Interview III

For this interview, I chose my mother, Amanda Rodriguez, because she is an accountant who handles the files on quality and shipments and directly works for Mr. Mellano, the sole owner

1) From what you've seen, what is the best thing that the company does administratively?
2) What is the worse?

Well really the company doesn't sell all the flowers, it just owns the warehouses. What we do is we rent out those spaces to sellers but we still control a large part of all the business around here but over the past few years more and more private sellterss have setting up shops on the outside, taking away business and we cant do anything about them. Though through time the company has been purchasing more and more growing farms so there is no middle man when it comes from the field to what we sell

3) How is accounting for a Flower company different than other businesses?

Flowers can die, we have a budget with the money and we have budget on time, once the flowers are in the market, they are there until they sell, sometimes we have to be verrry specific about orders because we lose money whenever flowers are thrown out

4) On the floor, what determine which sellers make the best sales statistically?

I'm not really sure but I guess I would have to say its the one's with the best customer service because alot of the businesses sell the same types of flowers, so really its up to appealing to passing people or actually having long-time buyers like florists

5) How do you handle the imported shipments from places like Hawaii, Australia, Isreal, etc. ?

Well they are freezed and then shipped here, we get flowers from all over and usually a company from one those countries sells them to us and we just get them here into the market. I don't do the paperwork for those

6) How does the market fluctuate in pricing?

Well sometimes the farmers have disasters or things just go wrong and no one gets a certain type of flower so thats when you have an increase in the price, but because flowers are grown everywhere, some businesses may have contracts somewhere else which means they still get that specific kind of flower

7) What is Mellano & Co. doing to expand its business?

Like I said, they are buy more and more acres up north in California so they dont have to pay full pricing as often

8) Who are your main customers?

Florists and Wedding Planners...their jobs require massive amounts of flowers so they buy it wholesale from us

9) How does time in shipping affect how the flowers are when they are seen in the market?

Ones that are grown in California last a couple days longer than the imported ones, but other than that it doesn't really make a difference, they are dried out before we freeze them so they don't die while coming here

10) What do you do specifically to help support the business?

 I crunch the numbers on all the sales and I make sure people are getting the shipments they ordered