#265: Jim McCann, American entrepreneur and former CEO of 1-800-Flowers – Find a way to connect

24:23David Novak:You know, you mentioned earlier that you acquired the 1-800 flower name for$2 million and then you had the due negligence story. But how did you get hooked up with that 1-800-Flowers name to begin with? Well, I realized after 10 years of building up a chain of flower shops that it wasn't working. What I mean by that is there was no economy of scale. There's a reason why we florists are oftentimes, very oftentimes, family businesses. And you touched on it early on, David. That is, we have these peaks and valleys, Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Secretary's Week, Mother's Day, Father's Day. We have these spikes.

25:09Well, those are terribly, you know, we'll go 10x, normal week to holiday week, 10x. How do you stare for that? Well, traditionally, how we stare for that was Uncle Barry works for IBM, but he takes his personal day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, to deliver flowers for us because he wants to be invited for Thanksgiving dinner. And that doesn't happen when you work for the XYZ company. And so what happened was we got up to 30 or 40 flower shops, and I ran out of family. And we didn't have that economy of scale any longer. So I was looking around, how else can we do this? I wanted to build something bigger.

25:45And 800 numbers were very new at that time. And everybody was spending money on TV campaigns to get people to remember their 800 number and toll-free numbers. By the way, a long-distance call was very expensive then. People were very reluctant to make a long-distance call if they didn't have to. Remember, hurry up. It's long distance. That's right. So this was a new concept that the company you're dealing with would pay your bill. And in the flower business, I went around and I said, you know, I think people would like to use their credit cards. I'd like them to be able to call 24 hours a day.

26:20And everybody who was smart and knowledgeable about the flower business said, that's crazy. People want to come into the shop. People, if they're going to call, they want to put it on their house account. They don't want to put it on a credit card. And they certainly don't need 24-hour-a-day service, all of which we now know is wrong. But common wisdom was none of those things are necessary. But I just felt that convenience was the key factor there. And if we could be easier and more accessible to our customers to enable them to act on their thoughtfulness, that would be a winning proposition for us.

26:57So you had Sheridan hotels out there with singing, dancing girls and chorus lines on their commercials trying to get you to remember 800-325-3535. There's only one person who remembers that, and that's me. And it's not even Mr. Sheridan. But I thought, is it a better way? If you could just remember the corresponding numbers, flowers is 356-9277. That would be an easy way to remember. But lo and behold, this company had already gotten a hold of their telephone number. And they launched this business. I called out to them and said, I'd like to be your fulfilling partner for the New York City area.

27:36They said, great. We started that. And for about a month, it was good. And then, boom, it just went to zero. And I called. They said, you know, we only had so much money. And we had some marketing ideas. And they didn't work. So we're closing down. So I got on a plane, flew to Dallas, became best friends with American Airlines. and wound up buying a company for the aforementioned$2 million down and an assumption of debt. And while it was a terrible business decision, it was something I was embarrassed about for a long time, having put my family and everything we'd worked seven days a week, 24 hours a day for and had good luck in the pursuit, was now in jeopardy.

28:15But so many times the worst decision turned out to be the best decision because we became a brand without any money. And that was in 1986. By 1992, we were the leading player in our category. And then we had some really good fortune come our way that helped us to become a national brand without having the money to cause it to happen.

28:35David Novak:And you really went after the franchise model. How did you get excited and learn about the franchise model? By accident and default. I didn't have capital. I didn't know how to raise capital. I didn't know what private equity was. I didn't know about financing and all. I was on educationally I was on my way to be a New York City policeman when I started working in social work and and then just putting off going to the police to bomb until it was too late so I didn't have a business education other than sitting around grandmother and grandmother's kitchen table what I did was I had all these stores and I needed capital and I knew that they were better run by families than by a company so I started selling those stores off to raise capital to franchisees.

29:16And that's how we got into the franchise business. How'd you make a decision that you talked about a little bit earlier?

29:23David Novak:You're not just the flower business now. You've really expanded. How did you make that decision to expand beyond flowers? So many times businesses get in trouble because they aren't focused and they go too broad, but you really found the right way to do it. What do you think made it work for you? Well, if you think of what we as a florist would do, we merchandise our store in different ways seasonally. So Christmas, it's going to have one look and a different mix of merchandise. You get the Valentine's Day, it skews to chocolate and flowers heavily. And then Mother's Day, it skews to different color flowers, different gifts.

30:03A lot of gift baskets come into play for Christmas and gift baskets for Mother's Day. And then Father's Day is a very different mix. It's chocolate, it's gift baskets, it's hobbyist baskets, very little in terms of flowers. So we were used to changing our mix for the appropriate season and the holiday that was next to come. And then we started, especially when we had online data and we could see where did our customers go after they shopped with us. And where did they go? Well, 16 % of the time they were going to this place called Harry and David. That was their next stop to finish their shopping list.

30:38And so we yearned to buy Harry and David for a decade. And then finally, it was purchased by a private equity firm. They took it through a bankruptcy and we had the opportunity and we seized it. And it's just a great brand. And that got us into agriculture. Who knew that this kid from Queens would be concerned about snowcap in southwest Oregon to get us through the growing season in the melt. But we have 5 ,000 acres of agricultural production there. And we've owned that company now for 10 years. And it's just a terrific company with a really wonderful product and good people. But that's what we did.

