I have been a sales guy to about every player in this vertical for about twenty years and being a sales guy who pours a heavy drink or two, I made many friends at Provide, FTD and even Teleflora, 1800Flowers and the Newer startups. Here’s my take:
Provide early years: explosive growth powered by early entry into e-commerce, laziness of the big boys like FTD and 1800Flowers charging 200 bucks for valentines roses. I know coz I paid for it!! So they bought growth at expense of any profitability and that was ok then because everyone was doing it.
Provide post liberty: Same game as early years BUT bad karma had set in. CEO Bill was screwing employees, HR aiding and abetting harassment, management team was riddled with insiders. I almost had to hear it from multiple people to realize how toxic the culture had become - in today’s world the ceo, hr, legal staff would be in jail!
Provide with FTD: the key reason the cultures never worked together was the hubris of San Diego folks and incompetence of Downwrs Groove. Provide people were good at growth but sh--ty at delivering any profit. And that’s now how the world works. Look at Sharis Berries, a 100m business and zero profit. Same with ProFlowers - only made money at a rate that was too little to fund the explosive growth in customer acquisition costs. FTD was equally a piece of sh-- having milked the florists by every imaginable statement stuffing fee but really couldn’t build a profitable business outside of wire service. So they had no experience in turning around a high growth ship and sure enough ran the whole damn ship to the bottom. They would have been fine by themselves but once they got burdened with ProFlowers it was too big Not to fail!
In the end people who I love and respect got hurt. But if you ask me the pivotal point was the bad karma at proflowers. The lesson here is never let the ceo get away with screwing employees literally (like at ProFlowers) or otherwise (at FTD).
Would love to see any thoughts.