Jim McCann is the Founder of 1-800-Flowers, an e-commerce company that has long been on the cutting edge of business and technology. Jim was working as a social worker in New York City during the 1970’s when he took a chance and bought a struggling flower shop. His flower shop grew into a chain, and soon, grew into the largest floral operation in the world. Jim credits his success to his careful attention to creating relationships. He is a true believer in the power of community and connection to create meaningful change in the world starting at the individual level.
In 1998, Jim published Stop and Sell the Roses, a memoir recounting lessons he’s learned in business and life. An ever-curious lifelong learner, Jim isn’t satisfied when he learns something new until he’s shared it forward. It was in that spirit that Jim recently launched a podcast, Celebrations Chatter, to navigate expression and relationships by sharing ideas, insights, and interesting points of view.
In this episode, Jim and Bryan discuss:
- How our relationships are the key to happiness and success as human beings.
- Why it is important to make space in your company for your employees’ personal lives.
- How to make a specific, guided plan to maintain your relationships.
Transcript:
Bryan Wish:
Jim, welcome to The One Away Show.
Jim McCann:
Bryan, good to be with you as always.
Bryan Wish:
Absolutely. Well, thrilled to have you here, Jim. I’ve been following along everything you’ve been doing. Very, very well done. Jim, what is the one away moment that you would like to share with us today?
Jim McCann:
I was just thinking about your question just on our way to work this morning, Bryan. And the most recent that stands out in my mind because they seem to happen every day. The most recent one that I’d point out to you goes back a little over two years ago. And I’m very fortunate… 1-800-FLOWERS is a public company, Bryan and ergo, we have a board of directors. And we have a really good board of directors. And they have a variety of talents and interest and a diversity of thought. And so we, I and my brother, Chris, lean on them in a bunch of different ways and in a bunch of different areas.
Jim McCann:
And it was back at the beginning of COVID. So call it March of ’20. And I was having a conversation with one of our board members. His name is Adam Hanft. Adam is a creative genius. He’s a genius all around and a creative genius, and just a very, very valuable advisor, board member and a provocateur for me, for Chris, for our company. And we were having a discussion about, where was this gonna go? It was so new. How is this going to impact our lives? How is this gonna impact our business?
Jim McCann:
And you remember back at the beginning of COVID, our fears, our concerns were quite primal. We were concerned about, would those around us, would we, or anyone around us become ill? Would we have access to healthcare? Back in the New York area at the beginning of this, would we have access to food? There was a panic in terms of supermarkets and grocery delivery services. And so we were feeling primal kinds of fears. What if someone around us became ill, would we be able to get to them? Would be able to get them to the proper healthcare? All of those really basic instincts and concerns as a family member, as a father, as a business leader, how would we keep our people safe? What would happen to our businesses?
Jim McCann:
And as a way to sort of comfort myself in my thinking, our conversation turned to what happens in the future? What can we expect? What can we predict? And Adam is genuinely and professionally a futurist. So he is trained himself and he got a lot of training to think about, “Okay, what do we know today and how do we predict the future?” And he’s awfully good at it. And I remember in those earliest days, Bryan, he predicted some things in a more macro sense, all of which have come true. He said cities would struggle. He said suburban real estate would take off. He said vacation homes that are proximal to cities would become in high demand.
Jim McCann:
And, you know, this was back when we were just shutting down. I remember it was March 11th of 2020. We were in Manhattan for a breakfast meeting and all of us stood up after breakfast and said, wow, this is real. This is big. What’s gonna happen here? And I remember taking the train home that night being the only one on the train and only one in my car saying, wow, this is different. This is eerie.
Jim McCann:
And so it was right after that, that I’m having this conversation with Adam and he predicted what would happen with real estate. He told me cities would come back, but they would come back younger. He said old folks like me who had an apartment in the city weren’t gonna wait out the years it would take for the cities to come back because we had apartments, because we liked restaurants. We liked theater. We liked all kinds of live entertainment and shopping, and all of those things were gonna struggle for a time and indeed, they did. And we weren’t gonna be willing to wait it out. So we’d sell them, our places, at a loss, allowing younger people to get them cheaper. All of which happened.
Jim McCann:
He talked about how telemedicine would explode, and indeed it did and has and stayed permanent. But he was sanguine, but thoughtful about consequences with housing, work. His point was if you lived in mid Long Island or mid New Jersey, and you were commuting to the city, it was a pretty hellish commute. But if you didn’t have to go to the city five days a week and you only had to go two or one or three, it’s a lot less hellish. And if people were gonna be working from home more, in that privileged class of people in the information economy who can, and let’s face, it’s less than 20% of the working population, but sometimes we fall into the habit of speaking about them like they’re the majority, they are not. 80% of all people have to go to work every day. They’re in transportation, hospitality, and healthcare, and such. Production, logistics. They have to go to work.