31:13We followed our customers while they wanted to buy chocolate. So we bought a couple of different chocolate companies. I was flying to Dallas on that aforementioned American Airlines. And in the little food box they gave you, there was a cookie. And I'm not a big cookie eater, but I opened the clear wrap on the cookie and I tasted the cookie. And it was delicious. This buttercream cookie with this icing on top. And I took the label after I finished the cookie, it stuck in my pocket, and I called Cheryl's Cookies in Columbus, Ohio and said, these cookies are delicious. I think our customers will like them.

31:44We begin selling their cookies. And several years later, Cheryl came to me that she had some health issues and she wanted to sell the business. And we were by far her biggest customer would be interested. So that's how it happened. And it happened with the Popcorn Factory and Cheryl's and Schaffenberger Chocolates and Simply Chocolate. So we either started them, bought them, or certainly tried to grow all of them. But it's all giftable. So our products are primarily used as gifts. You know, about 20 % self-consumption, but mostly gifting. And then finally, a few years later, a few years ago, my brother Chris, who succeeded me as CEO at the time, thought we should be in a personalization business because so many people wanted us to do other things for them.

32:27So he bought the personalization mall, and then we bought the Things Remembered brand just a couple of years ago. So personalized gifts, all these different kinds of food gifts and wine, and our flower gift baskets.

32:38David Novak:I love that phrase, followed your customers. You followed your customers that took you into these different categories. Was there ever a time that you realized that if you didn't innovate, you'd get left behind? Or has just innovation and expansion always been something you've naturally done? Well, if you go back to the point I was just on, which was 1986, I got a hold of that telephone number. I started selling off stores to raise capital to invest in this idea to get it to become a brand. And we had success at that. And at some point I thought, you know, geez, we could sell pretty much everything if it had flowers on it.

33:15And so we launched a catalog of giftable products. And one of the lessons I've learned from you on leadership is the importance of letting people know that you make mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes. And I was taught that lesson by a lady who was our chief merchant at the time. And I walked into the office and people were giggling. And I was thinking, what's going on here? And finally they took me over. She had taken a couple of bookcases, three of them, and put them together. And she made a sign, Jim's Wall of Shame. I have a few of those. Not one, it's many. These were all my product ideas that didn't work.

33:51And in the center of those three bookcases was a Chinese satin jacket that I had that had a big, beautiful embroidered rose on the back of it. And I thought, this is going to be a killer item. David, if you're interested, there's probably a warehouse someplace that still has a few boxes of them left if the moths haven't finished them by now. But the lesson I learned from Ho was it was funny and it was making fun of me. but what the lesson she was teaching us was everyone in the company now knows of course you're going to make mistakes and you shouldn't be embarrassed about them you should celebrate them and may turn it into a joke and there's a lesson there and i think that contributed to our culture of being early and being risk takers so to the to the evolution you talked about when we had found this so we had the chain of stores retail was our first wave second wave was the 800 number But then 1992, three, four, I'm working with my friend Steve Case and Bob Pittman and Ted Leonsis at AOL.

34:55And we think this online, my brother Chris had joined the company by then at a university. And he's doing all these new tech things. And we're saying, wait a minute. If these guys from Queens with no money and no business experience created a national brand by embracing a new technology, an 800 number, what was going to be the next technology wave that would push us aside. So if we're going to be disrupted, let it be by us was his motto. And so when the internet, the online world, then the internet came along, we were early to it, very early. We had a website in 1992. Nobody cared. We were the first transaction of any kind you could do on AOL.

35:36That was important to us. So the relationship with Bob Pittman and Steve Case and Ted was extremely important. And then, frankly, the next wave was during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, which was damaging to us. It really hit us like it did everybody. But we didn't stop investing. We maybe had 15, 16, 17 developmental projects. We said we can only afford to do two or three. What should they be? And we said mobile is going to be huge and social is going to be aided and abetted by mobile. So let's invest in those two things and let's invest in our new tech stack. The other 14 projects we're going to put aside, we can't afford to do them now.

36:22And that was a good decision on our collective parts because everything social mobile is our fourth wave. And then I think my brother might be the first person I ever heard use the term conversational commerce, which he coined about 10 years ago. And now this wave that's breaking on a shore, which is being aided by everything AI, is frankly the most exciting wave in our career's history. And I think it'll be the most transformative in terms of how we relate with our customers, the tools we can bring to them to help them in their relationship development. Our marketing has already changed from buy my stuff to, hey, let me engage with you.

37:00I started writing a newsletter every Sunday in the first months of COVID. We now have 14 million subscribers to that. I get to do our podcast and talk to unbelievably interesting people like you. And what we write about in that newsletter is not buy our stuff or here's our product, but we write about relationships. And we have a group of experts we turn to on a regular basis. And we use the calendar as an excuse for our community to think about using their power to express and connect. So if it's Grandparents Day, which it was last month, and I write for a couple of weeks about Grandparents Day, and as a grandparent, I remind my other grandparents, don't just sit back and wait for the call or the note or the card or the gift or the attaboy.

