Twelve: An Opportunity for an Office and Winning an Award

1994

In August of 1992, less than a year after we added two foliage houses and dismantled the original cactus house, the neighbor on the other side of the “little house” came to see me. Her name was Sherrill and she asked me to buy her property. I wasn’t prepared for this. I was flabbergasted! How would a third piece of property, another commercially zoned lot with a small house and a deep back yard benefit Cactus & Tropicals? Why take on the extra pressure?

I had to ask myself, am I running my business or is it running me? I was never good at business planning, but I was clearly developing a modus operandi: the through-line seemed to be “leap before you look.” Taking stock of Cactus & Tropicals current assets, I came up with two lots (one in the city and one in the county), four connected greenhouses, one gift shop, eight parking stalls, and a small house that was more office than home. Each piece was born out of budget necessity or no budget at all. Each piece was critical to the whole—yet the whole didn’t quite mesh. We still had too many doors and not enough parking stalls.

My MO seemed to include a phase of destruction. Nothing new built unless something was destroyed. With that in mind, Sherrill’s house seemed like the perfect place to move the office, and the “little house,” mothership of the dream, could become a parking lot (which was at least one person’s definition of paradise). The new parking stalls would join the batch gained by disappearing Phranques Gallery, with the forty-eight-foot-high billboard (mine for seven more years) in between.

This was not a financial DIY project; this project required input from a bank. Asking for a bank loan at this moment in time was a little weird, too, because the Utah Association of Women Business Owners had just held Bankers Roundtables where we discussed how difficult it was for us to get bank loans! It made sense to go to the same bank that carried my combined Phranques Gallery and “little house” mortgage. Maybe they’d just crank open the coffers and roll this third property into

the same loan. I knew this particular locally owned bank had been purchased by a statewide bank, but I didn’t know the personnel had changed as well. Richard Gray was gone, so I worked with a new banker. I brought him up to speed on my loan history, then told him about the new opportunity presenting itself to Cactus & Tropicals. I invited him over.

He came on a good day. The eight-space parking lot was full and a semi-trailer full of house plants from Florida was backed into the driveway. I showed him The Garden Wall first, explaining how it was once a chinchilla farm. His eyebrows arched in surprise; I couldn’t tell if he was baffled or bemused. We walked through the greenhouses and I pointed out the two new (self-funded) bays. I explained how our Interior Plant Sales and Service program had boosted our income.

Next I showed him our new opportunity. I led him to the front yard of the “little house” and pointed over to Sherrill’s house—the one I hoped to buy and renovate into office space. I told him of the critical need to demolish the “little house” like we had demolished Phranques Gallery, to add more parking. The banker was underwhelmed and told me he’d get back to me.

A week or so passed before he called to turn me down. He said he couldn’t loan money on property that would be demolished. He also told me that Sherrill had several liens against her property that would be difficult to clear up. He reminded me I only had four years into my current loan. “Wait a few years and try again,” he said.

When my loan application to buy Sherrill’s property was denied, I went in search of Richard Gray. With a couple of phone calls to friends in the Utah Association of Women Business Owners, I had his number. He came out the next day. What a fantastic human being! He was so positive, and impressed with The Garden Wall and the parking lot he’d financed. (He didn’t have to park at the 7-Eleven.)

“Good job,” I told him. We laughed.

He immediately saw the benefit of making Sherrill’s house an office and replacing the “little house” with more parking. I told Richard the bad news about the liens on Sherrill’s property and my concern that her mortgage might be under threat of foreclosure.

He said, “Then we better act fast.”

Richard was an expert in SBA loans, so that’s the way we’d set out.

The mission of the Small Business Administration, an independent agency of the U.S. government, initiated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, is to assist small businesses—to help them stay in the game. They offer a variety of programs from counseling to financial classes to loan guarantees. In order to get an SBA loan, the process begins with a bank. If the bank likes the prospect, it takes the loan to the SBA for approval. The SBA doesn’t loan money directly, but if the borrower qualifies, it will guarantee the loan, taking the risk away from the bank. SBA loans have a higher than 90% success rate, but getting approval is not easy. It requires pages and pages of paperwork and weeks of waiting.

The opportunity before me had a past due date stamped on it. Sherrill couldn’t wait, and therefore I couldn’t wait. Richard appreciated this, and even though it seemed to take forever, he moved through the process as fast as he could. With my commitment to purchase her property, Sherrill was able to hold off her debtors. In early November 1992, Richard called to tell me the liens would be settled and the loan paperwork was complete. He invited me to come to his office and sign all the dotted lines.

It sounds cruel. I was a homewrecker, knocking down unwanted buildings without exception. If they stood in the way of progress, they were reduced to rubble and hauled off. I wasn’t heartless. I was sad about losing the “little house.” I had such happy memories of buying it, parking across the street at the 7-Eleven, trying to remember if it had a bathroom or a closet in the bedroom. Nevertheless, as soon as the ground thawed, the bulldozer thundered in. As excited as I was about what we would gain from its disappearance—visibility from the street and increased parking—I couldn’t stick around to watch. After all, along with everyone else who worked at Cactus & Tropicals, I’d lived there for over ten years. I headed for the canyon.

In October 1992, I was one of six women to receive the annual YWCA Women of Achievement Award. I was surprised and thrilled. The guest speaker at the award luncheon was Shirley Chisholm! The first black woman elected to the House of Representatives. Winning her seat by double digits, her campaign slogan was “Unbought and Unbossed.” In 1972, she’d run for president of the United States.

Shirley Chisholm was a determined renegade in pursuit of justice, but she wanted her activism to come from within the political system, not from the streets. She was more than an inspiration. She was a true role model for the kind of person I wanted to be—kind and caring, yes, but more, someone who fully appreciated each person’s worth and individuality. Shirley is one of the people dismissed or forgotten by history. She was an early warrior in the fight for civil rights, for both blacks and women. We stand on her shoulders.

In January 1993, I was elected President of the Utah Association of Women Business Owners.