Jim McCann:
And he said, but for those office workers who could work from home, if they didn’t have to go five days a week, they could afford to go further away from the city center and buy a bigger home, more square footage, that extra bedroom for the office that they’ll need. And so, all of those things were great predictions of his. And he asked me about how I thought it would impact our relationship with our customers. And I said, “You know, my big intent here at Flowers is to get our organization to become conscious of, we wanna have a different kind of relationship with our customers and think more and more of them as our community.
Jim McCann:
And so, he challenged me and said, “Well, what kinds of things would you like to do but you haven’t gotten to?” And I rattled off a handful of ideas. Including this crazy idea I had of, what if we could offer to our consumers a way for them to come and find one another, to help them? What I mean by that is, a young woman who’s had her first baby and is struggling with the emotions of that, the challenges of that, and doesn’t really have someone to talk to in her life who’s been there and done that. What if we could create a technology platform that allowed them to find somebody else who three years ago went through that, and they were a match in terms of interest and attitude, and now she had a big sister she could talk to that would give her comfort in the evening and say, “Wait a minute, lots of people have gone through this and we’ll get you through this too.”
Jim McCann:
And so he challenged me in that phone call, Bryan, he said, “Well, I just wrote down five things that you’d like to do. Why aren’t you doing them?” And I couldn’t come up with good reasons as to why we weren’t doing them. What I had was a handful of reasons, actually a long list of reasons, why I hadn’t gotten to them yet. This other priority. Like technology limitations while we have all these other things going on and all of it was non-consequential. So his challenge to me then was, “If you wanna lead, lead. And if you think these are things that are important to you and your customer base who you want to think of as a community, just do it.”
Jim McCann:
And so, that was on a Thursday. On a Friday… That night, and then into Friday, I sat down and wrote a letter to our community about what was going on, what we were feeling, what we were trying to deal with. All of it anchored around the core thing that I think we, as a company, have responsibility for. And that is, relationships are the key to our happiness and success as people, as professionals, as human beings. And if we measure all of our feelings and our emotions and our successes or failures, it all comes down to, what are the relationships we have in our life? What are the family relationships, social relationships, professional relationships, business relationships? How many do we have? How good are they? How deep, how meaningful, how rewarding are they to us? How much do we give to them? How much do we get from them?
Jim McCann:
So, I think, while it looks like we’re a flowering gift company and we are, we’re also a company that’s in the business of helping our community members. Our customers to have more and better relationships in our life. And sometimes that is evidenced in a purchase that is a gift that they send to one another, sometimes. But all the time, we should be in the business of helping our customers to have more and better relationships in their life. And that will not always, not always, result in a transaction.
Jim McCann:
And so, we have to have the strength of our convictions to say, we’re gonna do things that cost us money, create a connection community, where that young mother can find somebody else who can help her and walk her through it. There is no transaction in that. There is expense, there is time, and there is no reward in that. We have to have the strength of our convictions. Adam counseled me. We have to have the strength of our commitments, that if it’s a good thing to do, and our instincts tell us it’ll be valued by our community, then we should do it without regard for the consequence. If it’s not a killer from a budget point of view, then we should just do it.
Jim McCann:
So it changed my, ergo, our thinking in March 2020, about what my priorities should be, how I should spend my time and energy as a leader in a company called 1-800-FLOWERS. So, we created the connection communities. I wrote that first letter and I was overwhelmed, Bryan, by the response. And I’ve written a letter every Sunday, since. Now, as I mentioned, at a commencement of that Manhattan college last week, this is the same poor student who never got a paper in a time in high school or in college, but I committed to write this letter which is not a platform for selling, it’s a platform for sharing. And now our community’s getting more and more engaged in sharing their ideas with it, and it’s overwhelmed us.
Jim McCann:
The seven and a half million subscribers that we have to that letter now have become a community. And we work hard to serve that community. And to… Look, we’re not saying we have all the answers, clearly we don’t, we’re in search of. The good fortune for me and for us is that we have access to really smart and thoughtful people like Adam, like my other board members.
Jim McCann:
In fact, Bryan, we created something called The Connectivity Council. And what that is, is a handful three, now four, really accomplished psychologists who we’ve gotten to know during this COVID period, who work with us regularly to bring their wisdom, to bring their knowledge, their experience to the table to benefit our community. So that phone call in March 2020 with Adam on a Thursday night, changed my agenda here at Flowers, frankly, in my whole life. To say the things I said I wanted to do, he said, “You’re out of excuses as to why you’re not doing them now.” And so, we have created a whole bunch of activities that are geared toward engagement with our community in a context of service and mutual journey of investigation to help all of us to have more and better relationships on life, which equals better lives.
Bryan Wish:
Well, Jim, first off, I just wanna say that the fact that you were having such intentional conversations, whether you knew it or not, with Adam back at the beginning of the pandemic, and then to see two years later all the changes that have been created since, I just wanna say it takes a lot of hard work and you said, talked a lot about conviction and what you said to follow through on some of these actions. It sounds like you’ve had an enormous impact on your Flowers community.