37:52What are you doing? What's your responsibility as a grandparent to do something for your grandkids? How do you choose to give them a gift of your time with them one-on-one? And so we talk a lot about that and the engagement. David, I know you won't be surprised because you were the king of engagement. It's just magical for me now because I'm no longer the CEO. I was smart enough to fire myself back in May and hire a real CEO. And now I get to spend my time on engagement and content and community building. And I've just never had more fun.

38:23David Novak:You know, imagine you're leading a CEO roundtable on AI, which you probably may have done. What would be the top one or two insights you'd want everyone to take away? I think, number one, we don't have an excuse. We don't have any choices. You have to embrace it. It's going to change everything. And the second thing that I think about is I think about AI in two clusters. One is efficiencies. That I can understand. It's going to make everything more efficient. If you have 12 people in legal, if you build a small language model in there, you could probably get by with nine or six people in legal a couple of few months from now because contract reading, smart contracts, auto paying is just going to be built into the system and it's already happening and we're already using.

39:10So efficiencies, I can understand that. Then the other thing is capabilities. What kind of things did we not imagine being able to do that AI will allow us to do? and I'm not a super smart technologist, but I do understand from our business point of view that for the last four or five years at New Year's time, I write to our community about resolutions. And I encourage our people not just to do a resolution about I'm going to exercise more, I'm going to read a book every month, I'm going to do this. I ask them to build a relationship resolution and I ask them to make three groups on their relationship resolution.

39:48This is a group of people I have relationships with, and I want to continue and invest in those. Here's a group of people who I have, maybe the relationship has waned. I haven't seen them in a year or so, but they used to be important to me. I'm going to reinvest in those relationships. And then there's a group of, the third column is people you don't have a relationship with, family, workplace, community, that you're going to be deliberate about building bridges to them to try and develop a relationship. But now our team in the AI and our AI development team has written an app for me that automates that.

40:24So it asks you the proper questions about those relationships and it prompts you to think about them. And now he says, would you like me to help you to follow through on your resolution? So he said you wanted to get to know David Novak better. Well, David Novak was just honored by the institute he created on leadership for all the work that he's done over the last couple of years. And here's the article that was in the Louisville Gazette about that. You might want to drop David a note congratulating him on that. And then it comes back a few months later. He said, you know, you said you wanted to invest in your relationship with David, but I haven't seen any correspondence, either text or phone calls or messages to him.

41:02Here's something else that just happened in his life. You might want to take note of that. So it prompts you to do follow through on the things you said you were going to do in areas that are a little esoteric, a little bit more esoteric than diet or exercise regimens. So I think the capability side is the really exciting side of what's going to be efficiencies, I understand, but capabilities are where the real magic is going to happen. You know, you're such a people person and, you know, you're highly regarded for that and building a culture where people are valued. How do you prepare your team about the efficiency side of AI?

41:42It's a tough question. One that we've been deliberate about. I mentioned I hired a, my board and I hired a new CEO. We started in May. His name is Adolfo Villagomez. as a terrific guy, just extremely qualified. And boy, if there's one good choice I've made in the last bunch of years, it seems like Adolfo is it. But we were talking about the fact during the courting process when I was trying to lure him here in those many months before he started, we were talking about the efficiencies and the impact it's going to have. And what we decided as a team internally with Adolfo's input long before he even came to work with us is we have to be very honest with our team and say, we can't say, hey, don't worry, we're going to protect you.

42:27Everyone's job is, we can't do that. It's not realistic. So we're very honest and we say disruption is going to happen. We'll be as transparent as we can with you about that disruption, but there will clearly be disruption. And now Chip Cutler in the Wall Street Journal back in June wrote a piece where he talked about all of the Fortune 500 companies are now collectively have lost 3.5 % of their headcount in the last three years. And they're all projecting to have smaller headcounts in the years ahead. And the mantra in business has gone from, David, I can't keep up with business. It's growing so much.

43:03I can't hire enough people to being proud of being able to say, we can do more with less. So the attitude has changed. So we're honest with our team. And what we did was we said, let's reinvest in something we created a few years ago called Fresh University. So what we say to our team is there will be disruption. AI is going to disrupt us in ways we can guess at now, in ways we can't imagine, but it will happen. And our investment is going to be in you. We're going to give you all the tools, give you all the opportunity to learn these new capabilities and tools. We'll have coursework online. We'll have trainers in person.

43:41We'll give you the opportunity to develop as best you can personally, and professionally. And so that's our commitment to you. So even if you do get disrupted here, if you've learned these skills, you're going to feel that you have options. You can certainly go to work for someone else because you're very employable. You can hang out your own shingle and create your own business. You can become a consultant, or you can just use these tools in your own life. And a new board member of ours, Shelly Palmer, did some research at the Palmer group about people who really do embrace and learn these AI tools, they feel very confident.

44:19They're not worried about losing a job because they know they have superpowers now. And so that was the evolution of our thinking here. We can't protect you from the disruption, but we'll be transparent about it and the timing will be obvious to you. Secondly, we're going to invest in you so you have all the capabilities you need to be successful personally and professionally going forward. And that was our decision. That's how we communicate. The third element of that, David, is we said resume is not a noun. Resume you should think of as a verb. And you should be thinking about resumeing all the time.

