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For years, Lorraine Pater had her eyes on the prize — making partner at KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms. 

She had interned at the company for two summers in college and joined its ranks of auditors right after graduating. She recalls spending one New Year’s Eve doing an inventory audit of diamonds — counting them, measuring them and looking at their color and clarity to ensure they passed inspection. 

“That was kind of fun,” Lorraine tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “You audit all kinds of different stuff.”

Her main task was auditing a bank’s quarterly financials for her first two years on the job. Lorraine says that she “loved” her job, but was at a crossroads after she had her first child, her daughter Brooke. She was about to get back to work after a five-week maternity leave, and was having an anniversary dinner with her husband, Todd Pater, when he asked her a difficult question: “Are you excited about going back to work next week?”

“I started crying,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to go back. I think I want to stay home with Brooke.’”

Todd had a copier business at the time that was doing well, so he said that she didn’t have to go back; they could afford for her to stay at home. 

“It was a random conversation,” Lorraine says. “After being home for five weeks with her [Brooke], I didn’t want to leave her. So we always laugh about that.”

About a year later, Lorraine had her second child, another daughter. She took a 10-year break from work to be present for her children.

Considering a franchise

When the girls went to elementary school and middle school, Lorraine found herself with a lot of time on her hands. The family was living in the Lakewood Ranch/Sarasota-Bradenton area of Florida at the time, and Lorraine began looking into buying a franchise.

“We had always been huge fans of Smoothie King,” Lorraine says. “We have a very active lifestyle, so we were drinking them every day for lunch and meal replacements.” 

The couple also had a front-row view of what the business could look like at scale. After the girls were born, they had lived in Houston, Texas, where a neighbor owned roughly 40 Smoothie King locations in the suburbs. That exposure made the franchise model feel tangible, not theoretical.

“We had been a fan of the product for so long that when it was time to look for something to do and what franchise to get into, that was definitely our top one,” Lorraine says.

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Startup costs

In 2016, Lorraine and Todd opened their first Smoothie King location. Todd, who had built and sold companies in the copier and residential trash industries, brought a long track record as an entrepreneur, and he provided the funds to get the business started. 

“He calls himself the visionary,” Lorraine says with a laugh. “I’m more of the details person.”

That first build-out required a significant investment, though quite reasonable when you compare it to today’s prices. Lorraine estimates that opening a Smoothie King from scratch 10 years ago cost around $250,000, including improvements and equipment. Now, she says, the price tag to open a new store is closer to $450,000 to $500,000 — driven up by construction expenses and higher rents.

Still, the model has worked well enough that Lorraine has continued to double down in her local market. Over time, she and Todd opened additional locations and acquired existing ones nearby, steadily building density around Lakewood Ranch and the broader Sarasota-Bradenton area. They recently purchased their 10th location and have a letter of intent (LOI) out for an 11th, all clustered close enough that operations and oversight remain manageable.

Growing pains

Growth has come with challenges. In the early days, the toughest problems were often basic staffing and backup. With only a small team and a few cross-trained employees, there wasn’t much margin when something went wrong. 

Lorraine remembers one particularly grueling period just after opening the first store, which was about an hour’s drive away. “I would get phone calls at 4:30 in the morning from an opener basically saying, ‘I can’t go open the store today. I am not feeling good,’” she says. 

With the manager unreachable at that hour, Lorraine became the safety net. 

“I would get up, get ready, drive the hour away, be there by about 6:30, open the store and work the 8-hour shift for the whole day,” she says. “There were some long days in the very beginning.”
Those experiences shaped how she built the business. Today, with 10 stores and roughly 90 employees, Lorraine has structured the company so that no single point of failure can derail operations. Each store has its own manager, and a general manager sits above them to provide an extra layer of support if a manager leaves or needs help.

Many managers started as team members and worked their way up, which has helped foster strong loyalty and culture. “Each store acts like a little family dynamic,” Lorraine says. “The manager loves to have their own little culture for their store, so we obviously encourage that.”

Her favorite part

Her accounting background has been a major asset as the operation has scaled. Lorraine still personally handles all of the bookkeeping, payroll and QuickBooks work for the business. Todd has suggested hiring a bookkeeper to lighten the load, but she has no interest in giving it up. 

“This is my favorite part,” she says. “I like all the numbers and I like them all to be put together. Everything’s got to equal a certain number at the end of the month.” 

She shares financial “scorecards” with store managers too, walking them through key metrics like cost of goods, payroll and rent as a percentage of sales. “The managers know where the numbers are that they need to be hitting,” she says. “We definitely keep them up to date on how they’re running their stores.”

That discipline has helped Lorraine build what appears to be a high-performing group of units. Although exact revenue numbers are confidential because the company is privately held, one location has surpassed $1 million in annual sales. 

Lorraine adds that the portfolio’s revenue this year is projected to be about 55% higher than last year’s. Two of her stores currently rank in the top 10% systemwide, she says.

