The Greenhouse Odyssey: Seventeen - “Stand by Me While I Talk About You”
By Lorraine Miller
My memory tinkers with the past. Sometimes it speeds time up, making a crush of events, bumping one year into the next. Then, there are periods when time drags and nothing changes. Progress comes in fits and starts: a greenhouse here, a gift shop there, and a parking lot in between. Years of waiting, nine for customer parking, ten to take out a billboard, twelve to build four greenhouses, a burgeoning collection of employees. But I realize every step is necessary in building a strong foundation for Cactus & Tropicals. Each addition was needed to create a rock-solid footprint. Drums rolling followed by fingers drumming.
1993 was a year of settling in. By ‘settling in’ I mean a momentary pause in demolition or construction. It took a year to stitch the loose ends together. We settled into our new office. At least we tried. The carpet was threadbare, the wallpaper and paint were peeling off the walls in kite-sized curls and the bathroom – yikes! That shower had to go. It took a while to make the space usable. Periodically, we’d gaze out the south window to admire our sleek new parking lot with its vibrant yellow stripes, that damn billboard looming over it all, now encased in concrete. We still had four years to put up with the beast.
We purchased computers, bought a complicated bookkeeping program and stopped using carbon triplicates for billing. Kathy Harbin and I learned to use the Microsoft Word and Excel programs. We got fancy with spreadsheets. Every kind of record went on a spreadsheet, every piece of information, every fact, every statistic, every bid, every bit. We gifted our recipe box of contacts and account files to the Museum of Ephemeral Necessities.
When I could finally sit at my desk to create a budget or analyze expenses, I thought of my first experience with bookkeeping, the 14-column ledger and the SBA Score volunteer who rode the city bus to the Grass Menagerie every week to teach me how to use it.
With complete visibility from the street, more parking, a new entry and visible signage, walk-in sales doubled almost overnight. It was a good year for commercial sales, too. We were thrilled to provide the plants for the LDS Church’s Joseph Smith Memorial Building, which had been remodeled from the historic Hotel Utah. At about the same time, the ZCMI Mall remodeled its South Temple entrance. The new entry was bright and sunny, with a wide stairway leading to the food court. The stairway was framed by large, built-in planter boxes. The planter boxes gave us a chance to be more creative with color, shape and size than the standard tall plant placed in the corner of a hallway.
If 1993 was a respite, the rest of the decade came like a flood, like someone or something had broken the dam. My banker, Richard Gray, called me early in 1994 to tell me he was nominating me for the Utah Small Business Administration’s Small Business Person of the Year.
“You are not,” I insisted.
“I am,” he said. “You deserve it.”
I don’t remember Richard calling to tell me that I won but I’ll never forget the State SBA Awards event. It was held in the Gore Auditorium on the campus of Westminster College at the beginning of May in 1994. To use a phrase of my father’s, there was a good crowd. As people left the lobby to take their seats, I stood at the window, waiting for my parents. They didn’t come. The program was about to begin and I was beginning to worry. I had spoken to my mother that afternoon, so I knew they were coming. As I looked out the window, an ambulance went by, lights flashing. I had an uneasy feeling. A campus policeman came into the auditorium to find me and I was right there at the door. My parents were late and the parking space they found was a fair distance away. Running to be on time, my mother tripped on a cracked sidewalk and fell, shattering her kneecap. The people in charge of the event kindly changed the program schedule and put my part at the beginning rather than the end so I could get to the hospital.
When I learned I was the state winner, I also learned that each year, during the first week of May, the SBA celebrates Smalll Business Week. Each state winner is invited to Washington D.C., for the week and I was able to bring a couple of close friends along. What a week it was!
We were given a tour of the Treasury Department by Lloyd Benson, the Secretary of the Treasury. He told us that small business is the engine that drives the economy.
At a luncheon held in our honor, Leon Panetta, President Clinton’s Chief of Staff, talked about the importance of small businesses in creating communities. He told us to pat ourselves on the back, small businesses are the engines that drive the economy. We were given a tour of the White House and many of the Washington monuments. Karen Shepherd, Utah’s elected member of the House of Representatives, graciously took me under her wing, gave me a tour of the Capitol, let me tag along to press conferences and invited me to lunch in the House Members Private Dining Room.
She told me small business is the engine that drives the economy.
The final day was a gathering of all the winners in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located next to the West Wing. If President Clinton’s schedule allowed, he would present the awards. He did come and it was exciting beyond words. He gave a short speech about his work to reduce the Federal deficit while enhancing the Defense budget. Mostly, he talked about the need for universal health care. He explained that while big business employs enough people to receive a deep discount in health care costs, small business does not. It was a problem he wanted to address.
He told us small businesses like ours are the engine that drives the economy.
We still didn’t know who the winners were and the auditorium was tense with excitement. After his speech, he paused for a long moment before he announced the third-place winner, an orchid grower from Hawaii. I remember the grower putting a beautiful lei of white orchids around the President’s neck. As soon as their picture was snapped, Clinton took it off, citing allergies. The second-place winners were two gentlemen who created the New England Culinary Institute, now listed as the fifth best cooking school in America. They presented the President with a chef’s hat.
He said to them, “You all go over there and stand and we’ll do this.” He pointed to a place a few feet away. Then he said, “Our winner is Lorraine Miller from Salt Lake City, the President of Cactus and Tropicals. “Come on up here,” he said to me. “Stand by me while I talk about you.”
I was dumbfounded, not to mention empty-handed. He shook my hand and said, “I’m so proud of you.” I felt about 8 years old.