44:56And toward that, we put in a transcript system here, like a college transcript, only now we record not only everything you did in college and everything you did before you got here, But we ask you to record, and we record for you, any of the courses and certificates that you earn here. We even ask you to fill in things like, what do you do with your volunteer time? What do you do with your vacation time? So if you have two people, one goes to the Caribbean and sits on the beach drinking Coronas in the afternoon and snoozes a lot, great, wonderful, you're entitled to it, it's your decision. But then you have someone else that takes that same week vacation and they go down to Honduras and they work with the round hut people building three round huts for communities that have been devastated by the most recent hurricane.

45:44And you immersed yourself in Spanish and tried to sharpen your Spanish skills and you get this wonderful letter of thanks from the charity you worked with. And that should be on your transcript too, part of your resume, because it indicates to you and to anyone else who'd be interested, future employers at all, what your makeup is. What's important to you? What are you doing to invest and sharpen your own skills? What are you doing to give back to the community? What are you doing to be the best fully rounded individual you can be? So that's our program. Be honest. It's going to impact us. You should be, if you're not working on AI tools to solve the things that you shouldn't have to spend your time on, that gives you the capacity to do the things that only humans can do, be assured your boss is thinking about it.

46:29And then finally, we're going to invest in you and give you all the tools while you're here to help you to be the best person and the best professional you can be.

46:37David Novak:I love the idea of making your resume a verb. I think that's fantastic. And, you know, you released a book a little over a year ago or last year called Load Start. tapping into the 10 timeless pillars of success. What's a pillar every leader should know more about? Well, the book I did was with a partner. His name is Dr. George Everly. George is a gift to the world. He's a wonderful guy. And I met him because at the beginning of COVID, he wrote an article in Psychology Today about what he thought the impact of the lockdown was going to be on relationships. Major relationships, familial relationships, and casual relationships, waving to your regular friend at Pizza Hut when you visit there on Friday evenings with your family and just waving to them.

47:25It's a social contact, even if it's just a familiar way. And I wrote him a fan letter and I said, George, this is really good work. This is terrific. This is how I became familiar with you. It was an accident, but I just hope we have occasion to chat someday. So he wrote back to me and said, well, I'd love to talk to you. Why don't we make it happen? And we became friends. Now, for the first couple of years, We were COVID buddies. We never met in person. But I was getting all these questions to our newsletter, which is called the Celebrations Pulse that I do every Sunday. People asking about what do I do with my kid?

47:53He's not in school. He's not participating in sports. I think he's deteriorating socially. I'm concerned. I wasn't qualified to answer these questions, but I was qualified to collect a panel of people who were. And George was the first to join our Celebrations advisory panel. And so he called me one day. I was traveling in Florida, my wife and I on vacation. And he called and I answered it on the phone in the car. So my wife could hear and he said, Jim, I'm loving the work we're doing together. It's really exciting stuff. I love the other people you've assembled. This is a really amazing panel and I just enjoy the interaction.

48:32I have a suggestion. I said, what's that, George? He goes, why don't we write a book together? Now, my wife perhaps thinks I'm a little overcommitted and maybe I don't balance my time properly. She was about to hit me when I said, George, I'd love to. And that was a two and a half year project of working together, writing together. And for me, David, an opportunity to learn from a really brilliant man. But in answer to your question, so George has taught at Harvard and spent the last 20 plus years teaching at Johns Hopkins University, where he's emeritus on the faculty now at the School of Public Health, the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the medical school.

49:09And he's a psychologist and he's wonderful. But he tells a story that I think is a lesson for all of us, both as individuals and as leaders thinking about your organization. And that was he was undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia. He's a junior in high school, and the great advisor to guidance counselor calls George's father, who's a very successful CPA in a small town in rural Maryland outside of Baltimore. and he said, look, George is an okay kid, but he's not very bright and he's certainly not going to college and he's probably not going to graduate from high school. So why don't you take him out of school and see if you can get him a job in a filling station or a factory or in a warehouse someplace because then he'll beat his graduating buddies to the place where maybe he'll already have a job.

50:03George's father told George that story. Not then. but many years later at the lunch to celebrate George's first of several PhDs. And George said to him, dad, why did you never tell me that story? And his father said to him, I didn't want it to become self-fulfilling. And that's when you asked me, I learned so many things working with George, but that one sticks in my head. So whether you're an individual or a person, what you imagine and what you realistically think you can achieve is likely to be what you do achieve. But if you're told that you're good for nothing, and you'll never amount to anything, whether it was the 10 boys I lived in a group home with for years or it's the people I get to work with today.

50:47My job is to help them achieve the most that they can achieve, to form groups that give them the benefit, to be conscious of the social construct in our companies so that it gives people the opportunity to perform at their best. Working at St. John's Home back then, I remember I promoted a lady who had just returned to work to run our services. So that would be maintenance, housekeeping, dietary, purchasing. And her experience was she had just raised nine children. And the youngest of which was off to college so she could return to work. And everyone said to me, you're out of your mind. She was terrific.

