Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14Focus

Jared Polis

Jared Polis is the founder of BlueMountainArts.com and ProFlowers, among many other companies. He is the Governor of Colorado and was a five-term U.S. Congressman for the second district of Colorado. An active philanthropist, Jared founded the Jared Polis Foundation in 2000, which, among other things, donates more than 3,500 computers a year to schools and nonprofit organizations. He has founded two charter schools, one with multiple campuses across three states and a postsecondary school for at-risk students. Jared is one of the cofounders of Techstars.

Ideas are easy to come by. I have had many that I never had time to see through and heard many other good ones from flakes and drifters, but I believe the key to success is focusing on a good idea and implementing it well. In the case of ProFlowers, my idea was to disintermediate the supply chain by sending flowers directly from the grower to the customer, delivering fresher flowers at a better price.

From there, it became a matter of focusing on the implementation. I had to invent a system to get the orders to the growers. Since many flower growers were extremely low tech at the time and couldn’t be relied on for Internet access, we created a foolproof way of faxing FedEx labels directly to the growers right on sticky peel-off paper for them to affix to the boxes. We also had to become good at marketing and customer acquisition. It doesn’t do any good to be the best at something if no one else knows ...