Bryan Wish:
A question that was going through my mind, I have a number of questions actually. But one of the first questions was, you said, “During this period, I was finally able to take the list of things that I wasn’t doing or had excuses for not doing it, and then go do them.” Is like this major change of behavior. And my question to you is, ever since I’ve met you, or just say, you look at your track record of work, I would’ve always guessed that you were extremely relationship focused or community-oriented focused about service. So, I guess, where I wanna start is, prior to the pandemic and making these changes, how were you different as a leader in your priorities?
Jim McCann:
I’m not sure. I would guess, though, in a number of ways. The challenges that the management team here confronted in the very beginning of the pandemic was A, we didn’t know what the heck was gonna happen to our business. Number one. Number two, we didn’t know what was gonna happen to us individually and our families. But then when all of a sudden we said, well, wait a minute, we can operate in a safe way, get our people back to work, go virtual where we could and needed to. When all of those questions started to be answered, then it turned out the demand from our community for our products and services was overwhelming. I mean, we sold everything we could find.
Jim McCann:
That was a challenge for big army. How do we handle all this demand? How do we find the product? How do we ship the product? How do we make sure it’s of the quality that we want? So, business skyrocketed. So while big army was focused on that, remember I’m the chairman of the company. Now my younger brother, Chris, is the CEO. That allowed me and my small band of merry folks here, three or four of us, to go focus on this other agenda. And a little bit, they didn’t have time to get in all way. So we could just go ahead and take advantage of the crisis a little bit, Bryan. So it changed us in terms of, instead of focusing on the reasons why we couldn’t get things done, and focus more on, just do it, just get it done.
Jim McCann:
And so, it changed us as a company. It changed us as a team. The team that I work with, which is focused on innovation, thought leadership and change. And then consequently… Personally, your question applies. Becoming much more aware of our limited time, that we could say, what was really important here and what’s not? The toughest thing for me, Bryan, is to pick the things I don’t do, that we don’t work on. That’s hard ’cause I wanna do it all. But if you have something like this event and the conversations I had with Adam and other board members and friends and advisors, it allowed us to be much more focused on, what are your priorities? And what things you do, and what things you don’t. So I became, I/we became better at prioritization. Not perfect, not even good, but better.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Well, the assumption I wanna make, I’m sure is true, is perhaps this period was a time that really exposed and magnified your true values. And you started to put your effort and focus on, like you said, you had this period to go shift to the people and serve and take on projects that were super important. And the question now from this is, when you do these projects, the weekly letter to the community, thinking about how to connect people through shared experiences, I would say often that there are stories that come out of influencing and impacting people within that seven and a half million member community that you’d never expect. So, over the last two years as you’ve taken on more intentional or prioritized efforts with this community, has there been anyone from the community that’s shown up or emailed you or written your team or shared an experience online about how the work, your focus, has impacted them?
Jim McCann:
Well, one comes to mind, that’s very recent, Bryan. In April, we do an event called… It used to be Bring Your Daughter to Work, and then Bring Your Son to Work, and now Bring Your Children to Work. We focus on bringing the children to work day. And it’s always a fun day around here at our main office on Long Island. We have about 500 people. And that day usually attracts 50, 60, 70 kids of our team who come in and…
Jim McCann:
We created a charity that’s our corporate-focused charity, and it’s called Smile Farms. And I’m the oldest of five children. My younger brother, Chris, our CEO, is the youngest of us, 10 years younger than me. And we have two sisters and a middle brother. And our middle brother’s name is Kevin. And Kevin was born with developmental disabilities. He’s doing really well. He lives in a wonderful group home here on Long Island. He’s very much a part of our family. And I hope and expect that our parents would be very proud of the other four of us in terms of how we help Kevin, make him the centerpiece of our family and keep him very engaged and developing. And thanks to IGHL, the agency that runs the group home that my brother lives in. He’s living a good and fulfilled life.
Jim McCann:
But several years ago, the fella who founded that agency, his name is Walter Stockton. So 44 years ago, he founded that agency to help people with developmental disabilities. And he called Chris and I and said, “You know, your brother, Kevin, could and should be working in the community, but I can’t find jobs for Kevin or for a whole lot of other people in our agencies who would benefit from working in the community.” That was seven years ago. It gave birth to an idea which is now called Smile Farms.
Jim McCann:
So my family started that with the cooperation and all the input from our team here at Flowers. And seven years later, we have several hundred people who work in agricultural settings and jobs where learning skills and doing things that are good and productive and growing. What started out as plants and flowers, has grown further into a lot of food stuff. And so, we’ve made that our primary charity here at Flowers, and it’s worked beautifully and it’s ingrained and intertwined in what we do. And it’s so good for our culture here at Flowers. It’s so rewarding for me and for Chris to see what our people do in terms of their volunteer time and their efforts and how they bring their energies.
