How to Make a Million (or More!)

Christina Stembel didn't just bend the traditional business model for flower companies; she snipped it in half.

Stembel grew up on a farm in Bremen, Ind. (population 4,500), so it's tempting to say that she founded Farmgirl Flowers to get back to her roots. But the real inspiration for her business came while she was working as an event planner near San Francisco in the mid 2000s. Tasked with cutting expenses, Stembel, now 41, looked for ways to reduce the costs of floral arrangements, which she thought were overpriced and underwhelming. She started ordering directly from local growers, which led her down a rabbit hole of research into the business of flowers. She concluded that the e-commerce side of the industry was ripe for disruption because a lot of people--particularly young people--weren't satisfied with the floral arrangements available online.

"Younger consumers were purchasing far less often than previous generations, for the same reason I hated sending my mom flowers--they didn't like what was out there," she says. "You spend an hour sorting through options on websites to find the least ugly option, which shouldn't be the thing you say about flowers."

Stembel's idea: Instead of adopting the model of the big flower companies' websites, which offer everything from red roses to Asiatic lilies, she would sell only one arrangement that changes daily, based on what's in season. Stembel launched Farmgirl Flowers in 2010 with $49,000 in savings. In 2015, the company started taking orders outside the Bay Area, relying primarily on social media and word of mouth to drive traffic to its website.

Last year, annual revenues topped $23 million. Stembel now has more than 100 employees--including on-staff bicycle and car couriers who deliver locally--and plans to establish six distribution centers throughout the U.S., which will expand the business and reduce shipping costs.

The most-successful entrepreneurs scale up with an eye toward selling to a larger company, and that's what Stembel envisions for her enterprise. Right now, she's investing most of her money in the business (she pays herself $50,000 a year and lives in a one-bedroom apartment with her husband, Neil) so she can expand as quickly as possible over the next five years or so. At that point, she'd like to sell the company and use the proceeds, along with everything she's learned, to launch another venture.

Taking a great idea or a special skill and parlaying it into a successful business is only one route to riches. Among the people featured here, one couple earned their first million by buying rental properties, and another amassed seven figures--and retired early--through