The Power Up ⎯ SN.02/EP.03
Joe Ressler's Secret Sauce For Starting A New Business
Like most small business owners, Joseph Ressler didn’t study entrepreneurship. In fact, he used to be a professional poker player before opening REWILD, a plant and flower studio in Washington DC. At first, it was all about creating a business that filled a hole in the market. Then it was about optimizing and expanding.
Joe shares with us, “When you’re starting a business… a lot of it is just working at your business, problem solving with customers every day, making sure that the products you buy are high-quality, and making sure that you have a good margin on them. Your policies and procedures are all loose. As we grow we’re starting to think more about having a customer relationship management system and tracking whether customers come back or don’t come back. I would say we’re about a year into that process.”
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About The Business
Business name: REWILD
Founded: 2018
Owner: Joseph Ressler
Location: Washington, D.C.
Website: https://www.rewilddc.com
Sales diversification strategy: Storefronts, museum gift shop, e-commerce, in-home service, workshop, events, installation and maintenance
About Our Guest
Joe’s first career was as a professional poker player and when it came time for something new he thought getting an MBA would be the key. However, even with his degree, Joe couldn’t find any job opportunities without prior experience. That’s when he turned to starting a business of his own.
When doing research for an idea, Joe realized that a lot of traditional flower shops were closing. He realized he could build a better business model that filled the hole in the market. REWILD has been so successful that they opened a gift shop at the U.S. Botanic Garden, run large scale events, and use their warehouse to support their installation and maintenance program.
Full Transcript
Sean (Thrive): Hello everyone, it’s Sean from Thrive with another episode of The Power Up where I meet with successful small business owners and operators to learn about their business strategy so you can take their insights and level up your own business. Once your business is ready to expand, knowing where to start can be overwhelming. Our guests have some creative solutions for how they’ve tackled tricky problems and turned them into growth opportunities. Now, let’s dive into today’s episode.
Our guest today is Joe Ressler from ReWild DC in the United States. In a previous life, Joe had a successful career as a poker player, but when that started to wind down, Joe took the time to get an MBA, but didn’t have much luck finding opportunities without previous experience.
That’s when he decided to create his own jo,b and ReWild was born in 2018 to bring a curated selection of indoor houseplants to budding enthusiasts. Since then, Joe has expanded the business to five locations and diversified sales with a gift shop, events out of the warehouse, and an installation and maintenance program to keep plants happy and healthy for the long haul.
Are you ready to get started, Joe?
Joe (ReWild): I’m ready!
Sean: Alright, my first question for you is, tell me a little bit about how you go from being a professional poker player to an MBA to starting ReWild.
Joe: So back when I was getting my MBA, I was applying for a lot of finance jobs, which when you have an eight-year gap in your resume, it definitely put you at the bottom of the ladder.
A friend from the poker world and from high school, an old friend of mine, he and I decided we wanted to start a business, and we were looking around. The way that anyone wants to buy a really small business is you just go on BizBuySell and you request NDAs.
For me, one observation we had was that there were a lot of flower shops for sale, and when you got the financials of these flower shops, you could see you were really buying nothing. They weren’t making a lot of money, there wasn’t a dedicated commercial customer base.
So why would you want to enter a business that’s not making a lot of money?
I guess for us, we saw an opportunity to zigzag where flowers in particular were moving to Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and big box retailers, and it was such an impersonal experience.
Something like flowers and plants are very aesthetic; they’re very important to the vibe of your home.
So we decided the most efficient route to do that would just be to create our own brand, and that was the seed of a thought that started ReWild.
I would say that I don’t feel like it was a good idea then, but it feels like a good idea now. At the time, it was basically a cheap experiment.
Renting retail space, especially back in 2018, wasn’t super expensive. When you have one store, you don’t need a ton of inventory. I planned to staff the store mainly with myself and my other business partner, Lily Cox, who was sort of the industry expert for us.
So that was how ReWild was born.
Sean: Got it. So tell me a little bit about the business model specifically. What are you guys doing that’s unique compared to other flower and plant type shops?
Joe: Most people think about garden centers, you go 10, 15, 30 minutes outside the city, you hit a big garden center, it’s cheap, there’s a ton of inventory, and you don’t really know what you’re looking at or have an idea of what you’re going to do.
For us, we just moved that model right into the city and we focus solely on houseplants, people with condos, with row houses.
Our specialty is really being super fast and high quality. That’s how we think of ourselves. We can deliver really large, complete products to customers; we’re not giving them problems.
That is basically where we live in the value spectrum.
Sean: Got it. So are all five of your locations in Washington DC? And are all five locations the same model, or do you do something different at each?
Joe: We’ve been lucky to diversify a little bit. Four of the locations are typical houseplant stores where we focus on selling plants and pottery.
We have one location that’s actually the gift shop at the US Botanic Garden. That location is a bit of a diversification. We sell plants there, but we also sell branded, really high-end tote bags, dish towels, things that commemorate people’s visits to the garden.
Diversifying away from plants is definitely a gift to us in a lot of ways because DC is a very transient city.
Our hot seasons for the houseplant stores are when people are home, in the fall, winter, and spring. In the summer, everyone’s traveling, so our sales cyclically go pretty far down in the stores.
However, tourism in DC goes way up during the summer, so we’re able to offset the low demand in our retail plant stores with a gift shop, which is honestly pretty lucky.
The US Botanic Garden store was another. A lot of our stores, in general, we try to find real estate where it makes sense for our business model. Our stores tend to be 800 to 1500 square feet, so we look for opportunities in dense, high-traffic areas but not super large financial commitments.
