We recently connected with Rachel Guffey and have shared our conversation below.

Rachel, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

I think “what does it take to be successful,” is such an interesting question because success is so subjective. For myself and our two businesses, Jungle House and Squishington’s Candy Shop, success is defined by a few benchmarks:

1) Am I providing an enjoyable work environment for my co-workers?
2) Am I able to pay myself (most the time, anyway ;) ) and provide for myself and my family?
3) Do we bring something valuable to the community?

For the first benchmark of providing an enjoyable work environment for my co-workers, this can be a more difficult task to keep tabs on and requires a large amount of communication from our end. Consistent check-ins with the management team seem to be the best way to gauge the fulfillment in our work, but also going out of my way to do nice little gestures for our team such as providing treats on very busy days, giving frequent raises and verbal praise, and giving our crew a huge amount of autonomy- which, by the way, isn’t great for all personality types so we keep this in mind during our hiring practices!

A last note I’d like to slip in about this is that when you’re opening your own business, you can get a lot of folks saying, “Oh! Working for yourself must be so nice!” and I want to be the first one to say you never work for yourself! You are constantly working for those around you; whether that’s your employees, your community or your customers- we will always be working hard for those around us!

Secondly, am I able to pay myself and provide for my family? This is a constant battle in our heads! I own both our shops with my husband, Jhami, and knowing both of our incomes depend on the success of our shops is terrifying. There are times we need to skip our paychecks, and overall we do feel grateful we can do that time-to-time. We’re big believers in “abundance thinking,” meaning if we believe things will provide for us, they will. We’re going on year 6 for our plant shop and abundance thinking has been working thus far but we have been extremely fortunate to always have customers showing up for us!

Lastly, do we bring something valuable to the community? This is probably the easiest one for me to know we’re successful in because we hear it from customers’ mouths daily! At Jungle House, we frequently hear about caring for plants has improved someone’s mental health and at the candy shop we are literally making people smile everyday “like a kid in a candy shop!.”

What does it take to be successful? Being brave, sticking to your mission or your benchmarks, and being flexible! You must be brave to take the jump into entrepreneurship, and you must be flexible to know when you must rotate your business model to meet the needs of of your customers. Sticking to your mission (and clearly defining your mission) will keep you headed the right direction everyday!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Hi there! I’m Rachel Guffey! I’m newly 40 years old with a 2-year-old daughter, Jolly. I own two businesses with my husband, Jhami; Jungle House and Squishington’s Candy Shop.
Jungle House is a full-service houseplant shop in the heart of our historic downtown Lawrence, KS. Jungle House was born out of my love for houseplants and my husbands love of entrepreneurship! (He started selling home grown tomatoes to local restaurants when we was 5 years old!) We pride ourselves on our customer service, having a great freakin’ time and providing our community with a fun local stop for plants! The hilight of our shop is our potting bench, customers can pick out any plant + pot combo and we’ll pot it on the spot for them- even drilling a hole in the pot for them if it doesn’t have a drainage hole!

Squishington’s Candy Shop is an old fashioned candy shop offering nostalgic candies! Squishington was my husbands childhood nickname so we’ve taken that and run with it! Squish, as we call it, is an adorable little shop that serves up “kid in a candy shop,” vibes everyday! We love to offer free samples, make custom mixes for folks, and just overall have a sweet break in your day.

We are extremely fortunate that our shops are next door to one another in our historic downtown; we can literally be two places at one time! ;)

I’m extremely proud that we brought our two-year-old daughter into this chaotic entrepreneurial lifestyle! For the first two years of her life, we have been able to bring her to work with us, take her on work trips and spend a ton of quality time together as a family!

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

As I’ve faced burnout in the last 6ish years, I’ve turned to some books and tradeshows to find re-inspiration to our industries!
As we hire and train managers, I frequently reference the book, “FISH!” If you haven’t read it before it’s a super easy read and you could finish it in just a couple hours. The main message of the book is about the Seattle Fish Market and how their employees create fun and playfulness in their otherwise kinda gross work environment (think about stinky fish, the melting ice, the weather conditions…) I find this book to be so inspirational because it reminds me how to bring the fun to my coworkers and lead with a lighthearted attitude. (It is just plants, afterall!)