Why the franchise

Even as the enterprise has grown more complex, the franchise model has given Lorraine what she wanted most back at that anniversary dinner: the ability to work ambitiously without sacrificing time with her family. She remains deeply involved in day-to-day operations, visiting each store at least once a week, but she’s also able to travel for her younger daughter’s beach volleyball season at USC, which recently included a tournament in Hawaii. 

“I still can do all of this because I have a good team behind me,” Lorraine says. “I can still travel. I don’t miss a game.”

For Lorraine, that balance — meaningful work, a strong team and the flexibility to show up for family milestones — has made the trade from Big Four partner track to multi-unit franchisee feel like the right move. “I wanted to have something to do to keep busy because I couldn’t imagine just sitting at home and doing nothing all day,” she says. “I love what I do.”

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Every industry has a tendency to get starry-eyed about the “new.” We’re naturally drawn to the spunky founders and the visionary outsiders who have the gall to walk into an established sector with a fresh perspective. That bold, exploring spirit is the lifeblood of progress, and real estate is not immune to the appeal of new founders who arrive with big ideas and the grit to explore them.

These entrepreneurs are essential; they provide the sparks. But if we only look toward the stage or the pitch deck to find innovation, we miss the people actually fueling the fire. While we celebrate the entrepreneurs building the tools, there is an equally vital group of innovators we often overlook: the entrepreneurs already standing on the boots-on-the-ground front lines of every building.

I call them the “hidden entrepreneurs.” They might not have the “Founder” title, and they aren’t chasing the next venture round, but they are taking the exact same kind of calculated, unseen risks for the sake of a greater reward.

Within our industry’s largest portfolios and most complex operations, there is a layer of leaders who treat innovation as a daily discipline. They are the ones taking the “big ideas” from the outside and doing the hard, gritty work of testing, implementing and refining them in the real world.

They are the visionaries who understand that a solution is only as good as the person with the courage to operationalize it across one building or a hundred. True entrepreneurship isn’t just about starting something new; it’s about the resourceful spirit required to move a massive ship forward from the inside out.

Defining the “hidden entrepreneur”

We have to stop treating “entrepreneur” as a job title and start recognizing it for what it actually is: a resourceful spirit. The word has been hijacked by the idea of the lone founder in a garage, but that’s a narrow view of a much broader reality. At its core, an entrepreneur is anyone who identifies a gap between the way things are and the way they could be, and then takes a calculated risk to bridge it. In real estate, this spirit doesn’t only live in the people who start proptech companies; it lives in the “hidden entrepreneurs” who operate buildings, manage assets and define the future of the industry.

The difference between a founder and a hidden entrepreneur is the nature of the stake. A founder risks venture capital and market rejection; an operator risks something just as tangible. When a regional property manager or VP decides to pilot a new automation system, they’re staking their professional reputation, the operational stability of a multi-million dollar asset and the daily sanity of their frontline staff. If a founder’s “beta” fails, they pivot; if an operator’s “beta” fails, a resident can’t get into their home, or a maintenance team gets buried under a broken workflow.

What sets these internal innovators apart is their perspective. Because they are on site every day, they see issues up close, like fragmented data, operational friction and resident pain points. They’re looking for solutions and tools that aren’t flashy, but that work for the people who live and work at a building. Rather than focusing on big ideas that can make a splash, they focus on building reality that can make a positive difference.

My “aha” moment

I recently had a realization while looking through this year’s Proptech Innovators of the Year list. At first glance, it appears to be a roster of talented executives and directors. But as I looked closer, I saw a map of an entirely new entrepreneurial class.

These are the “infiltrators” working inside some of the world’s most significant real estate organizations, managing assets and testing, breaking and implementing new dynamics, building-by-building. These innovators are focused on something immediate: operational excellence. They are the ones bridging the gap between a founder’s vision and a property’s reality.

The scale of this movement is staggering. Together, the leaders on this year’s list impact more than 4.5 million units and help their companies generate a collective $136 billion in revenue. When an innovator at this scale decides to pilot a new workflow or deploy a fresh tech stack, they are moving the needle for a significant portion of the country’s housing and commercial inventory. They are proving that you don’t need a “founder” title to be the person who makes change feel inevitable.

Relentless pragmatism over flashy features

To understand the impact of these internal innovators, look at how they redefine the very concept of success. While a traditional founder might celebrate a “feature launch” or a “UI refresh,” the hidden entrepreneur is focused on the durability of the result. They operate with a relentless pragmatism born from necessity. Because these leaders have to live with the technology long after the demo is over, they have developed a low tolerance for fluff.

They bypass the bells and whistles in favor of visionary outcomes like resident stability and staff retention, understanding that a solution is only successful if it solves a friction point that has been dragging down a team for years.