51:27Absolutely terrific. And she'd walk through the maintenance department and there'd be all these grizzled guys there and they're mumbling under their breath about this woman thinks she can tell us what to do. And she taught me the lesson of selective hearing. She says, you don't need to hear everything. Just smile and whistle and go about your work. So my job today, like your job was for so long, is to create an environment where everyone can achieve their best possible development self.

51:57David Novak:That's great. And you also say that leaders are cultural engineers, but they can't control it. They can influence, but can't control it. Say more. Well, when you were building Yum! Brands, you couldn't control every environment. And certainly a culture in one restaurant would be different than it would be in this region, than different it is in this country, than different it is in this hemisphere. It's going to be different every place. So you had a few dials as a cultural engineer of Yum! Brands that you could turn that would influence that culture. What you choose to reward, what you choose to ignore, what you choose to punish, who you choose to hire, what standards you set for behavior, how you compensate people, what you celebrate.

52:41And those are your dials. So you have to be careful with those dials because that's signaling to this enormous organization you built what our values are, what our core principles are, what you value, what you celebrate. And that's going to dictate and influence the behavior, but you cannot control. There'd be a rogue store every once in a while. There'd be a rogue employee every once in a while. Overall, as a cultural engineer, you have to be conscious of what your limits are and what your dials are.

53:09David Novak:Great, great points. And, you know, you really are a change agent and you've managed the company through so many different changes. And you seem to be a huge lover of technology. You know, how have you led your teams through these changes without overwhelming them? You embrace it. You know, this is something that you love, you know, but people don't like change. So how have you brought your people along with you as you've visioned the success and the direction for this company? Well, I would blame my brother Chris for a lot of that. We worked together for 40 years. He had to retire a couple of years ago for a health issue.

53:55And he always pressed us to be early to new technologies. He thought it should be part of our culture. And he always encouraged people to be early and first. And when we had those victories of recognition, he'd really celebrate it. For example, I remember we had no idea, but Mr. Zuckerberg at Facebook then, I don't think it was meta yet, was introducing a voice bot. So was that seven or eight years ago? And the first thing that he did that he ordered online through this voice bot was he called and placed an order with 1-800-Flowers on stage with a worldwide audience. We had no idea it was coming.

54:40It was news to us. But we had someone on my brother's team who'd been working with them. And what we said to the technology companies, we're a good poster child for you. We'll try your new technologies. We like to be early. We like to be first. And then when we have a victory, we like to really celebrate the heck out of it. And so he had someone on his team who had been working with the Facebook team and convinced them that we'd be a good partner to try that with. And he did that over and over again, whether it was with AT &T in the early days, whether it was Facebook or Amazon, whoever had the new technology.

55:13We'd like to be early. will be a great proving ground for you. And when we have a victory, we'll celebrate it. And so he helped knit that into our culture that encouraged everyone and everyone that had any exposure to a new technology to be first, to be early, make some mistakes. I remember we had an appearance on 60 Minutes one time when someone's robot that we were working with delivered flowers in some community in California. And of course, the robot crapped out in the middle of the demonstration. But we sure celebrated that. We had that robot in the office. We had pictures of the robot everywhere.

55:50So I'd lay that blame on him for us culturally being people who embrace technology, be early, be first, make mistakes, and celebrate every step of the process.

56:02David Novak:And this celebration seems to be the key. Indeed. You know, this has been so much fun. And I want to have some more with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? We'll see. The three words that best describe you? Curious, improving, passionate. If you could be one person for a day besides yourself, who would it be? I like the new Pope. Your biggest pet peeve? Risk-taking drivers on the road. Who would play you in a movie? Somebody with a better hairline. What's your favorite flower to have on your kitchen table? There's so many. When I started in this business, the amount of flowers we had, the range and variety, but it was really embarrassing.

56:41And there's so many more available today. But at the end of the day, David, and I love to play with flowers at home. You know, I usually take one variety at a time. I don't like a mixed bouquet. And I like to see how long I can stretch the shelf life. And an astromaria, I can get two, three plus weeks out of them at home. But at the end of the day, a rose is a rose is a rose.

57:04David Novak:What's the best part about being a co-owner of the New York Mets for a decade? The best part was family. I worked with some wonderful people, Fred Wilpon, the principal owner, good friend. But for that 10 years, we were owners and on the board there. My three children are local here on Long Island, seven grandchildren. We had a box there. The fact that my grandkids are such avid Met fans and we'd go to spring training, spend a weekend down there. They'd get to meet players and wander around the training fields. The fact that my 13-year-old son had to call me this year to ask my forgiveness because he wasn't going to play baseball this year.

57:44Because all his buddies were on the lacrosse team and he wanted to play lacrosse and it conflicted. The best part was family get-togethers. We'd get my broader family, I'm the oldest of five, get my brothers and sisters. their kids, their grandkids together at a Met game was just magic. And we still do it, but not as often.

