or 400 corporate locations across the states. It’s one way to expand, sure, but we’re going to have three or 400 different managers running those locations, even if we’re paying them 8090, Bucha salaries. There’s what I think a lot of people view as a small difference, but I think it’s huge, massive, like order of magnitude difference, where if you have a manager in that store versus an owner of that store, there’s just a slightly different mentality. And if we can find the right owners in a franchise system that understand how powerful flowers are and are very creatively driven. We describe ourselves. We’re really good at the boring stuff, the finance, the marketing, the technology, the operational support, like we do all of that stuff. We give all of that to the franchise owner. If we find somebody who’s extremely passionate about, you know, serving the folks that we get to serve. I think that that owner is going to push it from even like an eight or nine out of 10 experience to like delivering a 10 or maybe even an 11 out of 10 experience. So it really is a small difference on why franchise versus corporate, but having that local owner mentality and that passion in the local community, where we can just provide an incredible amount of support. We’re really good at what we do, they’re really good at what they do, and joining forces together, I think that’s where we’re gonna get the best results, ultimately, for the clients. So I for the clients. So small, subtle difference on on corporate expansion versus franchise, but that’s ultimately why we chose franchise.

Kara Goldin 13:09
I love it. Well, I think that part of we’ve had, you and I were chatting about this, we’ve had a number of franchises on this, on this program. And I think what’s fascinating is that no matter what the actual business or industry is, there’s there’s systems, right? There’s branding, there’s systems, all of the things that you were just talking about that are, it’s almost like you’re also coming in as a mentor to show like it’s worked in these three places. Let’s go and bring it into, you know, these and you can, you know, use these systems and all of that. So when you think about the, you know, boring, unsexy work you did behind the scenes that actually moved the needle when, you know, you came from a different industry and had, you know, a passion, how to love for your uncle, all of these things that you wanted to make it work. But what did you have to do to actually move the needle?

