How Managing a Flower Business is Training for Managing Elections
My wife and I have been involved in a flower distribution business for 20 years. We had the best quality product and the best service related to that product in the world. That’s not an exaggeration, and it’s not just bragging. I can say that confidently because Thailand produces 99% of that particular flower for the entire world – and we knew that we had the best quality in Thailand. There is absolutely no doubt about it.
Because of the quality of our product and our service, our company grew rapidly and gained international reputation. Top floral designers from many countries knew us and used our products. This led to our product being used on four television programs, one sport superstar wedding in Paris and a Royal family wedding in Dubai.
We were selling mostly one type of orchid, called Dendrobium, which is fairly common in the wedding industry. But, we also handled several other types of orchids which were less common and harder to handle. Our processing procedure in Thailand resulted in flowers that lasted more than a week as compared to our competitors’ flowers lasting less than a week.
In addition to the cut flowers, we produced strings of flowers, called garlands. We did this every week for custom orders. There were no standard garland products. Each order for each customer had to be priced and sourced individually. Typical orders were in the range of 20 to 100 feet.
At the time this Royal Family order came in, our sales in the US, our primary market, was around $100,000 per week, consistently. We would ship tons of flowers every day – seven days every week. We made hundreds of feet of Garland every day. But, the Dubai order was potentially asking for more than a kilometer in one week. This was 5 to 10 times the maximum we had ever done in a week. It also was roughly 2 to 3 times our total average weekly sales.
The reason I’m telling this story is not bragging about ourcompany, but explaining my competence as a manager, which is particularly relevant for the office I’m seeking election to.
We had never done a project of this size. We did not have staffing for a project size. I had to imagine how to make the project successful, with only experience at a much smaller scale. There was only one chance to get it right. If we failed, to deliver the best of quality and service to the king of a country – well, you can imagine the fallout.
You might think that we just had to cut the flowers and put them in boxes. But, there’s a lot more to it than that. In the case of this massive project, we had to source more flowers from more farms at more distance from our factory than we had ever done before. Think of the additional cost – and not cost at the rate we were paying, but cost at a premium. It’s not only the time to process the flowers, but the space required. We had already had disasters at Mother’s Day, which is the biggest day of the year – actually a week long process for our company. The space required to handle the flowers during the process exceeded the capacity of our building. We would have the same problem with this order. We would need to hire new, temporary, untrained staff; hire more delivery trucks for pickup from farms; secure more flowers from more farms than ever before; rent temporary storage facilities – many “beyond the routine” activities which we would not normally be doing.
(Our business in Thailand was primarily a processing and exporting business, not a farm business. At our peak of farm production, we only produced 15% of the flowers we were selling. We had to buy from many farms – usually around 100 every month).
Then there’s the matter of shipping. We owned a freight forwarding company that operated at the Bangkok International Airport. This customer wanted to use the national airline, which the King owned by the way. So, we had to investigate how to manage an Air Waybill to the King, when the king was the owner of the transit company. That was a strange process.
Then, we had to plan how to handle the flowers at the receiving end – in Dubai. After years in the orchid business, I knew that most people did not know how to properly handle tropical orchids – even if they had been handling flowers for decades. So, I had to hire a team, including a manager to fly to Dubai and stay for a week to make sure our flowers were handled properly, so the customer would be satisfied with the result. I’m sure that they thought we were trying to pad costs because of who the ultimate customer was, but as you see from the above explanation, there were valid reasons for this.
In the end, after dozens of hours of phone calls in negotiation, the order turned out to be very manageable for us. It was only around 30,000 flowers – well within our daily capacity. This was a big job, one that no other exporter in Thailand would be able to manage. More importantly, no importer in Holland could manage, either. We were the only ones in the world. We pulled it off successfully without a major effort.
The point of this story, again, is to highlight my management ability. A manager must not only manage what is happening today, here and now. But, a good manager has to think into the future of what could happen, both the positive and the negative. A good manager must anticipate trouble, and plan to prevent it, or have a plan to counter it, should it occur. In the case of elections, an elections director must think about the possibility of fraud, ballot box stuffing. With much of our elections being outsourced to computer hardware, unknown computer programmers, and other vendors, the possibilities of fraud entering the system are many. Safeguards must be in place. The operation of all these parts must be constantly monitored before, during, and after every election. It takes an experienced manager with determination and imagination to do this well.
