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"So, let me ask you something," Art Conforti says, sidling up to a visitor outside his Beneva Road flower shop. "Where do you buy your flowers?"
Conforti has spent two hours talking intimately about his life and his business and his late mother and his decision to leave high school in the ninth grade, but nothing he has said is more personally revealing than those six words.
In Conforti's world, everybody buys flowers at some point, especially this week, especially from Thursday through Sunday, when he will have 30 delivery trucks on the road doing 800 deliveries a day, hustling to fill the crush of orders during the Mother's Day rush.
That is the other thing revealed in his question: Art Conforti is always on the hustle.
"So where do you buy your flowers?" he asks strangers in airports, at restaurants, on the beach.
He wants their business, but he also wants to know -- wants to get inside the customer's mind, wants to understand what makes a man buy his Mother's Day lilacs there or there or there instead of here, at Beneva Flowers, where the lilacs are "unbelievable" and the customer service is "phenomenal" and the reliability is "like no place else in the business anywhere."
Two hours in the path of Conforti's superlatives can be exhausting.
He thinks fast and he talks fast and he moves fast, all in the style of his hometown, Hasbrouck Heights, NJ.
"In New York/ New Jersey there are a lot of people like me," he says. "Down here, I stand out. When you're ready to play, ready to roll up your sleeves, down here, people want to go home early."
He came to Sarasota with his parents in 1986 when he was 21, spent a few years as a Sarasota County bus driver, pushed a hot dog cart for a year or so, then rolled up his sleeves and got to work in the flower shop his father opened up to give himself something to do in retirement.
Art Conforti Sr. had been in the business for 30 years up North, but mom-and-pop flower shops were starting to wilt by the early '90s, undercut by the availability of their product in "every Costco and Wal-Mart and convenience store," as Conforti says, and by wholesalers offering nationwide telephone and computer-based delivery services for flowers on the cheap.
In 1992 he bought out his father. Within five years, Beneva Flowers was one of the largest grossing independent flower shops in the country, the equal of merchandisers in far larger markets.
"Systems, systems, systems," Conforti says. "It's all about systems."
"Every person who calls here with an order, the second time they call we've got their credit card number and their phone number and their kids' birthdays down on file. We're like their concierge. And when they go back to Michigan or wherever, we keep in touch. I mean, they're gonna send flowers the six months of the year that they're not here, right? I've got a phone. They can call me."
Conforti is typically up with his laptop until 1 a.m., mining data for opportunities, creating customer-reward programs, devising subsidiaries -- there are five, including a buying consortium and a consulting service for independent florists -- even watching what is going on at the shop, via the 18-camera security system he channel-surfs intermittently day and night.
Conforti is, he admits, "pretty much" Type A in all aspects of his life. But he does get some downtime.
"Once a week, I make sure I set aside a day to do nothing but just read."
The subject of his reading?
"Business."
A special tribute
He was born in the Bronx, like his father. His mother, a classical singer of striking beauty who was born in Turkey, was often away on tour, leaving him in the care of his grandmother.
But it was his mother he was closest to.
What he recalls as "a very special relationship" with his mother gives Mother's Day special poignancy for Conforti, because she died that day five years ago.
"She was my biggest fan," he says, and so in a way the landslide of Mother's Day business is its own tribute to her memory.
Mother's Day accounts for 20 percent of the shop's annual income, condensed into three days of setup and preparation and four days of nonstop frenzy.
"All hands on deck," says Conforti, which means 42 full-time, permanent staff members -- designers and salespeople and delivery drivers -- plus another 40 or so part-time temps.
He has done the math: With his normal staff and his seven trucks, "We can do and avg of 150 deliveries a day, so I know exactly what we are going to need." During holidays it is 130 an hour.
In addition to the retail trade -- 3,500 deliveries, several hundred walk-ins -- Conforti is doing the flowers for 14 weddings this coming weekend. He probably turned down another dozen, he says.
"We were like a sweatshop here," he says, "with people working until 1 and 2 in the morning. No more. I mean, how much money do you need to make when you wear employees wearing down?"
It has never been about the money, he says. "It's the thing you do that has to be exciting to you, not the reward you get for it."
This is one of a long list of Conforti mantras that makes him sound like a motivational speaker.
"Let's face it, I'm the coach for these people here," he says. We are a team. "I gotta get them organized. I gotta get them up. If you're in a bad mood, don't bring it into work, I tell them, and I'm the same way. Hang it outside the door. We're all here to work and make the most of our time together."
Baseball was his passion, growing up -- his office is filled with his souvenirs of the sport, and those of his son, a centerfielder on the Cardinal Mooney team -- and Conforti likens his zeal for business to dedication to any game. "Why play if you're not out there to win?"
That is what finally convinced him to quit school: It was a game he could not find interest in. "I just couldn't stay focused. The only thing that interested me was business. Finally I decided it was time to move on." Today it is the only regret I ever had. It made life more difficult. If I had to change anything, I would have continued my education.
He went to work part time for his father in the flower shop, and by 16 was using his savings to trade stocks. "I made a lot of money, and I lost a lot of money. That's where I learned you can never judge a person by what's in his pocket -- it comes and goes too fast." It's all about charater He will be the last to leave during the latest nights at the end of the week, he says, and that is as it should be.
"I expect a lot and I give a lot, you know, and that's the way it ought to be."
Is he a tough boss?
"You ask anybody and you'll get a different opinion," he shrugs. "Most of my people, they come for two weeks and they never leave. What does that tell you?" It's all about how you treat people. I beleive in treating everyone as I would like to be treated.
A couple times a year, Conforti says, he gives a party for his employees -- "a chance for all of us to eat some good food and have a good time together." Sometimes at these gatherings, he will play the piano, one of the ways Conforti says he can truly relax.
"I can play anything if it has words," he says. "If I can sing it, I can play it."
With the parking lot behind his shop already starting to fill up with trucks for his Mother's Day maneuvers, Art Conforti prepares for the "Big Event".
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