Jim McCann:
So you have two ideas here. You have, your bring your child to work day, and you have Smile Farms. And Smile Farms creates activities for those 50, 60, 70 kids that show up every year. With two years interrupters because of COVID. So, we repeated it again this year, and I got an email from a young man in our IT department. And he said, “I love what you do when you bring the kids to work day.” And he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t appreciate it, but I have two boys at home who have developmental disabilities, autism. And they’re non-verbal and sometimes their behavior can be a little bit disruptive. So we love what you’re doing, but we will not be bringing our kids to it because we wouldn’t wanna have them be disruptive, be embarrassed, have someone else feel uncomfortable or be embarrassed. So we applauded what you’re doing, but we won’t be participating.”
Jim McCann:
And so, I sat down with my brother, Chris, and with Faith who runs our HR operations, a quarterback, had team quarterbacks that day, and the leadership from Smile Farms. And we said, “Well, why don’t we do another day and see if there are other families in a similar situation? So, we went to this fella from IT and said, “This is what we’re thinking. What do you think?” And he was emotionally moved by the idea and the gesture.
Jim McCann:
So, a couple days after the bring your child to work day, for everybody, we had a special bring your child to work day. And it was… Although I grew up with someone with a disability in our family and the challenges that it brings, especially back then when it was the dark ages in terms of attitudes about people with disabilities, mental disabilities in particular, we had a wonderful day here. And to see how these parents interacted. And to hear subsequently, in recent days, how they’ve formed bonds and relationships and how they’re helping one another and doing play dates together. And spelling one another saying, “Okay, now that your kids have gotten comfortable with my wife and I, why don’t we give you a spell night, you guys go have a dinner date. And we’ll come over with our son and spend a day and take care of you, or two.”
Jim McCann:
So, when you see magic come out of that day, when you’re here to see that day, and you see how on, all the time those parents were and are because of the behavior of their kids. They’re so concerned about them doing something wrong or getting in trouble or breaking something. But more importantly, to see the spirit of our people who volunteered. There was probably four volunteers for every kid that was there. And to see our Smile Farms team develop planting, things that they could do, to see the artwork we did, the arts and crafts we did together, it was overwhelming.
Jim McCann:
So yes. An email changed our attitude, our behavior, and we created a special day that I was a little uncomfortable with whether or not it would be seen in the right light, were we doing the right thing? But when those parents come and grab you as you walk through the office, grab your arm and say, “I have to tell you how important that day was for me and my family,” you say action is better than pondering the consequences. And so, that’s an answer to your question that’s very recent. It’s very real. It’s very emotional. And I’m so proud of all people. The Smile Farms team, our HR team. And the 30 or 40 volunteers who, when they heard about it said, “I’m gonna give you my time. I wanna go create a wonderful day for those kids and those families.” So, I don’t know what it has to do with selling flowers and gifts, but culture does matter.
Bryan Wish:
Touched. Touched, moved and inspired are three words that came to my mind as you were talking.
Jim McCann:
Me too. That’s how I feel about the team here and how they responded to that email.
Bryan Wish:
And I think it says a lot too, about your culture. That someone who’s, you said junior, in the IT department could email you and share, “Hey, it’s great you’re doing this, but here’s my situation.” And then not only did he feel comfortable emailing you, but it was the fact that you took action or you found a way to make something from his experience possible for, sounds like hundreds, if not thousands of other people, to take part in. I mean, that says a lot about the culture, it sounds like, you’ve built at Flowers.
Jim McCann:
Well, then here’s the next consequence. So I’ve shared that story with you. I’ll share it in our weekly letter, which we call The Celebrations Pulse, and maybe that’ll inspire other people. But what likely will happen, Bryan, other people in our community will write in, “Hey, did you ever think you’re doing X? And here’s what we did in my community.” And you get this vortex of good ideas and generate… It’s unlocking the creativity and the passion, not only of the team here at Flowers, not only of the Smile Farms team, not only of the HR team who’s looking to influence the culture every day, but then you invite the community to come on this side of the curtain. And that’s when magic happens.
Bryan Wish:
I love it, Jim. It’s that cascade or ripple effect that you’re describing, and it’s powerful.
Jim McCann:
Yeah. You got to try to hang onto the tail.
Bryan Wish:
Right. And it’s like energy. You poke good things out there that goes further and further. So very, very cool and special and meaningful. So, Jim, something that I think just stands out about you, the culture you built, is you are always thinking about the people. You may wanna take on the world and boil the ocean, all the time. Life is limited, we only have so much time. But your acts and the way you have done things has seemed to be very service-oriented.
Bryan Wish:
I mean, I was in a conversation yesterday with, I mean, a couple few weeks ago, with someone who knew you from way back when… And they were like, “Oh, Jim, what a great guy.” And they knew you back in the 80s or 90s. And it seems like you’ve always been service-oriented. Where does that come from? When you look at your family or you look at your life experiences or growing up, what do you think has built these core characteristics about who you are? To lead a company in the way that you have done and the culture that you have. I’m looking for maybe more of the core attributes that have built you and maybe where those were formed. If anything comes to mind.