True innovation in real estate is about a complex synthesis of people, technology and process. These innovators view a building as a living ecosystem where every new tool must talk to the existing stack and every workflow change must account for the person on the front line.

Ultimately, this work is less about a single “big reveal” and more about a daily operational discipline. In this world, risk-taking doesn’t happen on a stage; it happens building-by-building through the resourceful execution of small, calculated improvements. By treating each building as a lab for real-world testing, these hidden entrepreneurs are proving that the most transformative change doesn’t come from a “disruptive” pitch, but from the grit required to move a massive ship forward from the inside out.

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When The Bouqs Company walked off Shark Tank without a deal in 2014, the online flower startup looked like another reality TV disappointment. Instead, the business quietly kept building, ultimately crossing $100 million in annual revenue last year by reinventing how flowers are sourced, sold and subscribed to. 

The Bouqs story starts long before the company appeared on Shark Tank. Co‑founders John Tabis and Juan Pablo “JP” Montúfar met at Notre Dame, connecting around a shared frustration with the traditional floral industry. The two founded The Bouqs in 2012 and designed the company to ship bouquets directly from farms to customers’ doors. The choice cut out middlemen and pushed against legacy models, where orders bounce from website to wholesalers to local florists. 

“Selling flowers online is not a brand-new concept, but the challenge with some of the other players in this space has always been that they are more of a wire service, so you can order on the site, but they don’t know what the inventory is of any local florist at any time,” The Bouqs CEO Kim Tobman explains in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “So what you order online might not be what you get from the local florist.”

The Bouqs set out to address that concern and make sure that what you order is what you get. If a customer loves lilies, that’s what shows up. If they want orange roses, that’s what they get. 

By the time Tabis appeared on Shark Tank in 2014, The Bouqs had already logged $700,000 in sales in its first year. The Sharks balked at his ask of $285,000 for 3% and questioned everything from margins to the name. Every Shark passed, and Tabis left without a deal. 

The exposure was ultimately good for the brand — and one Shark, Robert Herjavec, later invested in the company after recognizing its value. Herjavec reached out to The Bouqs to do his wedding flowers in 2016 and later made an undisclosed investment in the company based on his positive experience. A year later, Mark Cuban called The Bouqs the one deal he regretted not making. By 2019, The Bouqs had secured $55 million in funding and expanded to 80 employees. Today, the company has scaled to over $100 million in revenue. 

Subscription model

Tobman, 44, became the company’s CEO in September 2022, and says that one of its primary growth tactics is its subscription service. About 40% of the company’s revenue now comes from its subscription offering, which the brand deliberately designed around real customer behavior. “Subscription has been a huge part of our growth journey,” Tobman says. 

Tobman described two core audiences: Customers who want to gift a subscription to flowers starting on occasions like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day, and “power gifters” who send flowers constantly to different recipients for birthdays, promotions and life events. To serve both audiences, The Bouqs has made its subscription flexible. Subscribers can change the delivery date each month, they can change the recipient monthly and they can choose the specific bouquet each time. 

Subscriptions are priced at $48, $59 and $74 per month, with each price point corresponding to one bunch, two bunches and three bunches of flowers, respectively. The prices include year-round free shipping and do not increase over the life of the plan, allowing heavy flower buyers to lock in value while The Bouqs gains predictable, recurring revenue. 

The floral calendar is otherwise spiky: Valentine’s Day is the company’s Super Bowl. Orders surge in a compressed window, and flowers must land exactly on the promised day. “We don’t get credit when it’s early, and we definitely don’t get credit when it’s late,” Tobman says. 

The Bouqs uses that pressure as a growth moment. Marketing encourages customers to start with a holiday gift, then extend it into a monthly subscription, so someone who discovers The Bouqs in early February may still be receiving and sending bouquets in November. Tobman says the subscription service has grown “exponentially” over the past few years, becoming a central driver of the company’s overall performance. 

Brick-and-mortar stores

The next phase of The Bouqs’ growth is happening offline. In the past two years, the company has opened five brick-and-mortar stores, including locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, San Diego County and New York. The Bouqs has also begun rolling out in-store flower shops with Whole Foods Market. The goal is not just to have the brand more visible to shoppers, but also offer same-day delivery in those areas. 

Early tests show that the standalone stores have reached profitability within their first year, which “is pretty unheard of in retail,” Tobman says. 

“That’s number one,” she says. “Can we make sure that this pays for itself? The answer is yes.”

The stores also allow The Bouqs to capture demand and service more markets. “People do like to shop in person, that’s clear,” Tobman explains. “It’s a great brand-building opportunity that is also really important for us.”

Advice for CEOs

Tobman’s advice for CEOs is to lead with transparency and authenticity. She says it is easy to be an inspiring leader when things are going well, but that is not how business works. 

“A business doesn’t grow without hitting bumps in the road,” Tobman says. “And so as the CEO, I always try to make sure that I balance transparency with optimism and enthusiasm for what we do.”

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