Owens has been an entrepreneur his entire life and learned a spectacular lesson about business when he was quite young. As a boy, Owens lived in Montana near a pond that was home to hundreds of frogs. He decided he would make some money selling frogs to other kids in the neighborhood. He hiked back and forth between his yard—in which was a tub, awaiting its fate after a remodeling project, covered with a screen door—and the pond, collecting frogs (a couple hundred or so, Owens recalls) to sell and storing them in the tub.

It soon came to his attention that there was no demand for his frogs as the other kids in the neighborhood had the exact same access to free frogs in the pond. While his fledgling frog business didn’t make it, he did learn a lesson that’s stuck with him: “If you go into business, start with the market study. Don’t get the frogs first,” Owens laughs.

For those who think flowers are easy—think again. Like any small business, it’s full of challenges and obstacles, only with the added pressure of dealing with people in high emotional states as they plan weddings, funerals, births, or situations calling for a “thank you” or “I’m sorry.” Fortunately, Chanda and Randy’s experiences as children taught them how the good follows the hard.

Chanda’s parents owned the shop from 1980 to 1991, and she worked there as a kid. “I think my dad fired me at least a dozen times for different reasons,” she laughs. “As girls, we were kind of self-raising because [our parents] were so busy with so much work. My dad was working two jobs to be able to pay for it, and it was hard.”

Rock recalls that he officially entered the workforce at the age of twelve, hauling boxes for the local community store. “It was exciting for me because I had the chance to provide for my grandparents, who raised me. It was gratifying to see my grandmother’s face when I gave her what I had—although it wasn’t much.”

He continues, “I’ve always told people, if you ever want to learn about business, run the only store in your community… and have one of your best friends or family members come in and say they want to go over [their charge limit], whether it’s for food or something they really need, and you have to say no because you know that you’ve got to bring in the bottom line to be able to purchase the next order for the store… Those were pretty educational times for me, and I was called quite a few different names,” he laughs. “But you learn that you have to make tough decisions.”

Allen grew up in the family business and says his dad “had a way of making even the most tedious and disagreeable chores seem like fun… the working part was almost like play. We loved being around the shipyard.” He illustrates just how much with this story: “One time my sister, Kipper, had an accident where she got her hair caught in a planer. She was able to get the machine stopped but not before it separated her scalp. She ended up with three stitches. Well, I was really young and started yelling “I told you! Now we won’t be able to go to the shop anymore! You ruined everything!” And I was right—at least for a bit. For what ended up being less than three days, my mom didn’t allow us to go anywhere near the shipyard. But after that short amount of time, she couldn’t take the begging anymore, and she let us go with dad to put a boat in the water.”