Jim McCann:
Well, we’re all products of our environment. We’re little specimens in the laboratory of life. And I grew up in a family, in a community that was a blue collar community in Queens, New York. And my dad was a painting contractor, and his mother found herself… So his father was a painting contractor. My father went off to the service, and at the end of World War II comes back, and his father at 48 years old drops dead. So, here’s my grandmother. So this would be in the early 50s. Late 40s, early 50s. He finds himself the oldest of three brothers, with a mom, and this is pre-safety net. No social security of any consequence then. And so, here’s a woman in her 40s whose husband drops dead. They have a business, but… So she says to my father, who’s, I think, 21 or two years old. “Okay. You’re in charge.” Because the idea of a little Irish lady being in charge of men doing contracting work was unimaginable.
Jim McCann:
So she stands him up as the make believe head of business, and his two younger brothers are still in his service or in school. And they try and keep the painting business going. They had to. But she said, “I couldn’t be the guy out there doing the estimates and signing men to the jobs and getting them to work and supply it and back.” So my father is that person.
Jim McCann:
So, they run the business out of my grandmother’s home, which is just a few blocks from our home. And they have garages and warehouses in the back where they store the trucks and equipment and everything. So my education in business and in community was sitting at that kitchen table, ergo, boardroom table, listening to my father and his brothers and my grandmother as they ran and grew this business. And it was about their involvement in the community and doing the right thing. And hiring people and sometimes firing people and the people who didn’t pay their debts.
Jim McCann:
So the education around the table was literal and ongoing and regular. So, the role models of my community, Bryan, in terms of career opportunities were civil servants, policemen, environment and sanitation workers. Craftsmen, plumbers, carpenters, painters, shopkeepers and a few people who would put on a suit and go to the city. City, being Manhattan. And work in offices, and I couldn’t never really comprehend what it is they did. So, my career path in terms of service was, how neat would it be to be a policeman. Because talk about service, these are the ultimate people who are serving their community.
Jim McCann:
But along the way… I went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice with that mind. But along the way, I accidentally wound up working in the social services at a home for teenage boys. And it was a wonderful way for a very young person to dunk their head in careers and opportunities and helping other people. So, from the earliest age, being involved in a business and people being involved in their church and community, seeing my parents who had a disabled child, form a Saturday morning group with a rented space from the local church in their school, to invite other parents in similar circumstances to come together and have a play date. They could have a cup of coffee and a donut with one another and share their experiences. And seeing them at the leadership of this saying, “Hey, we need this. Let’s invite other families.” And the bonds and the relationships that developed with those families who were all in a similar boat. So that was my education, Bryan.
Jim McCann:
Small business. Complete engagement in your community from a business personal point of view. Creating organizations to help other people with similar needs because you needed those relationships and service to seeing how unbelievably intense bonds developed between those families. We thought of those families as not just relationships, but as extensions of all family, as family members. So that was all the ingredients into the soup of my upbringing that caused me to have the point of view or the outlook I have today.
Bryan Wish:
Jim, what I heard you describe was you were around a lot of people who weren’t about themselves first. I mean, being around service-oriented people or even more blue collar type of individuals who get their hands dirty and have to show up for others was very informative for you.
Jim McCann:
Hugely.
Bryan Wish:
And the money that was generated from what you saw growing up, sounds like it was poured back into those community efforts as an act of service beyond providing the basic needs.
Jim McCann:
The money was not plentiful, it was tough. We thought we were middle class, we weren’t. But we were told we were. We thought we lived in the suburbs ’cause we had a tree on my block. But people… You didn’t have to have a lot to give. And the whole structure of our communities that the service organizations our parents belong to who were service organizations. There was the, whether it was Alliance or the Kiwanis, or the Knights of Columbus, or the church groups, you didn’t have to come together as a group to find out how you could do for others who have less. And that was just a constant theme of good solid communities all over this country.
Jim McCann:
And so, that’s the fabric. And you have those kids like me back then who were curious, who were listening all the time, and that was imprinting on us what communities were really about. They were about helping one another, about coming together makes us all stronger than any of us individually. Just a basic, good old American outlook on life and what community means
Bryan Wish:
That’s so special. And Jim, you know, based on your humble beginnings and maybe what you saw as middle class or upper middle class, you realized as you look back, maybe it wasn’t as what you thought. At the same time, maybe as you went maybe close to your adult years and got into your late teens, and you think about the impetus for 1-800-Flowers or Flowers, do you always have a greater drive to go out and do something more entrepreneurial or create a better life for yourself? Was that top of your mind of thoughts or was that… Well, you said it was more natural. I’m just curious how you would answer that. And if, how you grew up impacted maybe the life you wanted to create for yourself, once you started to gain more autonomy over your own choices.
