The vacant spot next to the liquor mart could’ve been a sandwich shop, a travel agency, a cell-phone distributor, or a butcher. It could’ve been anything. But three days before Valentine’s Day, it opens its doors as a flower shop, and that’s nothing short of bloody brilliant.

The morning of, I walk across the street to spend fifty bucks on a dozen pink roses, a little box of chocolates, a vase, and a teddy bear. The place is hardly put-together. Sparse shelves in the corners, milk-crate boxes used for tables, flowers propped up in paint buckets. One big refrigerator houses specialty roses with price-tags reaching eighty to a hundred bucks. The other flowers are reasonably priced. There’s a family working behind the counter arranging bouquets, working around a table strewn with ribbon and wrapping paper. For as impromptu and bare-bones as the operation seemed, I found out that the business was here to stay, that this wasn’t only a special appearance for Valentine’s.

They taught me a lesson about life.

A flower shop at any other time would’ve been a complete waste of effort. A new business faces so many challenges in today’s economy that even the idea of starting a new business is sort of a joke. But how can you avoid those challenges? When my grandmother opened a coffeeshop in Auburn almost a decade ago, we had three customers a day—if that. We made fifteen bucks at the most. And this flower shop—open for three days—is making fifty bucks from each customer, ten or fifteen customers an hour.

What they did was corner the market—if I’m using that phrase correctly. They knew that anyone within a five-block radius with a wife, girlfriend, or floral-appreciative partner would be needing flowers and chocolate. They opened in time to advertise with street-side signs. They pulled in a good-sized profit before they’d even had a sign made for their door—it looked like they were running the thing out of a garage. All it took was timing.

And that’s the lesson, isn’t it? Timing. I’m sure this wasn’t the only flower shop to open the week before Valentine’s. The trick is to be good at something that people need and know when they’re going to need it. My advice is to look into fireworks—they’re big around July. But how can this advice work for me? I’m not sure, yet. People always say that “timing is everything,” and I believe that’s true, but there’s not much I can do about that since I’m not a florist and I don’t have a holiday to exploit. Looks like I’ll keep waiting for now.

Even if I didn’t learn anything valuable from watching a new business succeed, I still made my girlfriend smile, and that was all I wanted anyway.