Do you have a long-term business plan? Where do you expect your business to be five years from now?

Our three-year plan is about growing the business to a certain dollar amount. We're ahead of projection this year. I'd love to add a design department because we know that stores like ours do well with them, but I don't want to run it. I imagine that our market will top out at about $1.5 million, so the three-year plan is to get us to that point. If the market slows down that may become my five-year plan. By five years from now I imagine I'd have another store. We bring in so much merchandise at once that we might as well have two stores. Beyond that, I'm a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy. One of the nice things about being an importer is that we can switch directions when it feels like the market is changing. I imagine that the bloom will be off the rose on the Chinese stuff by then, so I'm going to Colombia and Canada more often.

My husband and business partner is also a CPA, and I'm a management marketing book junkie, so we do one-, three-, five-, and ten-year planning, with both a marketing plan and a general business plan. The best part about a plan is what it teaches you when you take an objective look at your business. Whenever I revise our plan, I come away inspired to make adjustments to make our shop better. Although it does help when trying to garner financing, we use the plan primarily as a learning tool. Our business plan sets objectives that are there to keep us focused. When we get discouraged and things get crazy, it's also a resource to remind us how things are supposed to be. We're running our store as a serious business instead of a hobby. In five years I anticipate that we'll be the shop to go to for all the latest and best.

I expect my business to be continually changing, that it will have at least one more store, possibly two, and that I will still own it. Everything changes and that's the beautiful thing about it, but those are our goals and our long-term plan right now. I don't have anything that's formally written down outside of doing my budgeting each year. I'm a big budgeter and I stick to the budget. Otherwise, goals are set verbally between my wife and me. Probably we'll add new stores within the state of Rhode Island. We have two stores in Providence right now, and there are other areas of Rhode Island where we would consider opening more. The nice thing is, it's pretty manageable because you can drive across this state in an hour. So you can have four stores and still be a pretty hands-on owner and manager.

Since I knew we would be opening the stores while I was getting my MBA and I had to create a business plan as part of my studies, I was fortunate to be able to use that and kill two birds with one stone. We're about halfway through the five-year plan that I created then. We opened Ruby & Begonia in 2001. In 2002 we opened The White Fig, our gift basket company. In 2003 we opened Olive & Dahlia, our cut flowers and garden style decor store. We also have plans to open a French bakery in 2004, and a stationery and paper store in 2005. They're all next door to each other on a historic street. The point of opening them together is to create a one-stop shopping experience. In the next few years, we hope to get all the stores generating revenue to sustain themselves. Right now, the existing stores help the new ones grow.