Friendly Rivalry Hones Competitive Edge : Relationships: Some Orange County entrepreneurs find advantages such as support and networking among their peers.

Paula Acquarulo was thrilled. After “too many years” in the fleet auto leasing business, she had decided to make a major career and lifestyle change. She bought Laguna Flower Co., a flower stand on Forest Avenue in Laguna Beach, a few steps down the block from the post office.

One reason Acquarulo was so enthused was that for an area as active as downtown Laguna, the flower stand had virtually no nearby competition.

Or so she thought. One afternoon, before escrow on her purchase had closed, Acquarulo and her husband were walking through town when they noticed a new storefront and a sign that read “The Garden Gate.” Even though the store hadn’t opened, they could tell by peering through the window that competition was on the horizon.

“The first thing that crossed my mind was ‘Oh great, flowers a block away’ ,” says Acquarulo, who lives in Fullerton. “I didn’t even have the keys yet and already I had competition I hadn’t planned on.”

When she discovered who her competition was, it only made matters worse.

The Garden Gate was being launched by Raymond Foo, who for four years had managed the very flower stand she had just purchased.

“The first thing I thought about was how much business he would take with him,” she says. “He managed this place for four years, and he knew a lot of people. I was the new kid on the block. I didn’t know a soul. I definitely raised some concerns.”

For some, the circumstances would have been enough to spark an instant rivalry. But Acquarulo says she made a conscious choice to focus on her own business rather than the competition. “I had enough to do to get things up and running without worrying about what Raymond was up to,” she says.

A block away on Ocean Avenue, Foo was going through much the same process. For several years, clients has urged him to open his own shop. Ironically, it was the sale of Laguna Flower Co. by his former boss to Acquarulo that prompted him to make his move.

“When I found out it was going to be sold, I wasn’t sure if the new owners would want to keep me on,” Foo says. “That’s when I decided it was time to open my own place.”

As it turned out, Foo was one of the first people Acquarulo met after she took over the flower stand.

“A lot of people in this business aren’t especially friendly, which has really surprised me,” Acquarulo says. “I’ve run into other local florists at the flower mart, and a few of them have been very aloof. But Raymond has always been very pleasant.”

Foo says he sees no reason not to be.

“I’ve never understood why people are so afraid to be nice to each other,” says Foo, who commutes to Laguna every morning from his home in Vista. “This is supposed to be a feel-good business. It should be fun. There’s just no reason to be snotty or to have an attitude. If you’re good, there is no competition. People will always find you. And if you take good care of them, they’ll remain loyal.”

While Foo and Acquarulo sometimes go weeks without seeing one another, Foo says he considers their relationship friendly.

“Just last week I was running short of red roses and I ran over to Paula’s to see whether she could spare a half-dozen,” he says. “Not only did she help me out, but she told me that if I came back in an hour, I could get fresh ones right from the mart.”

Dee Dee Hanson of Orange shares Acquarulo’s philosophy that connecting with the competition is not only good business, but also more fun than looking over one’s shoulder. Hanson is a professional Joan Rivers impersonator, and she says she and several of the “other Joans” have created an informal referral network for themselves.

“Frank Marino, who stars in ‘An Evening at La Cage’ in Vegas, has been very good to me,” Hanson says. “If he gets a call for a convention or a trade show and he’s booked, he refers them to me. I do the same with a couple of women in Los Angeles. You can’t get possessive. There’s plenty of work out there for all of us.”

While Hanson acknowledges that her business is a highly competitive one, she says she remembers only one incident in four years in which she was treated badly by a competitor.

“There were six of us Joans in one room, waiting to audition for a very lucrative three-day gig,” says Hanson. “I was practicing the script, and I stumbled on a word. One of the others looked over at me and said, ‘She may look like Joan, but she’s stupid!’ ”

Hanson bit her tongue.

“For a second I felt like saying, ‘Gee, I guess everything I’ve heard about you was true, bitch!’ But I kept my mouth shut, and I’m glad I did. I ended up getting the job.”

Hanson says she see no point in getting drawn into rivalries.

“What we do is very much a personality business, and friendliness is like a magnet. The better you treat people, the better they’re going to treat you.”

While Qumars Ghiass of Tustin Hills won’t go so far as to say he likes his competition, he is convinced their presence forces him to be a stronger, more creative merchant.

“Competition gets you off your butt,” says Ghiass, who owns and operates the Art of Living, a Laguna Beach gift shop specializing in unique home accessories, stationery and soaps. “Without it, you get lazy. It’s human nature.”

Ghiass says that while he enjoys a cordial relationship with several gift-shop owners in town, including two whose stores he can see through his front window, there are others he avoids.

“I’ve had run-ins with a couple of them,” he admits. “Some of them act like I’ve ripped them off if we happen to carry the same item, even if I had it first. If I stock a line of handmade soaps and lotions and it shows up in a store down the street a month later, I just start looking for another line that I like even better. And you know what? I almost always find it. So in some ways, I owe my success to my competition. They keep me on my toes.”

There are even times, says John Mearns of Graffiti Signs and Graphics in Costa Mesa, that it’s good business to join forces with your competition. Several times a year, Mearns and partner Chris Townsend unite with competitors to bid on large or complex jobs that neither business would be likely to land on its own.

“We have great working relationships with at least three of our major competitors,” says Mearns, whose company produces signage, graphics and illustrations for such clients as Planet Hollywood, Magic Mountain and the Walt Disney Company. “Those relationships come in really handy when you want to bid on a job but can’t, either because the deadline’s too tight or you’ve already got more work than you can handle.”

Mearns says that being flexible enough to work with one’s competitors is just smart business.

It’s not unusual, Mearns says, to be working with a competitor on one job while simultaneously bidding against him on another project.

“As long as everyone understands up front that all is fair in love, war and business, no one’s toes get stepped on,” Mearns says. “We all know the game, and we all know the rules.”

Not everyone, however, embraces the competition with such open arms. Two years ago this month, Ellen and Jim Bodas, owners of Everyday Flowers in Irvine, decided to expand their flower shop business by adding a coffeehouse. They invested nearly $80,000 in equipment and a major remodel of their 1,900-square-foot shop, on the corner of Culver Drive and Walnut.

“The idea of a coffeehouse was still novel,” says Ellen Bodas. “At the time there were one, maybe two others in the entire city.”

Now, Bodas says, there are at least 15--including a Starbucks Coffee Co., which is directly across the street from her shop.

“One day I went across Culver to do my banking, and the branch manager told me that Starbucks was moving in,” recalls Bodas. “My reaction? Let’s just say I wasn’t very happy. Your first thought is that they’re going to tap into your business. And in the first month or so, when they gave away a lot of free coupons, our sales did drop.”

But since the coupon flurry died down, Bodas says her business has continued to grow slowly but steadily.

So does Bodas ever sneak a peek at the competition? She says she’s only done it once.

“Whenever I’m at Polly’s Pies, I look over toward Starbucks to see how they’re doing,” she says. “But I’ve actually only gone in the store once, and that was on a day when our business was really dead. I was curious to see how they were doing. I have to admit it was kind of reassuring to see that they were just as slow as we were.”