Exploring Life & Business with Montshona Ihekweazu of Blooming Garden Flowers

Hi Montshona, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I can say with a fair amount of confidence that I never in my wildest dreams would’ve predicted that I’d own my own business, Blooming Garden Flowers, especially at this point in my life. Being able to create and having people actually want to pay for my work is something kind of unbelievable to me.

My goal is to provide people with a one-of-a-kind experience through flowers, so every time I set out to fulfill a flower order, or teach a floral arrangement class or team building workshop, no matter how big or small, I’m actively picking out all of the colors, scents, and textures that go into everything, and clients hire and trust me to do so. And I trust myself. It’s both incredibly amazing and super humbling to do this as a one-woman show. And it didn’t come easily. It took a series of fumbles in my life for me to finally take a leap of faith and do my own thing.

Growing up in San Francisco, CA, I was often surrounded by nature and its beauty. My parents were teachers and didn’t have a ton of financial resources, but they made a huge effort to get me and my brothers outdoors. My dad, in particular, would take me on long walks after school in Golden Gate Park, where the eucalyptus trees would grow so tall that they’d block the grey misty sky, and the smell of sweet roses would waft gingerly from the nearby rose garden into my nose. Those memories are part of the foundation of my business – I start each floral arrangement with a base of blooming roses and leafy eucalyptus as an ode to those walks from my childhood.

While my parents provided me with a lot of love and support, they weren’t always able to provide me with something that I craved very young – financial stability. Even as a child, money (or lack thereof) was often top of mind for me. Later on, as an adult, I took role after unfulfilling role in corporate settings in an effort to assuage that sense of unease. I kept thinking subconsciously that if I just made more money, I’d be happier, I’d be fine, I’d be set. Even after getting my MBA, I continued to conform to whatever job or role I thought I should fit into, whether it made sense for me or not. I longed for a creative outlet where I could shine, but couldn’t seem to ever find it.

Fast forward to the pandemic—my husband and I were trying our hardest to [unsuccessfully] balance our demanding careers, now working from home in Houston, where my husband was born and raised, with a busy toddler in our wake. That’s when my life started to unravel.

First, it was my personal life, with my father losing his years-long battle with an unrelenting blood cancer. A father I hadn’t seen for almost a year beforehand because I’d been trying to keep him safe by staying away, not wanting to bring him a mystery illness that would undoubtedly be fatal to someone so fragile. I was going to fly that evening to see him in the hospital the day that he died. Suddenly, he was gone. And I was spinning.

Then, my professional life took a dive headfirst into the abyss. I now found myself a stay-at-home mom, which by the way, is one of the hardest, grittiest, and most relentless jobs that I think exists. Especially during a pandemic. There were no breaks. No mental health checks. It was brutal. Moreover, I’d always pictured myself as this career woman, whatever that meant, and so to have that idea of myself, this whole identity that I’d built a fair amount of my adult life building up, now just gone felt almost impossible to grapple with.

It’s safe to say I became pretty miserable after that. I’m not sure I knew how deep my grief ran. I’m not sure anyone did. I was mourning my father while also mourning the career woman I thought I was going to be. I was now pregnant with my second child, another baby girl, and I knew things had to change. This was no way to live.

I decided to get some counseling, and in doing so, I dealt with a lot of deep, painful feelings. Lots of grief. I also began to come out of my pandemic shell and see people again. Carefully, thoughtfully, but again. I restarted doing something that I’d always loved to do – arranging flowers for when friends and family came over. I took classes, read books on floral arrangements, gardens, and entertaining, and most of all, I got serious. I was going to find some joy in this blossoming talent. And I was going to be great at it.

Once I realized what I wanted to do, things moved rather quickly in starting my business. I Google Mapped the nearest floral wholesaler, then called and asked how to buy flowers from them since I’d been told you can’t just walk into a floral wholesaler and buy their flowers without some sort of documentation. They told me I needed a certain state tax permit, so I found a company that would file that paperwork for me and who would also legally form my LLC for me for both a reasonable price and a decent turnaround time (shout out to ZenBusiness in Austin!). And with that, I started my very own business, Blooming Garden Flowers.

I now bring my talents and passions, such as my eye for style and design and my love of teaching, into my work. Things about myself that I used to downplay are things that I now lead with,  such as having studied luxury retail in Paris under the former CEO of Armani France while in business school. From that course, I learned so much about the importance of creating a special experience for people, and I bring those learnings into my work all the time.

Whether I’m whisking someone to a beautiful blooming garden with my flowers at an intimate event, teaching a group of friends how to find their inner florist through my private floral arrangement classes, or providing a much-needed escape to teams with my corporate team-building workshops that include a floral class, I’m always thinking about how I can bring one-of-a-kind experiences to people. I’m able to bring joy and have joy. And for that, I’m truly grateful.

Owning your own small business can be pretty tough in that for better or worse, all of the responsibility falls on you as the owner. I didn’t learn what this would be like day in and day out when I attended business school. You have to live this stuff to know it. You don’t have someone telling you to do something that maybe you don’t agree with at work, which on the one hand is absolutely fabulous, but on the other hand can be pretty tough since you actually don’t have anyone else at all, you constantly have to be your own motivator.