58:00David Novak:What's the one thing you do just for you? Exercise. Besides your family, what's your most prized possession? Friends. If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? A podcast. What's something about you few people would know? Well, we're going to keep it that way. What's one of your daily rituals, something that you'd never miss? I start with a list for the day. What I need to get done that day. Yeah, you took that planning mode right with you. All right, you were out of the lightning round. Great job there, Jim. You know, you've been married for 50 years. You said you hit the lottery.

58:35David Novak:And, you know, your wife has always been supportive. How have you two navigated all the ups and downs that come with entrepreneurship? Well, I'll take it back to my friend George Everly. And he gave me the vocabulary to develop some comprehension there. First of all, I married a woman who's completely understanding and has been terrific. We saw it at the very beginning. She'd work with me. We'd go into the store on Saturdays and Sundays, and I quickly learned that I'd rather stay married than work together. And so I tried, you know, the whole idea of you can't work with family. Well, that's obviously silly because we did and we do.

59:12George said to me a few years ago, we were talking about work-life balance. He said, work-life balance is a joke. He said, what you want is good work-life integration. And I think the gift that we discovered that my wife gives to me is she knows I'm in business and she knows I have passions and she gives me lots of rope and I earn it more and more every day, the rope she gives me. And she knows I want to expose my kids to all different kinds of people and businesses. So I think understanding that I'm in business and it's part of my life and it's never going to be different. And to come to that understanding, which George helped me to come to just in the last few years, is work-life integration is a gift, and you should be working at it and tuning it all the time.

59:55David Novak:You know, you've grown up believing, and you obviously continue to believe that everything is possible. You know, how do you help your teams, your kids, see the world with that same lens of possibility, particularly in an environment where there seems to be so much negativity and divisiveness? You know, I mentioned to you that I returned to St. John's home a couple of weeks ago and spent several hours there and had lunch with a group of guys. And I was reminded of my first couple of weeks working in that group home, which was just, as I say, 10 blocks from where I grew up. And I said it was a million miles away.

1:00:35speaking with those young men about what their futures might be was frankly depressing because their perception of opportunities is so different than mine. I remember one of the most important, when I was running a group home, summers, my main job was to make sure I got each of my kids a job for the summer because A, they'd be tired. B, they'd have a couple of bucks in their pocket and they wouldn't be out all night because I had to get up to go to work the next day. And they learned things. They saw things. So I remember one young man, I got him a job in the hardware store that was nearby in Far Rockaway, Queens called the Empire Hardware Store.

1:01:16And Norman worked there, and he's a black kid. And there's a vendor who would call on them, a tool vendor, also African-American. And Norman struck up a relationship with his tool salesman. and he had this big truck and he was a nice guy and he took a liking to Norman. And Norman discovered that you could have these jobs. He would never have thought of selling tools, going around to different mechanics and hardware stores and selling specialized tools. And one of the great success stories of my social services career was running into Norman 10 years later. And after he finished high school and he did two years of community college, he wound up buying that route from that guy he met in that summer job in a hardware store.

1:02:01And he had a home in Queens and in Cambria Heights. And he had two kids and he was happy and healthy and he was a big active member of his church. And I said to myself, wow, what a success. Yeah, that's great. But it wouldn't have been if he didn't have that exposure. Because those 15 kids I spoke to two weeks ago had no clue. The closest idea to someone being in business was a young man said, I think I'd like to be a barber. I said, oh, yeah, why? He goes, because if you have a barber shop, that's where everybody hangs out. You can have a whole bunch of friends around. But no one else had a perception of a real opportunity.

1:02:38School, career, no. Their role models were very different.

1:02:43David Novak:How do you tackle that? Well, I think St. John's Home is trying to do that. They've been doing that for 100 years now where they give them exposures and expose them to other people and other opportunities with job programs, with education programs. They used to have a singing group that would tour around and go to different events. And they'd meet people and someone would take a liking to them. And, hey, you know, if you're looking for a job, I got something for you. So it's taking them out of a really bad environment, even if it's just for a short period of time, getting them righted, show them a path where they can increase their exposures and change their perception because their perception is handcuffs.

1:03:23David Novak:What do you see as your unfinished business now, both for your company and personally? Well, from the company point of view, this is very exciting for us. This is a foundational year for us. We have to do a lot of, we have to change a lot of things. We have to embrace these new technologies. But I think we have a chance of becoming a company I've always wanted it to be and didn't have the wherewithal to get there. But now we do. So we're changing how we relate to our customers, how we serve our customers, how we communicate with our customers, how we message them. So this is an unbelievably exciting opportunity for us.

1:03:55And for me now to step aside to do what only I can do and allow real managers and professionals to re-engineer our company and to get it ready for this exciting growth era in front of us is terribly exciting. On a personal point of view, the things I think about most are, what I'm proudest of is my kids and my in-laws are, three of them are all good parents. I think about, Mary Lou and I want our grandkids to remember us. And so we want to be deliberate about giving them exposures. I think grandparents can and do play an important role in kids' lives. and I want that to be something they remember fondly and have appreciation for long after we're gone.

