We recently connected with Alexzandria Regan and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alexzandria, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

It was 2017 when I purchased a flower shop in my hometown, Fryeburg, Maine. Not in a million years, I would not have guessed that I would go back to my hometown and with flowering being my choice of career. In 2015 I had a life changing event that literally, switched my mind. I had an accident where I cracked my skull and got life flighted to Portland, Maine to undergo brain surgery aka TBI (traumatic brain injury). Lets’ say I was a lucky duck to make it out but of course, everything was skewed and different for me after. The Neurosurgeon told me I could not work, read books, drive a car, watch tv, look at my phone, no sugar, no salt, etc. because these are things over simulate you brain and you can get physically exhausted from or cause headaches. I was not able to do any of these normal life routines for nine months so that I could help heal my brain. Knowing that my head was off, I went to Neurorehabilitation to ‘retrain my brain’. My first mission was to rebuild and heal internally and my second mission was to figure out, now what?

Alexzandria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

After my accident I had blurry vision, lights of any kind was harsh to my eyes, loud noises felt like an airplane taking off over me. I had aphasia where I could not complete a sentence and jumbled which infuriated me. I could not walk without swaying. My equilibrium was off balanced. I soon went into neurorehabuliation to help heal my issues. Once I took several sessions they taught me that you need to start back to the basics of life and I needed to restore my senses. The tests that I took felt like child-like. Learning how to walk, memory tests, hearing tests, match the color and shape patterns. Though my last job was managerial I knew I was not ready to take on such a command. I had to find something where I could get back into the job findings step by step. What career has all these important things to help heal? Sight; color therapy. smells; memory building, art; brain function, touch; sensation. Flowers. Flowers had it all. Manifesting positive flowering, a friend called me and said there was an opening at a flower shop in Portland. I was hired and immediately fell in love.
Within a year there, I was able to learn about floral design, heal my brain and with a leap of faith, moved back to my hometown and took over an already existing flower shop and to pursue my Business Management, Small Business and Entrepreneurship degree. In my past I did consider a career as a florist and as it does sound cliché, my accident really just opened my mind and kinda screamed, ‘choice me.’ I have always been an indecisive person and maintaining a job throughout my life was semi painful because I became so bored, so very easily. My goal was always trying to find that career that when you wake up in the morning, you’re happy to go to work and I finally found it. Although my catalyst was my accident to lead me to this, it was also that I literally had to strip down to the basics, restore and refresh to figure out what I really wanted; passion, becoming an entrepreneur, creativeness, spontaneity and connecting with nature.

Let’s move on to buying businesses – can you talk to us about your experience with business acquisitions?

In 2017 I purchased an already existing flower shop in my hometown with a degree in Business Management concentration in Small Business and Entrepreneurship and a year of flowering under my belt. This was a huge decision but I went for it because I felt as though I could make a creative, new change in the town. Another plus side was that the building was zoned as ‘village commercial’ where I was able to live upstairs and business downstairs. I was excited! I had everything in one location but soon realized I had not just one but two things to juggle; running my very own business and also a house. Not to mention my main goal for the business to slowly eliminate the previous shops mainstream revenue platform, flower wire-out services.
Trying to keep house life vs. business life was impossible. The distractions were endless. Trying to figure out the ebb and flow working where you live is a tricky one. It was always awkward to have employees starting at an earlier time for more hours when I was upstairs starting to get ready. When customers found out that I lived upstairs, my store hours seemed to not matter as they knew I was there. A couple of years sorting all of these things out, I had to really try and disconnect that if I was away at the ‘house’, I was away. Also being in the same environment everyday, started to eat away at me with motivation. With this, I learned that it is very important to keep business and life separate for mental health.

While figuring out my living situation, I was also focusing on flipping the flower shop into what I was envisioning; strictly customized. From working at my first flower gig, I learned that the wire-out services (Teleflora, FTD, 1-800-flowers, etc.) seemed to be bringing in a lot of backlash and complaints. These calls always scared me and I did not want my own business to be affiliated with it as you would just have to copy and paste and arrangement online with no freedom of creativity. This was difficult at first with mostly the demographics of my town were used to it. I used to do everything I could to make all my customers happy, even it is was going against my vision for my company. I would lose money to make a sale just to get business and also lowering costs. This was my process for a little bit until I took a flower class and the floral instructor told me, ‘if you allow people to bargain with your flowers, you will always be a bargain florist.” I switched real fast into what my brand is today, staying true to my creativity and pricing.

With all this being said, owning a business, especially a brick and mortar is tough. At the beginning I woke up around 7am and stayed up until 3am with anxiety knowing that I was responsible for absolutely everything. Random crying throughout the week was typically common with stress but I kept going because it was everything I wanted.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Be nice. Always. Smile to greet someone, smile when they leave. Smile when on the phone so they can hear it. I wanted my company to be known as a friendly, welcoming and happy one. Customer service was always a big deal to me!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lemonandtulips.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lemonandtulips/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lemonandtulips

Image Credits
Rode and Co. (tropical bouquet) Surette Media Group (colorful wooden arbor (half pic) The rest – all my phone