Jim McCann:
I wouldn’t claim any greater goal or any higher goal. I think my attitude about doing things entrepreneurial, I don’t wanna claim credit for that, because it was a default. So because we didn’t have the emphasis, I didn’t have it, family didn’t, maybe, emphasize school and attainment through educational accomplishments, entrepreneurship for me…
Jim McCann:
But by the way, when I entered it, there was not use of the term entrepreneur. We didn’t think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. We thought of ourselves as small business people by default because I hadn’t done the things that would get me off the train I was on and into the new world where you could get a job at a big brand name firm and rise the corporate ladder or the medical ladder. So it was a default. So I don’t want to claim credit for I was gonna be an entrepreneur. It was what was left in terms of the choices I made, the opportunities I had. And then all of a sudden it started to be called entrepreneurship and that was celebrated. Back then, it was small business.
Jim McCann:
I remember, Bryan, losing people from my neighborhood who came to work for me because they didn’t wanna work in a small business. They wanted to work in a big firm like a Lehman brothers or a Bear Stearns, and they wanted to break out. And I felt bad that I was losing those people. I understood it, and it made sense then. But I think, one of the things that’s been beneficial to us as a country and a culture, is the idea that small business people or now, entrepreneurial leaning people, that that can be celebrated and have a good social ranking.
Jim McCann:
Even failure is accepted now. They had a deal blow up, but they’re in another deal. 50 years ago, you had a deal blow up, you were a pariah. “Oh my God, they failed a business.” Now, it’s accepted and celebrated that that’s one of the consequences of going down that path. That not everything’s gonna work out. And that’s okay. And I think that’s a much better, much better circumstance for us as a society. That a failure can be accepted and embraced and not a career ended.
Bryan Wish:
Totally. And it’s so interesting what you said though, about entrepreneurship or being a small business owner, that was your only choice given to you. Given you didn’t have the access to other things growing up.
Jim McCann:
Yeah, for me, it was… When I put off going into the police department because I was loving this work in the social services at the home for boys, St. John’s Home for Boys that I worked at, it was eye opening to realize that there were other career paths that I hadn’t perceived before. And that was the biggest challenge for the kids I worked with. Their perception of what opportunities were for them, was so limited. Mine were limited, theirs were telescope, in terms of limited. And I grew up blocks away from where some of them lived. But it was a world away too. My eyes being open to the self restriction of our own eyesight, our own perception was dramatic and life changing for me in those very early years in my first career.
Bryan Wish:
Well said. Well said, and in just great perspective. I think for those listening, who are interested in doing a path of service, but through a vehicle of entrepreneurship, may be realizing just the perception that’s completely shifted from-
Jim McCann:
Yeah. But the other thing I saw is that there was some people who were incredibly talented. Incredibly talented, who chose the not-for-profit world to make a difference in. And they were much more entrepreneurial than a lot of “entrepreneurs”, but they weren’t getting the credit. And now that’s changed. When you have people like Acumen Fund and Miss Novogratz there, and the work that she’s done, and the way that she’s elevated the idea of service and attracting the best and the brightest of the best business schools in the world who are in queue to try and get hired by her, Jacqueline Novogratz there at Acumen, she’s changed the perception.
Jim McCann:
So now you graduate from NYU Stern School of Business, and you’re number three in your class, and where do you wanna go? You wanna go do a few years working for Jacqueline. Changing a village’s life in a far off country because now they have access to clean water. That is so much better and broadens the realm of possibilities of how you’ll be judged socially, culturally, and how people view those as appropriate [inaudible 00:41:36] they’re thinking longer range about their career. “I’ll put this experience on top of that. And then this educational credential and my path will be, I don’t know what it’ll be, but it’ll be broad and open.” It’s so much better a circumstance. We always look back and say, those were the good old days. In so many respects these days are so much better than the “good old days” of my youth.
Bryan Wish:
Yeah. Now, I follow a little bit of her work. And to your point-
Jim McCann:
Look at the impact that the Peace Corps has had in my lifetime. So, Peace Corps created by John F. Kennedy. so that would be in the early 60s. So just over a half a century ago. But look how it’s changed perception of career opportunities. What service is all about, what community means. It’s global, not just Queens. So you have all of those ingredients, Jacqueline’s work, Peace Corps. And guys like Ray Lamontagne, who was the first employee of the Peace Corps all those years ago and how, I think, that his body of work and all those years since, and it’s still picking up steam, he went on…
Jim McCann:
His best buddy was Paul Newman. And Paul Newman shared with Ray, “Hey, here’s this idea I’d like to do with this Hole in the Wall Gang thing. And how do we feed that? Well, let’s create this salad dressing business. And Ray Lamontagne is still changing the world. Because he did create the Hole in the Wall Gang with Paul Newman. And he did create Newman’s own salad dressing and now all the food stuffs that fund those efforts. It’s remarkable. And so, there are so many heroes that we have, and it’s so many different kinds of heroes than we had 50 years ago. Thanks to great thought leaders like JFK and Ray Lamontagne and Jacqueline Novogratz, and scores of others that change our perceptions.
