In the beginning, I knew nothing of orchids, cut flowers (other that what I saw in florist shops), importing or Thailand.  Within 10 years, we became the world leader in our small niche segment of the $100 Billon global flower industry.  Over time, we expanded into other lines of business, becomming a small, family owned, multi-national Conglomerate.  At our peak, we maintained US locations in Miami, Virginia and Chicago; plus four locations in and around Bangkiok, Thailand.  In addition, we had remote employees in Bogota, Colombia and The Philippines.

The leadership by our orchid company changed the market.  Other Thai orchid exporters adopted some of our practices.  Our customers in the US and other countries realized that they had been paying for low quality flowers, poor customer service and limited selection.  For this reason, some Thai exporters despised us and attempted to undermine our business – even to the extent of threatening my life.  (In Thailand, Thai nationals who kill foreigners can go unpunished).

At some point, we realized we could not expand our market using our SUCCESSFUL business model.  Although we had the largest share of the US market in our product category, while maintaining the highest price, the majority of the market, both in the US and the rest of the world, was content with lower prices and lower product quality, and they were willing to tolerate poor customer service.  So, we attempted to branch into other lines of business.

Beginning with the import business in the US, we first expanded into an export company in Thailand, because we could not find another company which could produce the quality, variety and accuracy that our customers needed. 

Within a year after opening our own export company in Thailand, we realized that we needed control over the logistics of moving the flowers from our production facility to the airport, and onto airplanes for export.  We started an Air Logistics Company to do this.

Soon after we opened our export company in Thailand, we decided that we would need to develop our own farm for production of the flowers themselves, in order to improve variety and quality and to overcome the seasonal variations in price.

photos coming soon

As we started buying flowers for our farm, we realized that with our own production of orchid seedlings, we could further improve variety, quality and input price stability.  We opened our own tissue culture (cloning) lab.

In order to improve the quality of our orchids, we were constantly seeking information about how to make the flowers stay fresher longer.  Eventually, Chrysal, a Holland based company, provided the knowledge and product we needed.  We became their importer and representative in Thailand.

One of the difficulties in attempting to expand our orchid sales in the US was the logistics problems.  There were not enough flower delivery services to fill our needs.  We made several attempts to operate local delivery services in Washington, DC; Chicago and Miami.  As part of this, we bought a Big Rig and got into the Long Haul Trucking Business – with the intent to provide a better level of service than was currently being offered to the floral industry.

One of the business lines that came close to success was food import.  We began with importing fresh herbs from Colombia.  Ultimately, we realized that without control of the farm and post harvest processing, we could not develop the reputation for service and product quality that drove the success of our flower business.

As a corollary to this, in 2010, the largest flower company in China contacted me to entice me to become their CEO.  After 3 months, I determined that they actually had ZERO interest in product quality, international marketing or operational efficiency, and were actually seeking a fraudulent stock market offering, using a “foreign expert” to bolster their position.