How a Tech Marketer Bought a Flower Shop After Corporate Layoffs

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“Wait for the glass slipper. It will come.”

Meet Krista.

Krista Sohmer owns Poppy and Pine, a flower and retail shop outside Denver.

The shop sits inside a marketplace built in an old airplane manufacturing warehouse. Big space, lots of foot traffic, and flowers where the fuselages used to be.

Krista has spent over 12 years in tech marketing, and for most of that time, it felt stable. Then she watched friends get laid off one after the other over the last 5 years. It eventually hit her too.

“And I went through a layoff at my last company and that really shook me. And so being an owner, it feels like I am more stable in a sense of like, well, it's not replacing my salary. It's at least a little bit of something that I can control more I can fall back on.”

A few friends started talking about buying businesses, and she got curious. So on her birthday weekend, she gave herself a gift: a ticket to one of Codie's virtual events.

Something clicked.

She joined the community, took the group calls, built a deal box, and started showing up to meetings.

Then she gave herself a year to find the right business.

Some months, she made peace with missing that deadline. She evaluated “everything under the sun,” and sent 4 or 5 LOIs. She went down the franchise rabbit hole and climbed back out, finally closing on Poppy and Pine, her flower shop, on July 1st of this year.

Here's what she learned along the way.

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Krista kept running into the same issue.

She planned to use an SBA loan, and she needed to keep her salary. So the business couldn't need her full time.

That ruled out most of what she looked at.

“A lot of what I was seeing and evaluating was like, no, this would take, like, everything. I would have to fully step into it.”

Frustrating in the moment, but ultimately useful. Every business that needed a full-time owner got cut fast, which left her room to go deep on the few that fit.

Poppy and Pine fit. The previous owner lived in Florida and only spent about 5 hours a week on the business, mostly taxes and payroll. Employees handled the day-to-day, and they still do.

The lesson: Write down what you can't change before you open a single listing. Your hours, your loan, your need for a paycheck. Those limits make your yes clearer.

HVAC gets a lot of love in our world, and for good reason.

Krista even found a promising one early on. The numbers looked good, but there was a problem…

“It just wasn't sitting well. Like, I wasn't that excited about HVAC. I understand they're lucrative, but I don't know anything about that.”

Franchises felt off too. She looked hard at opening one in Denver, but it meant starting from 0 and stepping away from her job. And it never felt like hers.

“They sell it like you own it, but it didn't feel like yours.”

Krista calls herself “a fairly creative person at the end of the day.” A flower shop was something she could really make her own.

The lesson: Run the numbers first, then ask yourself if you'd be proud to unlock that door every morning. You need both answers to be yes.

Krista sent her LOI on Poppy and Pine fast, and the broker responded in kind. Another buyer had an all-cash offer, so the seller wasn’t interested initially.

“I was really heartbroken.”

So she stepped back. She paused her search for a couple of weeks to reset.

And that’s when the cash offer fell through. Before the broker put the shop back on the market, though, he called Krista.

Why her? She moved quickly, she showed real enthusiasm, and she read the seller right. The owner had built the shop from the ground up and cared deeply about who took it next, so Krista made her pitch about stewardship, too.

It helped that the story fit. The owner named the shop for the California poppies she grew up with and the Colorado pines where she's raising her kids. Krista made the same move, California to Colorado.

“There was never a point where I was like, oh my God, I'm making the wrong decision.”

The lesson: When a seller built the thing from scratch, price isn't the only thing they're weighing. Show up fast, show up sincere, and leave the door open even after you hear no.

An absentee owner keeps the lights on, but growth takes more.

Over the last couple of years, the shop leaned on its retail side for revenue. Meanwhile, the floral side drifted, because floral takes marketing. After all, people have to know you do it.

That gap looked a lot like a Krista-shaped hole.

“My background's marketing. And so I knew that that was my strength that I could bring to the table.”

She built a social media presence from scratch, she rebuilt the website, and she started customer email campaigns and community partnerships, with holiday workshops on the calendar.

Now, the shop even has parties and small elopements coming up, too.

It hasn't all been smooth. There's more to do than she expected, plus old tech that needs updating.

But her tech background helps there, and she’s confident she can handle the next steps.

The lesson: Look for a business that's weak exactly where you're strong. Your skills do the most good in a place that's missing them.

For a while, buying a business felt like a second job.

Nights and weekends went to deal boxes, calls, and LOIs. Then she closed, and those same hours moved over to the shop.

“It kind of was a good introduction to ownership. I got like a good understanding of, okay, this is probably about the hours that I'm going to be able to dedicate towards something else outside of my work.”

The search taught her something else, too.

“I already knew I was somewhat resilient, but I think I learned just exactly how resilient I actually am.”

The lesson: Pay attention to the hours you can sustain while you search. That's your best preview of what you can give the business once you own it.

Krista was looking for something already successful, because she knew buying something that made money would be better than starting from scratch.

But finding that kind of business can take time…

Which is why we recommend using BizScout to make your search more efficient.

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Krista picks up the occasional shift when an employee takes vacation.

That's when people tell her the shop is cute. That it brightens their day. That they come in just to look at the flowers.

Even the sympathy arrangements carry weight for her. When somebody is hurting, her shop gets to help say something that's hard to say.

“It resonates with my soul in a way that my day job does not.”

Poppy and Pine doesn't replace her tech salary (yet), but that was never the point. The point is ownership. After a layoff showed her how fast a paycheck can disappear, she wanted something she could control.

“It's at least a little bit of something that I can control more. I can fall back on.”

For 12 years, her work lived on someone else's org chart. Now some of it lives in an old airplane factory outside Denver, making strangers smile.

Her advice for you, if you're still searching:

“Wait for the glass slipper. It will come. It might be unlikely, or you might not expect when it's coming. But truly, don't try to make something fit that's not going to fit.”

- Team Contrarian

P.S. Codie here…

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