In my case, I don’t have staff yet, so for better or worse, I have to rely on myself. If I don’t get to something that day, it’s hard to look around and blame others since no one’s there but me. Sure, there are circumstances that can make crossing something off my list difficult (in my case, having two young children running around does the trick), but at the end of the day, my business is all me. And whether it’s a good day day, a bad day, or just a meh day, I’m the one baring the brunt of it. If I’m in a funk, there’s no co-worker to talk to that can help snap me out of it. My husband is a great source of support, but he’s not working with me at home day to day, and he also has his own demanding career. So, there’s a lot of self-talks happening on my end. A lot of trying to picture the ideal state of my business in the future. I want to be on stage and talk to people about my story and help others through my storytelling, and I know that will come with time, and so I have to picture that. I have to remember to be kind to myself. To have patience with myself. And to have compassion for myself. All things that are hard for me to do.

I think working from home (and being a mother) also makes things difficult because you’re undoubtedly the one that deals with more household responsibilities since technically you’re the one that’s home. I’ve struggled with tackling all the things that our family and our home need on a day-to-day basis while still trying to carve out time for my business.

I’m someone that has traditionally needed to be organized in order to be effective at work. And so, I’m now bringing back some of the practices that I used in my prior corporate career into my business. For instance, I’m slowly starting to implement Monday Morning Meetings with Blooming Garden Flowers, where I go over everything I need to do for the business that week and have sort of a check-in with myself. It’s basically a brain dump of everything I can think of that I need to do for the business that week, and then I prioritize these things and schedule appropriate items in my online calendar. I also go through what was already scheduled in my calendar for that week and reassess and reprioritize what now needs to be done. In addition, I’m scheduling set work hours in the day that are dedicated solely to my business.

It used to be that if one of my kids needed to have an appointment, or I had to run an errand, I would schedule it whenever in the day because I was “at home”. But now, I schedule things around my working hours, just as if I were actually at work. Sometimes the personal does bleed into the professional, but things are getting a lot clearer for me than they were before.

Motherhood, parenting, owning a business, having and being a partner, managing a household, caring for extended family; it’s a lot. I don’t have the answers for everything, but I do know that you’ve got to keep moving forward. Just keep going. Today may be awful, but tomorrow is a new day. What’s the next play?

As you know, we’re big fans of Blooming Garden Flowers. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about the brand?
At Blooming Garden Flowers, I like to provide an experience for people. My goal is to have people escape the ordinary, the mundane and be transported to a luscious blooming garden through my flowers. I design and make all floral arrangements myself, and I make them at simple, easy price points so that if you want to host a birthday party or a dinner or a baby/bridal shower, or a brunch, you can do that. You can have on on-call personal florist for events, big and small.

One thing I’m especially proud of is my flower board, which is something I created on my own out of a desire to host people in my home while having flowers on the table that didn’t block peoples’ views of one another. The Blooming Garden Flowers flower board is like a platter of beautiful fresh flowers that sits low on a table so that guests can enjoy the beauty of the flowers while still being able to talk to one another without any view obstruction. Instead of meat or cheeseboard, have a flower board.

I’m also very proud of my private floral arrangement classes, where I teach groups of people about the forgotten art of floral arrangement. I love to teach and have facilitated many workshops in my prior corporate life, so this is a great opportunity for me to help others learn the tools and skills to add beauty and joy to their lives through floral arrangement. I bring all flowers and supplies, and it’s a great way for folks to get together, learn something new, and take home a beautiful vase of flowers that they’ve made themselves.

I’m looking forward to expanding my business into more corporate team-building workshops that involve one of my private floral arrangement classes. When I worked in an office all day, it would’ve been great to have a fun team-building workshop where we got to work with flowers. Anything with nature is such an escape for me, and so I want to bring that to people in a setting I’m quite familiar with, a setting where I know a break from screens and a special space for creativity is needed.

Success is interesting because for a long time, I’d looked at money as the sign of success. And while money can bring many things – security, comfort, fleeting moments of happiness – it doesn’t solely define your success. Because to me, success has a lot to do with being proud of yourself and finding purpose and fulfillment in what you do. Forget about other people; it’s not about them. It’s about being truly proud of the work you put out into the world, whatever that may be.

I used to have this saying at work, and I still actually still do, which is that yes, you can be good at something, but to truly be great, you’ve got to be passionate about it. And for me, being able to transport people into a place of beauty and creativity, to my version of a whimsical blooming garden, to bring them something they’ve never seen before, whether through my floral arrangements, my private classes, or my team building workshops, that truly makes me happy. To be able to teach others how to bring joy into their lives with flowers is humbling to me because I think wow, how is it that I get to use my creativity to bring people happiness? And every time I create, I create something new. Since I rely on fresh seasonal flowers for everything that I do, no day or event is ever the same.

And to be clear, I am a super small business, so the best is yet to come. I still have a lot of work to do. A lot of flowers, smiles and laughter to bring. And while financials are an important component, they are not the sole component, so I have to keep reminding myself that. I am finally working in a space where I’m passionate and great at something, and people are paying me for things only I can create. It’s wild. In the best way.