1:04:40David Novak:And I'm sure they will. Last question here. What's one piece of advice you'd give to anyone who wants to be a better leader? To be deliberate. Read about other people. You've had great leaders on your show. Steve Case you had on your show. I listened to him back in August. I think you had him on. He's very different than me, but a great leader. You've had Jamie Dimon on. And Jamie's a friend, as is Steve. And I've learned so much from him. I'm a couple of years older than Jamie, but I still have learned so much from him. I remember one time my brother Chris and I were having lunch with Jamie, and he got very critical of me, and I really appreciated it.

1:05:18He told me, I spend way too much time evangelizing. What do you mean, Jamie? He said, you want everyone around you to get it. They don't need to get it. They're not all capable of getting it. But if you get it, all they need to do is understand that you have a dream, a passion, and a plan. And if you're in pursuit of that, they know if they move their needle from here to here, and everybody around them moves their needle appropriately, it'll crescendo into this beautiful new idea. But if you spend all your time evangelizing, you're going to frustrate yourself, and you're going to weigh yourself out, and you're going to spend your energy in the wrong direction.

1:05:51And that was such good advice, and I'm still guilty of it. But I try and corral myself because—

1:05:57David Novak:Yeah, but doesn't that evangelization, doesn't that evangelizing get that person to want to move their needle from point A to B? I'm not sure I agree with Jamie. It's to a degree. If you spend all your time and energy evangelizing and expecting that everyone will get it, you're wasting your time and you're wasting your resources. But if you spend more time, like I expect Adolfo has and will, understanding what everyone's metric needs to be, what their particular job is, what their goal is. and here's your goals, here's your metrics, everyone's watching. And if you deliver, we'll all deliver and we'll all get, I think the balance is the point he was making.

1:06:33So it was great advice 10 years ago, 20 years ago. And it's, I think, still good advice today. And every once in a while, I have to say to myself, I'm doing it again.

1:06:43David Novak:And I tell you what, in the role that you're in, you doing it is a pretty good idea. I would be more balanced in that than the other side of the equation. You're awesome. I really appreciate it. And thanks for being on the show. Really was fun. It's a treat to talk to you, David. Thanks so much.

1:07:08This 1-800-Flowers interview touched my soul in a very, very special way.

1:07:15David Novak:Why is that? Tell me about this. Why? Because when you think about the last time you got flowers or the last time someone sent you flowers, It just makes you feel good, like deep on the inside, because people are thinking about you and you didn't know they were thinking about you until you got flowers, probably from 1-800-Flowers. Well, what happens if you're dating somebody and you don't get flowers on Valentine's Day? Aren't you expecting that day? Yeah. Well, hopefully they would call up Jim McCann and say, I forgot to get flowers. Can you please help a brother out? And they do everything they can because they know how important it is for you to save that relationship.

1:07:51David Novak:And it's a relationship business. I love that. Didn't you love the fact that, you know, he sees them not in the flower business, not in the gift-giving business, but in the relationship business. Yeah. You know, the best leaders always define their business in a broader way. It's also is compelling and gives people a noble cause of why you go to work. We're out there every day. We're trying to build relationships, make the world happier, bring people together. I love that. I thought that was great. And he's a great guy. I mean, you know, he's a guy who you can see him, the fact that he loves making people happy.

1:08:28David Novak:Absolutely. And him talking about being in the relationship business reminded me a lot of your interview with Whitney Wolf heard when she says that at Bumble, they're in the business of love. They're in the business of connecting people and promoting love. And obviously, that's not the functional thing that they offer. But I just love that it allows everybody who's part of that company to buy into something that is deeply meaningful and that actually moves you. You make a very good point. That's not the functional thing that they offer. And see, the best marketers in the world, they understand what functionally they do, but then they connect with their customers by putting it in an emotional context.

1:09:10David Novak:They create love. They're in the love business, okay? And I think that's fantastic. I do too. it's such a fun way to kind of reposition your business, especially, I think, you know, for your people. And as you try to recruit people and retain people, that's much more compelling than, you know, hey, we have something that you can access on your phone. I love also an interview with Jim David when he talks about how they have, how they expanded over time from flowers into other gift items like chocolate and cookies. He uses this great phrase, David, he said, follow your customers. And he tells a story about how, you know, when they first launched 1-800 Flowers, all of his customers were buying flowers and then going to Harry and David to complete their gift buying for the holiday season.

1:09:58David Novak:So he calls up Harry and David and says, hey, all my customers are coming to you. We'd actually like to buy Harry and David so that it's the one-stop shop for people to go buy all their gifts. And he would have never known that if he didn't follow his customers. What's the real insight there? I think the real insight is understand your customers, know what they do. And then if you can buy adjacent businesses that are similar in terms of what they offer in the end, they have that emotional benefit that you're really trying to deliver, you're going to really be successful. If you try to do something for your customers that's outside of what they want, it's really difficult.

1:10:37David Novak:You're swimming upstream. But what he's doing is that he's diving off that diving board because he's going to have a perfect 10 because he understands what his customers are buying and why. And he goes out and, you know, figures out how to take advantage of that. He also did it with this cookie brand somewhere in the Midwest, like Cheryl's Cookies, I think it was. Delicious. Delicious. Jim's career is an interesting one. He was in social work and, you know, thought he was going to be in the New York City Police Department and then ends up at 1-800 Flowers. And in the interview, when you asked him about it, he says, resume is not a noun, it's a verb.