Michael Jacobson 14:10
Yeah, totally. So when I took over the business, a lot of it was for the first six, eight months. Was stopping the bleeding. It was a lot more tactical work. You know, when the very first decision I ever made in the company, you know, we sat and listened to the six employees that we had at the time, and two of them were customer service folks that both of them were part time, and I said, you know, what would you improve? What would you change? What do you need? How can I support? They said, Well, you know, we’re using our phones customers call us to try to place an order. It’s really hard for us to hear the customer on the phone. I think they have a hard time hearing us, too. I think we need a better phone system. Like, okay, great. That’s, like, really important. And so I looked at the phone bill, I’m like, Okay, let’s try to get a better phone system in we’re probably, you know, not. Paying that much for it. Let’s see if we can get something a little better, even it costs a little more, it’s probably worthwhile. It turns out we were paying $1,300 a month for our phone bill. I learned a lot about telephony that did not expect to learn, but like, we were using the old school systems. And when I say florists are great people, is a good example of it. My uncle was, like, really good friends with the phone sales guy, because my uncle just has, like, a bleeding heart, and he’s incredibly generous. And the phone sales guy, he thought the phone sales guy was his, like best friend clearly wasn’t. But So anyways, we ended up moving to a better phone system that was, like 100 bucks a month and, you know, super crisp audio quality, right? So saved $10,000 a year or more, right there, so that the first six, eight months were a lot of just tiny little decisions to get the business to, at least to, like, a little bit of a better space as soon as we started to that was to get it to break even and within the first couple of months, and then started to generate, generate a little bit of profit after about six months or so. And then that’s where the fun work really began, where we got to innovate. So we took I was coming out of, you know, my first job out of college, I was still living a pretty scrappy lifestyle. Was happy to live the ramen, profitable life, right? I was living on next to nothing, and just had a lot of joy running this business. I felt like it was a real life MBA, where I was getting paid to run this company, I felt like I should be so I didn’t have a problem, kind of, to an extreme degree, reinvesting into the company, as opposed to distributing that as a salary to myself or whatever. So yeah, we basically looked at no stone was unturned. We looked at the supply chain, we looked at the technology. I looked at our marketing and branding efforts, the website, conversion rate optimization, SEO, paid ads. We looked at like, just an incredible amount of stuff. And the problem was we only had, we were pulling in maybe 40 or 50k of profit in that first year. So it’s not, not a whole to play with. At the time. We’re like, okay, we can make five or 10, like $5,000 bets, or maybe, like, one or 220, $1,000 bets, like, how do we want to do this? And so it was just a game of incredible, radical prioritization, and but we were, you know, incredibly small companies, just myself primarily making these decisions. So we the first thing was the operating technology. We were basically spending 10, over $10,000 a year on printer ink, because the tickets would print out. You’d flip it over, you’d have to copy and paste the image from the website onto the back of the paper. So the designers knew what arrangement they were designing and what that arrangement looked like. It was like a just a crazy way to six fax machine. It was, it was a ridiculously archaic process. We’re like, why don’t we just create a little iPad application that has all of this information on it’s way more streamlined. You’re not getting paper wet and the card message is wet and it’s getting delivered, you know? So the technology was a big thing. The marketing was the other on the marketing side of things, we knew that, as much as we like business, because it’s black and white and logic based like, the reality is we’re human. We are led by emotion. Our customers are different than that. And so we knew that we had to invest into leading with emotion, especially given the industry that we’re in. And so we took some inspiration from like, I like, there’s, do you know Tiffany’s, the jewelry company, Tiffany’s, of course, yeah, okay, so Tiffany’s is interesting because they’re, they’re a little bit about love. They’re in the diamond industry. The part I don’t like about them, just to get this off my chest, they’re about love, but they’re a little bit exclusive with it, right? It’s very expensive, and it’s only reserved for whatever you know, folks can afford it. I think that I take a lot of I give them a lot of credit for the wonderful branding work that they’ve done. I think the difference between our two companies is we don’t view love as a luxury, and therefore, we don’t view flowers as a luxury either. I think that our name is French Florist. We’re an American brand. We don’t try to be French. But it’s a nod to the European way where flowers are a way of life. They’re they’re not a luxury. They’re a nice they’re a need to have. We view them as a nice to have. So that’s something that we’re working on, shifting folks to understand how powerful flowers are for creating in a more loving world. And love is not a luxury. So with that off my chest, Tiffany is what they do. They they you can go into Tiffany’s and you can buy a $300 diamond necklace. It’s going to be small, but you can buy it. You can also go in and buy a $30,000 diamond necklace from Tiffany’s. It’s interesting, because in both of those cases, they’re going to put that necklace in the turquoise box, and when you give the gift to somebody else, it’s the turquoise box that is the reaction, and that that’s that’s really interesting. So we infused a lot of that way of thinking into our brand, where it’s like, how can we, kind of, you put the flowers in the center, because it’s all about the flower. But how can we build a brand around that, that helps signal that emotional experience, that what it means? To give and receive flowers in a way that is driven through, maybe it’s our brand colors or the messaging. And so we worked on that a lot. So then we had technology, and we had brand and we started to do really well with that. And then the last piece was our supply chain. So just continuing to disintermediate, we left all of the partners of you know, we used to work with all of that. We call them wire services that, like internet brokers that syndicate orders to local florists, like we dropped all of our relationships with them. Even on the downside of the supply chain, we cut out the wholesalers. Now we import flowers directly from the farm, from Ecuador, Colombia, Holland, Thailand, Mexico, Canada, a lot of local farms in the United States as well, where we’re getting higher quality product. Ultimately, again, for the better client experience, more base life, but also getting them at a lower price. So now that we don’t really compete on price, but now we can start to offer more competitive pricing by happenstance, because we can pass that discount along to the customer. So those were the three main buckets on where we decided to innovate, and that really hasn’t changed. Today. We still kind of innovate in those three main buckets, but now we’re focused a little bit more on really trying to understand the client experience from how do they discover our brand? Then they have the need they purchase, then they’re waiting for the flowers to show up. And now we have two customers. We have the sender and the recipient, typically, and then that host purchase experience as well. I think a lot of folks will end their relationship with the client. You know, they do email marketing and some other kind of transactional stuff, but generally, and they end their relationship after they purchase. And so right now, we’re really focused on, how can we, how can we make that post purchase experience unbelievably special for the client as well, because once they purchase flowers from us, we want them to understand that, like, the impact that they really had by sending those flowers. And we don’t really care if they send flowers from us or not. I think that a lot of folks choose to send flowers through us, because, again, what we talked about in the beginning, like we really have a fundamental understanding of how important it is to get that right. When somebody sends flowers, we carry that with weight. But we like it’s all about the flowers. So it’s a lot of like educating, inspiring, motivating, and then anytime we can surprise and delight some of our existing clients, like we love to show the love as well that we have for them.

Kara Goldin 22:12
What’s been the most surprising thing about this industry, or just growing this business overall?

