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32 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
GolDen ruleS
1. When fear is the problem, activity is the answer.
2. believe in yourself: you have the ability to
change your own future.
3. Play to your strengths: acknowledge your weak-
nesses and delegate them to someone who is
good at them.
4. Stick to your core business and really ensure
you are delivering what you promise.
5. Customers are not dependent on us. We are
dependent on them.
6. Plan ahead for your outgoings so you are not
hit by surprise bills that can cripple you.
The Power Of
Flowers
Jonathan Barouch
Fastflowers.com;
established 1999;
thirty- five employees;
$5 million- plus turnover
For Jonathan Barouch,
chief executive of Aus-
tralia’s leading online
florist, life really is a bed of roses.
Unlike other young businessmen, he has
never had trouble getting financial backing for
his company. On the contrary, he’s in the envi-
able position of constantly turning down huge
stacks of cash. ‘I’m getting offers all the time from
Photo: Anthony R
eginato
34 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
private equity companies and other big florists
for Fastflowers.com,’ he says. ‘They’ve offered
me millions of dollars to take me over or for a
stake in the company, but I haven’t had any offer
I couldn’t refuse—not yet, anyway.’
Barouch has, in fact, spent much of his young
life turning down vast sums of money. He had
barely set up the company, as an eighteen- year-
old, before the Internet boom had companies
queuing at his bedroom door. They offered him
‘many, many millions of dollars’, he says. ‘Silly
money—more than the company would ever
be worth! But I didn’t know what to do with
it. And I didn’t want
the responsibility of
having big stake-
holders and other
p eople on the board,
so I turned them all
down and carried on
running the business on a shoestring, from my
parents’ house.’
It was an extraordinary decision for an
eighteen- year- old—especially one who suffers
from hayfever and can’t stand to be near flowers:
‘I’ve got a sackful of Claratyne in my drawers!’
But Barouch figured he had nothing to lose.
‘I didn’t take on any debt to start the business, so
‘
‘
They’ve offered me
millions of dollars to take
me over or for a stake in
the company, but I haven’t
had any offer I couldn’t
refuse—not yet, anyway.
THE POWER OF FLOWERS 35
the worst that could happen was that it would
fail and I’d have to do something else. Big deal.
Most businessmen have families and mortgages
to worry about. I was very lucky.’
This determined entrepreneurial streak is a
quality that runs deep in the Barouch family.
Jonathan’s grandfather was one of the first big
furniture manufacturers in Australia, selling his
products to the likes of Harvey Norman, David
Jones and Grace Brothers. His father was also a
businessman, a pharmacist who ran several stores.
They and his mother, a freelance journalist, all
gave him a strong sense of the importance of
financial independence.
The idea for Fastflowers came out of an
embarrassing experience in a florist’s shop. ‘I
wanted to buy some flowers for a girlfriend and
found it excruciating. I didn’t know what to
buy or how much money was appropriate to
spend. I felt so ridiculous. I thought there must
be a better way.’
Searching on the relatively new Internet, he
found little competition. ‘I found websites in
Europe and the US, but nobody in Australia. So
I started asking various florists to do our deliver-
ies—since they already had the stock—in return
for a small commission for passing on the busi-
ness to them. The first few turned me down
36 HOW I MADE MY FIRST MILLION
flat—they just didn’t get it. But after five or six
refusals somebody agreed.’
With savings he had amassed from selling
lollipops in the school playground when he was
fourteen—‘I made a small fortune from that
until the headmaster intervened’—and money
squirrelled away from odd jobs and birthday
presents, he commissioned a company to build
a website and business started briskly. There was
just a small catch—Barouch was still at school. ‘I
would dash out of class pretending to go to the
toilet, but actually I’d be taking orders from cus-
tomers or arranging business meetings.’
The teenager soon got a very grown- up
break. A newspaper item about him was spotted
by the business journalist Paul Clitheroe, former
Sunday Telegraph columnist and at the time a pre-
senter on TV’s The Money Show. ‘I was at a school
swimming carnival when he rang. He was quite
famous and at first I didn’t believe it was him.
I was saying, “Sure, sure,” like it was a joke, but
eventually he convinced me and I felt like a bit
of a goose.’
A crew from the show filmed Barouch work-
ing, going to school and doing business on his
mobile phone, then taking more orders at home.
It might have been a novelty segment, but it did
the trick for Fastflowers. Within half an hour of
THE POWER OF FLOWERS 37
the program finishing, the six- month- old web-
site had clocked up 300,000 hits.
Suddenly, Australia’s biggest companies wanted
a piece of the young flower magnate. Westpac
Bank made Barouch the preferred florist on its
credit- card rewards program, giving Fastflowers
access to over two million card holders. Then
Telstra BigPond also took Fastflowers on as its
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