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- 1-800-Flowers CEO and cofounder Jim McCann says he got the best piece of business advice from JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon.
- "You spend too much energy and time trying to get everybody in the organization to get it," Dimon told him, per McCann.
- 1-800-Flowers began as a single New York flower shop before evolving into a $3 billion company.
The boss of flower and gifts company 1-800-Flowers said JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon gave him the best business advice — that he didn't need his employees' buy-in while making decisions.
McCann, whose company began as a single brick-and-mortar New York flower shop before evolving into a $3 billion company, recounted the anecdote to Fortune's Ruth Umoh in an interview published on Monday.
"Jim, you spend way too much of your time evangelizing," Dimon told McCann, per the latter's retelling.
"Jim, you spend way too much of your time evangelizing," Dimon told McCann, per the latter's retelling.
"You spend too much energy and time trying to get everybody in the organization to get it. They don't all need to get it," Dimon told McCann. It is unclear when Dimon shared this piece of advice.
Dimon told McCann his team only needed to have faith that McCann understood the value of his product. And if they did, then the team's work would "roll up into a beautiful noise" or a "beautiful crescendo."
For context, McCann and Dimon have a long-standing friendship that dates back to their childhood in Queens, according to a 2010 CBS interview with Chris McCann, Jim's brother.
McCann's company was founded in 1976 and rebranded to 1-800-Flowers in 1986 after acquiring its namesake number.
In the Fortune interview, McCann credited his company's success to technologies like mobile phones. "Mobiles completely revolutionized our business, and that's when we crossed a billion-dollar threshold," said McCann.
The company has since pivoted to online sales, reporting record revenues and profit growth during the fourth quarter of 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, 1-800-Flowers reported total net revenues of $2.21 billion, marking a 4% increase year-on-year.
McCann's e-commerce business now extends beyond flowers to include brands like Wolferman's Bakery, Cheryl's Cookies, Harry & David, and The Popcorn Factory, per Fortune.
McCann and Dimon did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider, sent outside regular business hours.