Michael Jacobson 22:19
In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising. It’s not probably sounds a little simple, but it was at the time, it was just a huge learning that I took. In the beginning, we didn’t have the financial resources to hire managers or a CMO or a CFO. It was like it was, you know, we’re small business, that we’re struggling, especially in the beginning, as we grew we started bringing on great people, and one plus one became greater than two. We put our heads together and just it was just a remarkable experience to build an amazing team, and then what’s how that and that that stays and will stay very, very true, we put a lot of focus on bringing remarkable folks in our organization. The the interesting part, though, is, when we started franchising, I think that earlier you had mentioned that we’re almost like a mentor or a teacher, I think you’re right. I do. I do. I really think you’re right. I think that the opposite is kind of true as well. It’s been surprising that our franchise owners are coming back to us and saying, Hey, we love what you’re doing. Have you ever thought about doing this as well? And we say, wow, like, that’s very thoughtful. Totally in line with how we you know, they talk about client experience, right? And I think that it’s been a joy to bring our franchise owners into our ecosystem and have them contribute ideas as much as we contribute ideas, and the best ideas get to bubbles to the top. So it’s it’s been a really pleasant surprise that our franchise owners are just incredibly active in the system and equally as obsessive as creating an unbelievable client experience. That we’re not trying to make a five or 10 or 15% improvement on the floral industry. We’re trying to create an order of magnitude experience better. And I think that’s a tough challenge, but our franchise owners are up to it that contribute to it, so it’s been nice, but people, people are everything right? We could have all the systems, we could have all the tech. We could have great location, we could have great supply chain, but, like, if you don’t have the people running it, it’s just a an emotionless system. And that’s like a flowers especially, they’re not an emotionless thing. So, yeah,

Kara Goldin 24:31
definitely, when you think about, uh, growing the franchise, which you’re continuing to do, what do you expect to be able to do in the next year, like, how many more franchise Are you looking for? Or are you already maybe have in the works?

Michael Jacobson 24:48
Yeah, it’s been great. We publicly launched the franchise opportunity in mid 2024 so we’re it’s just almost getting into late 2025 now. We have. Awarded about just shy of 20 franchises right now, next we’re getting close to our capacity for this year. We’re a lot more quality over quantity. The number one risk, if you were to ask me, what keeps me up at night, number one risk that we have is, especially in a franchise model, you can expand too quickly. I think we’ve seen that happen with, you know, a lot of other franchise brands, and so we’re very, very intentional about making sure that we retain the quality again, ultimately, because if we start to compromise the client experience, then we get diluted, and that just, you know, that’s just not the path that we want to take. So we’re close to our cap this year. Next year, we’ll start opening up a little bit more, and we can open about 20 units per year, pretty sustainably, but we have been investing in the infrastructure in order to expand at the rate we are since 2020 so for the past, for the first four years, once the three corporate locations started to perform really well and we made the decision to franchise, we spent about four years building out an incredibly robust building a team putting the operational infrastructure in place in order to make sure that our franchise owners are super successful before we opened up that opportunity. So it seems like we just started franchising, but it’s been an extraordinary amount of infrastructure before we actually started launching this program publicly.

Kara Goldin 26:17
I love it. So French Florist, Michael Jacobson, CEO of French Florist, everyone needs to try products, mostly flowers from French Florist, but also plants too, and just an incredible, incredible selection. Company. So excited for you. And good luck with everything it’s it’s very, very exciting what you’re doing. And we’ll definitely be watching, and everybody will have all the info in the show notes as well. But it’s frenchfloors.com they’re on social as well as everybody is, so definitely check out what they’re doing. Definitely you’ll get a feel for what it means to really be a part of French Florist, and also that includes the purchases and the gifts that you might be giving from from them. But Michael, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your journey.

Michael Jacobson 27:17
Thank you, Kara. If I can leave you with this, I want to tell the folks that are listening again, we don’t. You don’t need to purchase flowers through French floor so you can go to grandma’s house down the block and pick flowers at our yard. But what I’ve learned you don’t need to wait until Mother’s Day to buy your mother flowers. You don’t need to wait your partner’s birthday to buy him or her flowers. As a matter of fact, I would go so far as to say if you buy them outside of that typical occasion, they actually are more meaningful than that person. I agree. So go out and buy flowers. They’re more meaningful than you think, and we hope to share that message more and more.

Kara Goldin 27:49
Thank you so much, and thanks everyone for listening. All right. Thanks so much. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. You.

Click to subscribe:

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen OnApple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen OnSpotify
Listen on Overcast
Listen OnOvercast
Listen on PlayerFM
Listen OnPlayerFM

People Also Liked

719

Daryl-Ann Denner: Co-Founder & Creative Director of nuuds

718

Sameer Mehta: Co-Founder & CEO of Smash Kitchen

717

Tapasya Bali: Founder & CEO of 100 Cal Snacks

716

Maria Weaver: Founder & CEO of XO Maria Louise

715

Kegan Fisher: Co-Founder & CEO of Frank Darling