Bryan Wish:
Totally. Absolutely. And a great body of work or body of works that you’ve been able to, I think, build on and bring into your own culture and kind of act and service. So, it’s just so cool that you have that perspective. How it was informed from childhood, how you’re bringing it into your own business, and what you’ve seen from others in that community to get the collective taste for how this is done, and how it’s done well.
Bryan Wish:
Jim, as we have a few more minutes, we have a couple more questions, more rapid fire answers, and just kind of how you go through them and then we can wrap. This has been so, so special. First question is, where you are in life right now and that we’re coming out of the pandemic and you’re looking at what’s ahead. Where are you finding the most joy or maybe sense of aliveness in your life? I know last time we talked, I think your son had just had a newborn, but I’m just curious how you’d answer that question. Whether it’s family, work, where would that take you?
Jim McCann:
Well, I think you guessed it. I’m thinking of my answer as you’re asking your question. It’s the fact that my life is a bowl of soup in the sense that it’s a vegetable soup. In that I don’t know where my Flower’s day job intersects with what we’re doing at Smile Farms or other activities. I mentioned that I went to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, graduated from there. Been serving on their board for a long time. And they’re very, very involved in some really important work now with, what’s the new role of public safety? Should it evolve? Should it change? How? And it’s such an important question particularly in the last two years since we’ve had some civil unrest and real challenges to police departments across the country defund the police, refund the police, thinking differently. I think an institution like John Jay can play a very important role in those dialogues. And so, my involvement there is interesting.
Jim McCann:
So, my life is a plethora of interesting opportunities and circumstances. But as you hinted, the thing that gives me greatest personal satisfaction now, is I’ll give you for instance. Just 10 days ago, we had our annual Smile Farms golf outing day. It’s one of our handful of fundraisers we do throughout the year to raise the money, to fund these agricultural efforts for our several hundred people who work in our 10 different campuses growing products.
Jim McCann:
But what was nice about that is you see the people from 1-800-FLOWERS who volunteer their time to run that golf tournament. You see the team at Smile Farms whose full time job it is to run that company, that enterprise and all of its fundraisers, you see them return from maternity leave the day before because she wanted to make sure that this event ran well. To see the people on my team give up their time. Worked there from early in the morning. ‘Cause we had morning sessions, afternoon sessions, evening dinner for everyone to get together. You see them working 12 and 14 hour days there on their own time.
Jim McCann:
And then to see my 13 year old, my oldest of my grandchildren come there after school to say, what can I do? What can I volunteer? Stay through the dinner? And then to hear from her parents, my daughter and my son-in-law that night when she got home talking about how she needs to get more involved. And there’s so many more people that need to be helped here. And hear the 13 year old internalize the cause of what we’re doing at Smile Farms and how she wants to redo her schedule for the fall for her school year so that she can be there for the other events we’re gonna do, and what can she do?
Jim McCann:
And at first we had this wonderful honoree in this year golf outing. His name is Father Brian Shanley. He’s the president of St. John’s University here in Queens, New York, one of the largest Catholic higher education institutions in the country. Number one, and number two. And before that, he spent 15 years as the president of Providence College. So he is new to the job and doing wonderful things here. And he was our honoree. Brought out the whole St John’s University alumni family to support the gala.
Jim McCann:
And to hear him speak that night, and to hear my granddaughter talk about… When I saw her this past weekend, she was, “When Father Shanley spoke and he spoke about, yes, his job is hard and yes, there are days that he feels frustrated, but he never ever loses sight of the fact that he’s doing something important and meaningful and worthwhile. So it makes all the trials and tribulations very manageable.” And asking me at a family party about, “How do you find work that’s meaningful? How do you find a career that make you feel like Father Shanley feels? So I’m thinking, “Oh my goodness, this works.” They’re having thoughts and questions and attitudes.
Jim McCann:
So, you guessed it. The thing that gives me the most joy right now is to see the next generation of our family… My son who works at Flowers. My niece, who’s about to have her second child, who works here at Flowers. And I see them thinking and talking about, what’s next? How do we serve our community in a very different way? I had a conversation with a young man who’s been a long time volunteer since we began Smile Farms here at Flowers who’s been promoted several times and has this whole new project.
Jim McCann:
But I put him on a Zoom call with my niece on Friday night about some ideas of how we could serve our community even better. And he had this whole big deck prepared in line. And here we were. It’s, I don’t know, maybe 7:30 on a Friday night with a warm weather weekend in the forecast. The weather was beautiful. And Jenner and Chris Mills are on the Zoom call with me on a Friday night at their urging to talk about, “Hey, what if we did this for our customer? What if we gave them this services? Just gave it to them.” And I’m saying to myself, “It works. These are wonderful kids.”
