"One final question. You've answered all the other ones right. But this one's the most important question of your entire job interview. Get it right and you're hired. Get it wrong . . . and I'm sorry."
Dean Georges was speaking to an applicant for a job at a large flower shop at one of the world's most sophisticated and prestigious addresses: One Rockefeller Center, New York City. He's the managing partner of Irene Hays Wadley & Smythe Lemoult (henceforth, IHW&SL), a flower emporium so well established that it doesn't need a catchy name.
The applicant was a young woman who wanted to be a floral designer. Just as easily, the job seeker could have been a retired engineer, a fired corporate manger, a housewife, a prison parolee, a frustrated artist, a person with powerful altruistic motivations, or a whiz-bang entrepreneur planning to make a million. Today, people who want flower-shop jobs and expect to carve out a career in floral designing come from every age group and virtually every economic level of society. For example, Frankie Shelton, a floral design teacher in Houston, Texas, counts among thousands of former students an ex-ruler of Cambodia, an ambitious street urchin, and a Florida operatic soloist. For most of today's students, the job prospects are good, perhaps excellent. But the path isn't easy.
"Ready?" asked Georges of the applicant at IHW&SL. "Here's the big question: If you come to work here, where do you expect to be five years from today?"
The applicant failed the test. After a few moments' thought, she answered, "The director of floral design for this store." The correct reply, says Georges, is "Owner of my own flower shop."
Blooming business
One estimate places the total number of flower shops in the United States at 35,000, not counting 19,000 bouquet departments in supermarkets. A conservative figure for the most stable shops would be about 10,000. That's the number of members in the Society of American Florists, although the total includes individuals as well as shops.
"Our biggest problem is finding good people to fill the jobs available in this field," says Alan Bachman, a vice president of corporate communications and development of Bachman's, a Minneapolis firm that started a century ago with one immigrant vegetable farmer and blossomed into a floral industry giant known throughout the world.
"That means those who are skilled, trained, and productive," he says. Being a floral designer involves more than the term describes. It can mean being part artist, part psychologist, part decorator, and part plant expert. And add to that mix: plenty of business smarts.
The flower business is booming. In only ten years, sales at all retail levels in the U.S. floral industry have shot from $2.4 billion in 1977 to more than $8.2 billion in 1987. And they're still climbing.
"More people are buying flowers more often," says Betty Sapp, executive director of the Society of American Florists. "That's the basic
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