“I got to this place where I thought, ‘I can let this take me down, or I can rise up against the odds and be a better human being and take my business with me,’” said Rakini Chinery, who shares her story in this month’s Floral Management. “I wanted to be more generous. I wanted that idea to be the underpinning of my business.”
Life seemed pretty good to Rakini Chinery in 2011. Allan’s Flowers & More in Prescott, Arizona, the business she’d owned for more than a decade (and worked in for more than two decades), was growing — the year before, she’d purchased a second location about 10 miles from the first
Then one day she got a call from her 30-year-old daughter Helen, a sommelier in Los Angeles. She was sick and needed to come back home. Helen was soon in the neuro-intensive care unit at a hospital in Phoenix. Chinery and her husband, Jim, eventually learned Helen had Systemic Lupus Erythematosis.
The business Chinery had worked so hard to build became an afterthought.
“All of my energy, all of my time — it was all about Helen,” Chinery said. “Nothing existed outside of that time and space.”
A year-and-a-half after Helen’s hospitalization, Chinery felt a shift. Instead of pulling away from her business, she wanted to dig in. She also wanted everything she and her staff did to be more purposeful, from the way the shop ran its daily operations, to how her sales team interacted with customers and how she herself handled her many roles in the business.
In this month’s Floral Management, Chinery shares how she turned a personal crisis into a true transformation, and how her business has become a place that’s more generous, more compassionate and more successful.