Sean: Sure. Something you mentioned at the beginning was a reference to other flower shops not having a traditionally returning customer base. Is that something you’ve been able to figure out how to resolve with ReWild?
Joe: I would say that’s an open question. As you grow, when you’re starting a business and ReWild has been around for five years, a lot of it is just working at your business, problem-solving with customers every day, making sure the products you buy are high quality, that you have a good margin on them, that your policies and procedures are all loose.
As we grow, we’re starting to think more about having a customer relationship management system and tracking whether customers come back or not. We’re about a year into that process, so the data is not totally there yet.
One great part of having beautiful retail locations and storefronts for a slightly complicated product is that we’ve been fortunate enough to launch a maintenance and installation business. If you have an apartment building, a restaurant, or a super high-end residential home, we’re happy to put together really large orders for you, deliver them, and then maintain them on a weekly basis.
On that end, we’ve been able to develop recurring revenue. Recurring revenue is one of those places where you don’t know if you want to live there or not as a business owner.
In reality, what I’m telling customers is: I have a beautiful, high-quality product you can put in your home. It’ll make your space greener, accentuate whatever vibe you want. I would love to give them a complete product, but unfortunately, plants need to be taken care of. If you water a plant for a year and don’t do anything else, maybe it’ll deteriorate a little.
Trying to get it right is always a bit of a heady question. I would love if I didn’t have to maintain it because that would make my product way better.
Although, as long as we are doing the right things with our maintenance customers, giving them little gifts, making sure their plants don’t have pests, and not creating problems, I feel a little better about it.
Sean: Got it. Do you have any sort of loyalty program?
Joe: This Friday, we’re launching a membership program. It’s something we’ve been asked about for years. That will be the true testament to figuring out the customer lifetime value of ReWild customers.
Sean: Are you able to tell us a little bit about how the program is going to work?
Joe: Yeah, so I spend a lot of time thinking about other loyalty programs. You have REI, which has a co-op. They just sell it to you at the register; it’s sort of like a kickback. It costs 20 bucks and you get 10% of your purchases back in the form of a gift card at the end of the year. That’s the lowest end of a membership program.
The highest end would be Restoration Hardware, where it’s 300 bucks a year, and everything you could possibly want to buy is discounted 30%. The average order there is thousands of dollars, so you sort of have to become a member if you want to.
We decided to live somewhere in the middle. Our membership program is going to be $80 a year. We’re a very local company; we’re not trying to sell a ton online, we’re trying to sell out of our retail stores. For $80 a year, anytime you shop with us, you’ll get 15% off the whole store. You have to spend something like $530 to get your $80 back, which isn’t terrible. On top of that, we give you one free local delivery, valued at about $25, and one free workshop at our store.
We do educational workshops or activities where you get to make a custom plant product like a terrarium, kokedama, or a mounted plant. We value that at about $55.
So really, the membership program is a low and slow thing. We’re not trying to launch a membership program and get everyone to sign up. We’re trying to launch it so all those regulars who ask about discounts can just get a discount for the whole year. We’re hoping it allows us to have a closer relationship with a small, very loyal subset of customers and not have to do 20 sales a year.
Sean: How are you planning to tactically manage this? Are you using a software product to manage the membership program?
Joe: Frankly, I’m just using an app on Shopify to manage the membership program. I looked at a few apps. We use ActiveCampaign as the customer relationship management tool. Anything we do, we want it to have an API into ActiveCampaign, and that’s basically how we’ll manage it.
Sean: What app did you go with on Shopify?
Joe: I went with an app called APS VIP Membership. I can’t really give it a review yet, but it was easy to set up.
Sean: Interesting, never heard of it.
Jeo: Yeah, in the SaaS and app world, there seems to be a trend where apps want to take a percentage of the revenue the app drives. Many membership apps will set it up so that 5-10% of the revenue generated by members on your website goes straight to the app, on top of a monthly subscription charge.
We were conscious of that. That was not the game I wanted to play. Managing a membership with only a couple of perks and needing to discount my website, I can do most of those things through Shopify. So I was trying to avoid giving people 15% off and then having to give 10% of the revenue to the app.
Sean: Does it have a customer relationship component?
Joe: No, you have to use a companion product like ActiveCampaign.
Sean: I’ve seen some folks use Smile.io for that.
Joe: Yeah, I’ve heard of it.
Sean: Cool. Well, let’s get close to the end.
I have four rapid-fire questions for you. You can dig into them a little bit if you like, then we’ll wrap up. Sound good?
Joe: It’s a deal.
Sean: Number one: What would you say is your fastest-growing sales or marketing channel?
Joel: It’s our installation and maintenance business. Doing large-scale installations and maintaining them is where we’re spending a lot of time.
From a business standpoint, especially during rapid growth in 2020 and 2021, we’re trying to maximize the venues and places we’re currently living in.
Sean: Number two: What is your favorite resource to grow your skills or business? Could be a blog, YouTube channel, book, anything.
Joe: My favorite business book is probably The Goal.
Sean: Who’s that by?
Joe: Eliyahu Goldratt.
It’s a fictional story about a factory that is not doing well, focusing on constraints and how to improve.
Sean: Got it.
Number three: What piece of tech can you not live without in your business?
Joe: Thrive and Google Sheets. The business runs on those two. Special shout out to Slack, but after a certain employee count, Slack gets messy.
Sean: Have you found any use for the hot new AI stuff out now?
Joe: Not a ton. Maybe a bit of AI integration on Shopify for product descriptions. I don’t love it. Every time I read AI-generated content, I feel like I telepathically know someone wrote it with AI. It hasn’t been super useful yet. We have a couple of projects going on where they might be useful.
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