1:11:18David Novak:And that's really a philosophy that they try to ingrain into their people at the 1-800 Flowers company. And I love that resume is a verb. It's one of his, you know, more quotable phrases. How do you balance pursuing those sort of resume building growth opportunities while also doing your current job really well? Oh, I think you're growing. You know, it's just like the flowers, you know, you got to grow. And, you know, while you're doing your job, the only way you're going to really do your job well is to grow by learning how to do it better each and every day. So I don't think they're two separate things.

1:11:55David Novak:It's intrinsically linked together. At Lighting Hunter Flowers, they have developed this training program and they call it Fresh University, which, by the way, I love that name because you want your flowers fresh, therefore Fresh University. Anyways, he talks about the importance of offering skills training and development opportunities to his people, especially as all these new AI tools come into play. He wants his people to feel confident in them so that, you know, when all these companies lay people off because AI is replacing their job, at least he's offering folks a way to get really good and comfortable using all these tools.

1:12:32David Novak:So I just love how their commitment to developing their people is a real guiding force. Yeah, he's been a head of technology for a long time. You know, from the 1-800-Flowers buying that brand to now AI. And, you know, he really makes some great points in this interview about how to deal with AI. Be totally 100 % upfront with your employees. Yes, there could be some productivity gains that could mean some people lose their job. But we're going to develop you while you're here. And so that if there's a reason that your job goes away, you know, we're going to prepare you for the next job. And that's part of his resume as a verb.

1:13:21David Novak:We're just going to keep building your capabilities, building your skills so you can be the best you can possibly be at our company. but if for some reason, you know, your job is eliminated, you can go out and be a consultant, you can go work somewhere else, but we're going to prepare you to win. And I love that because, you know, when you lose your job, a lot of times, you know, it's not because of any fault of your own. You are a winner and you can win. You're not a loser, okay? And I think that it's his belief in people and their capability that really is the impressive thing here. Jim is also really funny.

1:13:59David Novak:And he talks about humor in the episode as being kind of a competitive advantage in the leadership space, especially if you aren't necessarily super extroverted or really social. And humor is this concept that I'm honestly surprised it doesn't come up more on this podcast because you've got some jokes, David. But it is a powerful leadership tool. And I'm curious, like, number one, do you think you're funny? Number two, has humor helped you in your career get things that you might have not otherwise got? I don't know. I don't always ever ask me if I thought I was funny before. I think I have a good sense of humor, okay?

1:14:41David Novak:And I love to laugh and I love to have a good time. And I think that when your humor is self-deprecating, you know, and not at the expense of others, I think it can be very powerful because it makes you very relatable. But when your humor digs in at other people and makes them feel less about themselves, that's when you have a problem. And, you know, I have to tell you, you know, I've done both. When you think you're funny or you think you have a good sense of humor, you can do it in ways where it really does release the tension and it makes people feel better and everybody laughs and it gets you through the tough times.

1:15:25But then I've used my humor in a way that at times hasn't lifted a person up.

1:15:35David Novak:And when I do that, I'm at my worst. So I think humor can be very powerful, provided it's generic. It's not personal to other people. And it's more, if you're going to make fun of anybody, make sure you make fun of yourself so that you're more approachable and people feel good about it. But I just think it's great to laugh in the marketplace. I just think it's great to go to work with a smile on your face. I think it's great. I think it's great to have fun. And it's hard to do that without having some laughter out there. And it's kind of interesting. You know, I mean, this is nothing really that revolutionary, but, you know, if you smile, it's kind of tough to feel bad.

1:16:25David Novak:It's so true. I mean, try it. I mean, just smile. Now, when you smile, I mean, come on. It's kind of hard. You're almost laughing at yourself, even if you're not feeling good about it. But just try it. You know, try to smile and see what happens. I definitely don't feel bad. And by the way, when you do that, you connect with other people because people want to be around positive people. I would say positive energy lifts you up, negative energy brings you down. So when you can have a smile, you can have some humor, you know, I think it allows you to connect. And I think if you listen to the podcast carefully with Jim, he uses self-deprecating humor.

1:17:06David Novak:You know, sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's not. But you know he's got his heart in the right place. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it also helps him connect in a more meaningful way with the people that he surrounds himself, with his family, with his friends, and certainly with the people that he leads. Now, great example there. I said, sometimes he's funny, sometimes he's not. Now, when he hears that, he's going to go, when am I not funny? Did I really need to say not? No, I didn't. And he's really funny. Yeah, he is really funny. I thought it was hilarious. I didn't just need to say sometimes you're not, but that was just me just like trying to be funny and not being funny because that wouldn't have lifted him up.

1:17:51David Novak:I love that as a filter. And I would say that you're funny. So you can say that I asked you and I think the answer is yes. Again, I think it's very important for others to be the judge of that. All right, David. Well, that does it for our episode of How Leaders Lead today. Hey, if you're feeling down, call 1-800-Flowers and just send somebody some flowers to say you're thinking about them. And thank Jim McCann for his great leadership and for how easy it is to do that. Absolutely, let's do it.