Ten years in a row! That's right, we have been selected "Best Florist in Charleston" for the last TEN consecutive years. At the awards party someone asked me "C'mon, do you still get excited about winning it every year?" I told him this story:

When Clara and I started Tiger Lily, we had no floral experience. Clara was a personal banker, opening accounts and helping folks with general questions. I was a catering director for Marriott Hotels, in charge of banquet sales and operations. Clara worked for a short stint at a local florist, about 6 weeks. I was part of thousands of events and meetings over my 12 year Marriott career, but not really into the flower part of it. We wanted to try our own business and felt we could teach ourselves the floral business. We bought Tiger Lily just before it went out of business. We figured if we could just follow the "rules" of the floral industry we would be just fine. Afterall, the floral industry has been around for hundreds of years, surely there was a formula.

After two years of following the rules of the industry, we were about out of business. Frustrated, broke and desperate, Clara and I had what we now call our "Kitchen Table Meeting". With the kids (1 and 2 years old at the time) sleeping upstairs, we talked about our future. Should we bag the business and go back to corporate America? Do we keep it and radically change the way operate it? Do we continue to drive it in the ground? (sound ridiculous but a lot of small business folks do just that)

We decided to keep it, but throw out the "rule book" and do it our way. Succeed or fail, it would be our way. There were a lot of things we didn't agree with in the floral industry, and we would have always regretted letting go of Tiger Lily without following our instincts. So we tapped into my retirement fund, put another $35,000 in to Tiger Lily, and started all over again.

The first things we did would have been considered crimes against nature to other florists. We cancelled our Yellow Pages ad. We fired our wire services. We threw out all of our plastic novelty vases, balloons, stuffed animals and toys. We stopped carrying carnations and mumms. We stopped using the oldest flowers in the cooler first to "get rid of them" and began throwing out any flowers that weren't absolutely awesome. We told customers "no" when they wanted something that we weren't going to be proud of, like sending a dozen dead roses to an ex-girlfriend. We only had one goal: Be the Best Florist in Charleston.

Once our new stuff starting hitting the streets, the response was almost immediate. Hotels began calling. Caterers, wedding planners, even the famous Charleston South of Broad crowd began ordering from us. It was like we were satisfying a long thirst for our customers. We started getting resumes, a lot of resumes, from designers wanting to work for Tiger Lily. Good things were happening.

Six months later, I got the call from Charleston City Paper....We had won the award. It wasn't even on the radar for me. The awards were announced in March and it was only January. Man, what a feeling! Someone, a lot of people, noticed and appreciated our efforts! It was just the vote of confidence we needed at the time to follow our path of trying to Be The Best.

Ten years later, that vote of confidence is more important than ever. Yeah, I sweat out the results of the reader's poll every year. Rue the day we don't win it. Our staff will not want to be around if that happens, it won't be pretty. But by working hard every day, and focusing on each and every order, maybe that day will never come. I know I wake up every day thinking "we have to be really good today".