American dream: how they rose from street peddlers to millionaires.

Summary

---

Marty and Helen Shih of She's Florists

Marty and Helen Shih built their winning She's Florists enterprise by following the McDonald's Corp. formula. The Taiwanese couple had been impressed with the way McDonald's turned out a consistent product and thought they could do the same with flowers when they came to Los Angeles, Ca. They now sell flowers at 16 area shops in 15-21 standard bouquet designs. They have also started several side companies providing services to Asian Americans.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

American dream: how they rose from street peddlers to millionaires.

That first day was grueling. Early in the morning, Marty Shih and his sister Helen set up on a street corner in Los Angeles. Their cramped flower stall was a former cigarette stand they'd borrowed. Marty had financed his first stock of flowers with the 5500 his mother had given him for graduate school.

The hours stretched by, yet they had only one sale: A customer stopped by long after dusk and gave them $1.99 for a lone bunch of flowers.

As he handed them over, Shih swore to himself: "Marty, you will become the McDonald's of the flower industry."

That was in 1979. Since then, the Taiwan-born Shihs have worked a miracle, building a business empire serving America's huge multicultural Asian-American market.

It was an impossible dream: Everybody said Asian-Americans were too culturally diverse, speaking too many languages, to form one community. Yet riches lay in wait for the entrepreneur who could break that market, with its 9.4 million members and 500,000 Asian-American-owned companies.

The Shihs found the secret. They knew that to zero in on this elus...

See the full content of this document

---