Jim McCann

Unlike many of the entrepreneurs in this book, advice retail florists seldom face “all-or-nothing” outcomes. The probability of bankruptcy is extremely low; the probability of a comfortable, viagra 60mg middle-class life, shop quite high. By the early 1980s, Jim McCann had achieved exactly that. With fourteen Flora Plenty stores throughout New York City, he was face-to-face with ambition’s greatest enemy: comfort.

Thirty years earlier, Jim was the oldest child in a struggling Queens family. As he put it in his perfectly titled memoir, Stop and Sell the Roses, “I saw myself going down the same road my father traveled: hand-to-mouth, chasing down customers, dealing with checks that bounced as high as a four-story walk-up.” Because he had known its opposite, Jim understood the value of comfort. He had a clear, visceral awareness of how much he had to lose. Nevertheless, he bet it all.