Profits in bloom - Cactus & Tropicals plant shop - Making It - Company Profile

Nation's Business, Oct, 1995 by Michael Barrier

Lorraine Miller remembers very well why she went into business for herself 20 years ago. "I had a boss who kept telling me to get my woolly head out of the way when I had questions," she says. "So I decided to be my own boss." She was then a lab technician at the University of Utah medical center, in Salt Lake City. She had a bachelor's degree in history, "so nothing was adding up," she says.

Earlier, Miller had spent more than two years as a volunteer in North Carolina for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). In those days, she had "the idea that maybe creating a profit also created poverty in the world, so business was the furthest thing from my mind," until her cantankerous boss pushed her in that direction.

It's a measure of how much her view of the world has changed in the intervening decades that she was named Small Business Person of the Year last year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. The national recognition came after she won the state award for Utah as owner of a Salt Lake City plant store, Cactus & Tropicals.

When Miller was deciding which business to enter, she realized that in Salt Lake City "you could get petunias from an outdoor nursery or cut flowers from a florist, but there were really no sources for petted house plants." She used about half of her $2,000 in savings to set up and stock her first store, called the Grass Menagerie.

Soon, she says, she "started jumping in my Volkswagen van and driving to Southern California at 4 p.m. on Fridays" to visit as many nurseries as she could during the weekend in search of unusual plants.

When the van got too small, she switched to a rented truck. She was driving 12 hours each way--"but when you're 25 years old, you can work all day and drive all night, and still have plenty of energy."

It was not until 1979, when she moved to her current location and opened Cactus & Tropicals, that she hired her first employee. "I'm sure that my income was below the poverty level for at least my first five years in business," she says. "It's a good thing that when you're self-employed you don't have to follow the labor laws."

It was when she made that move that she built a greenhouse and switched heavily into wholesale, selling to grocery chains. But now she has shifted back toward retail, where margins are higher. In addition, some of her 35 employees care for about 2 million plants under commercial maintenance contracts, an area with "a huge growth potential," she believes.

After she was named national Small Business Person of the Year, Miller recalls, she was "totally depressed--devastated. Because everybody was telling me I'd reached my peak."

But when she was with the other state winners, many of whose companies were considerably larger than hers, "I realized that it was a mind-set, how much money you make, and that I did want to start playing the game a little bit differently."

She came up with a goal to energize herself and her company; it called for Cactus & Tropicals to go from $1 million to $5 million in sales in three years. She also drafted a six-point mission statement that "pretty much encompassed where I wanted to go with my business."

That statement reflects ambitions not just for Cactus & Tropicals but for its employees. "It took me awhile, after I was in business, to realize that I was in it for the money," she says. "I want to create a space where my employees can grow, too, and to do that for them--helping with their educations and things like that--I have to make a lot of money." She expects sales this year to total just under $2 million.

One ambition is beyond Miller's reach. She went into business because she didn't want to have a boss, but now she has one even more demanding than the old one. When you're the owner of a small business, she says, "your business is your boss."