The other resource I’ve found to be extremely helpful for inspiration is tradeshows. In this last year, I attended Cultivate ’24 which is the green industry’s largest tradeshow in North America. We were fortunate to send our manager of Jungle House along with us to the tradeshow-she also brought home a ton of inspiration! I love tradeshows from the professional development standpoint and reminding myself why I do what I do. I find it comforting to hear my peers compare similar stories of hiring difficulties, industry wide issues, and new ideas to try when I get back home!

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

I love reflecting on how we turned this little side-hustle into our full time careers!

This is a long story that begins in 2002. I was a junior in high school and I was bitten by a tick. My doctor unfortunately didn’t recognize the signs and symptoms of a tick bite with a bullseye rash and prescribed me eczema cream. Fast forward to the fall of 2018 and I was *EXTREMELY* sick. Deadly sick. I was violently vomiting daily, yellowing and sallow skin, depressed, lethargic, and worst of all I accepted I was just a sickly human that and that was that. I had to quit my successful full-time job as a hairstylist because I had been calling in sick consistently for a year and I knew that wasn’t fair to my coworkers or my clients. My self esteem and self worth was shot. There were weeks I physically couldn’t get out of bed because I felt so run down and drained, and I was vomiting every couple of hours.
In a weird turn of events, my mom heard about a clinic a few hours away that was specializing in helping people find the root cause of their illnesses. My mom and her partner gifted me the incredibly opportunity to attend this clinic for two weeks and see if I couldn’t get to the bottom of why I was honestly slowly dying.
Two days into my 14 day stay at the clinic, I was tested for Lyme Disease because my doctor recognized my symptoms compared to some of his other patients who struggled with Lyme. It came back positive, surprise! He diagnosed me with “chronic, late-stage Lyme disease.” I had been sick for 16 YEARS! My liver and kidneys had taken a big hit as well as my endocrine systems.
In the next 24 hours he started treating me for Lyme and by the end of week two, I’m not joking when I say that my skin was an entirely different color! I went from yellow and sallow to pinkish red! I had color back in my face and I didn’t look as if I was dying anymore, and most importantly I didn’t feel like giving up anymore!

Anyway, during the throws of my illness I had begun hoarding houseplants because they made me feel good- having something to care for in the house literally kept me alive for well over a year. After I returned from treatment, I was inspired by my husband to start a houseplant supply webshop – supplies only because I was scared to sell live plants! My husband and I started a Shopify website in fall of 2018, listed the ceramic pots and other supplies we wanted to sell and started an plantstagram Instagram page to start to get a feel for our audience and community. This was, by the way, the smartest business decision we made in those early days! The Instagram gave us a great insight to our newfound customer base as houseplants were just becoming a trend online.
In late fall 2018, our friends business, Wonderfair, offered to host us for a pop-up shop to sell off some of my plants that I had propagated and grown because I no longer had any room in our house! We were supposed to set up and sell Friday-Sunday. On Friday evening, we set up our shop around 4pm and the sale wasn’t set to begin until 6pm. I’m not joking when I say that people were *running* up to me and taking plants from my hands! We sold out by the end of Friday evening!
After the pop-up sales success, we knew we had a market in our community. Since I was already unemployed from my job as a hairstylist and feeling SO much better, we decided we were ready to take the leap into opening our own shop, Jungle House!
We found a dilapidated building for rent (the roof literally leaked water every time it rained or snowed) in an arts district in our town. There’s not a lot of walk-by traffic and my favorite Google Review from this time says, “Sketchy on the outside, beautiful on the inside!” IT WAS SO TRUE!
The idea was that we would be open just a few days a week, I’d listen to some good tunes, sell some plants and my husband would continue with his full time day job. Within the first few months, we knew this was turning into something much bigger. We had lines out the door waiting for us to open on multiple occasions! We hired a couple part time folks and within the year, my Husband left his day job to join me at Jungle House full time. We now have moved our store into a much nicer building in our downtown and grown our team to 25!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.junglehousegoods.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/junglehousegoods/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/junglehousegoods/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelguffey785/

Image Credits

Leah Evans Photo