Bryan Wish:
That’s so special. You’ve been able to cultivate that. That you’ve had influences that have cultivated that and you’re seeing that being-
Jim McCann:
Oh, they’re influencing me. I’m trying to keep up with them, Bryan. You know what you punks are like.
Bryan Wish:
Jim, I wanted to… Do we have like two more minutes? I want to be respectful of time. I wanna make this last question. I asked Brent, who was with me last week, two weeks ago. He came out to film our launch video and I said to him, I’m interviewing Jim. And I said, “What question would you ask Jim?” Because he was talking to me about… I think he was so scared to take on the show and do it from the ground up. I mean, he’s a very humble and confident person, but he’s just-
Jim McCann:
Terrific young man
Bryan Wish:
And… Anyway, I can’t say enough good things about him. He’s beyond talented, but he is a heart of gold. And I said, “What question would you ask Jim?” If I could put this on the show. And here’s what he said. He said, “I’d ask Jim to share what doing the podcast means to him personally. What made him wanna do it originally? And what does he hope listeners take away from it?
Jim McCann:
Well, it’s something I touched on when Lisa Saba said to me, “Hey, Jim, I’m putting the camera in front of your face. Tell us why you’re doing this podcast.” And the podcast which we call Chatter, Celebrations Chatter, is just an outgrowth of the work we’ve been doing the last two plus years in writing the pulse every Sunday. So, the point was, we’re doing the work anyway. Why not… And we have a print version that we do in terms of our digital newsletter that we call the Pulse. Why not take the work product and pull the curtain back again and invite our community with you on the other side of curtain, and they hear the discussions?
Jim McCann:
So what I said in that intro when Lisa stuck the camera in front of me one evening here is, if you are in my universe, family member, colleague here, any of my business circles, friends, if I read an article that’s, I think is really good or really interesting, I send it to you. I’ll comment on it. I’ll circle something. I’ll make a comment. I’ll ask you a question about it. Because I’m not done unless I shared it forward. And that’s what this is. So, that’s why we went down this path. I get to talk to really smart people. I’m curious, I’m looking for answers. And rather than saying, I’ve found the answer, I haven’t. But I do find some people who have some incredible points of view, including my connection council.
Jim McCann:
And I’ll tell you something that I talk about often. One of the members of my connection council is Dr. George Everly from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. An imminent psychologist. Just a good man and a very wise man, and certainly an alerted man. And through our discussions as part of the connectivity council over the last two and a half years, two plus years, something has emerged from him and it’s all about relationships. And what he said was, you have to be deliberate about relationships. And I’ve written several times about having a relationship plan. You have an education plan, you have a physical development plan. You need a relationship plan too.
Jim McCann:
And toward that, three things have emerged as dictates that I’ve taken from my conversations with the connectivity council, and in particular on this count with Dr. George Everly. The relationships you have, have a plan to nurture them, develop them and make them better and richer. For the relationships that you’ve had that have waned, that have faded, that have gone, that you’ve disconnected with, think about the people on that list that you wanna re-engage. Re-ignite a relationship with. And have a plan as to how you’re going to do that. And frankly, with the social media tools like this, that we have available to us now, Bryan, that’s easier.
Jim McCann:
And finally, who are the relationships, what are the relationships that you dream about that you want, that you think would make your life better and richer? And have a plan to go get them. So those are the three things I learned from my interactions with my connectivity council here at Flowers and at Celebrations, Chatter and Pulse. And I feel so privileged to bring that message distilled down to three things we need to have on our plan that I know has made my life and is making my life better every day. And I think it’s such good advice for everyone because it’ll help your life, your relationships be better every day, because you had a plan.
Jim McCann:
Things happen by accident, but most things happen because you planned. And so, you’re gonna plan your business. You’re gonna plan your education. You’re gonna plan your family development. Sit down and work on and develop and work regularly on your relationship plan too. So that’s my motivation here. And how lucky am I? I get to do interesting things with interesting people and engage with a community that’s becoming more and more community every day.
Bryan Wish:
Incredibly special. Jim, thanks for, I think, one of the best episodes I’ve done. A hundred in, and this has been pretty good.
Jim McCann:
Well, you make it easy, Bryan, and you make it fun. And I think you’re a living example of young people today who will take geography risk. Will pick up and move to another part of the country. Know the value of relationships, and are using the new tools of today to build businesses and communities and relationships. And the opportunities that’ll come your way because of your risk taking and your attitude, are frankly enormous. And I’m proud to know you.
Bryan Wish:
Humbled, Jim. Thank you. Thanks for these very kind words. The goosebumps and the chills that you shared, the stories, and excited to get this out there. Jim, where can people find you? Where can I direct them towards to support you and your community?
Jim McCann:
Well for those of you on LinkedIn, we have a nice community on LinkedIn and on Twitter. And of course at celebrationspulse.com.
Bryan Wish:
Awesome. Thanks Jim.
Jim McCann:
Thanks Bryan. Be well.