Bryan Burkhart and the business of showing up again

Bryan Burkhart and Sonu Panda took a ZipCar around Manhattan to work out how flower deliveries might scale. There are grander settings for a business education. There are probably fewer parking problems. The two co-founders were learning H.Bloom from the ground up: buying at the flower market, meeting prospective employees and figuring out how an attractive arrangement could become a repeatable service.

The rented car is a useful place to begin with Burkhart. His career includes enterprise software, a floral subscription company and, today, Worksmith, a business serving retail operators. The products have changed. The recurring puzzle is recognizable: a customer needs something done, other people must do it, and the whole arrangement has to work again after the first successful demonstration.

That makes for a less ornamental story than the flowers suggest. A bouquet can survive on charm for a few days. A company needs a plan for the following week.

Before the bouquet, a sales career

Burkhart studied entrepreneurial management at Wharton and began his career at Trilogy Software in Austin. Later, at Callidus Software, he became senior vice president of global sales, responsible for revenue and the company’s sales operations around the world. He came to entrepreneurship with experience persuading businesses to buy software and overseeing the organization behind those sales.

Those are useful credentials for starting a company. They still leave some practical gaps when the new inventory needs water. H.Bloom, which he co-founded with Panda and launched in 2010, put him into a trade where the product could deteriorate while the business was deciding how to sell it.

The attraction was economic. Flower shops had to support a place customers could visit and stock arrangements before knowing who would buy them. Burkhart approached the trade with questions about how purchasing, orders and delivery might be organized differently. The familiar pleasure of fresh flowers came with an unfamiliar invitation: consider the schedule behind them.

An appointment with next Tuesday

H.Bloom offered scheduled flowers for homes and businesses. Customers could choose a delivery rhythm; the company could buy against anticipated orders. Its early pitch paired convenience with lower overhead. The shop window gave way to an online relationship, and the next bouquet had a customer before it had a doorstep.

It was an appealing proposition for someone who liked flowers but disliked remembering to buy them. In 2011, the service was already being compared with Netflix, then widely associated with subscriptions and deliveries. Members could suspend orders while traveling. The arrangement was meant to fit into an ordinary calendar, including the weeks when nobody would be home to admire it.

An early customer account captures the household version of that promise. Investor and blogger Joanne Wilson tried the service after Burkhart contacted her. The flowers arrived ready for their vase; the next delivery would fit the same vessel. The detail is modest and revealing. Reusing a vase turns a decorative purchase into a small, established routine. The customer has less arranging to do; the company has another reason to return.

For corporate customers, the recurring setting was already there: a reception area, restaurant or shop that needed to look ready for visitors. H.Bloom eventually developed an offering that still includes account executives and local floral partners. The business Burkhart helped start has continued under different ownership. Its history also keeps the word “subscription” in proportion. A recurring order establishes an obligation. Someone still has to fulfill it.

Two founders, two calendars

As H.Bloom developed, the founders divided their work. Panda took operations; Burkhart concentrated on sales, marketing and investor relationships. “We have a clear division of labor,” Burkhart explained. That division reflected an honest discussion about what each person was suited to do.

Expansion exposed a weakness in the arrangement. Panda’s attention was on New York while Burkhart was working on Washington. They were doing their respective jobs, yet their conversations became less frequent. Their response was to reserve time together each week, over a meal or whenever they could meet.

The episode gives the partnership a human scale. Roles can be assigned in a document. A shared understanding needs maintenance. Two founders can become very efficient at pursuing slightly different versions of the same company, especially when both are busy enough to mistake activity for agreement.

Burkhart’s willingness to describe that friction is useful. The rented-car phase had made communication easy because the work happened together. More locations required a deliberate replacement for that proximity. Even the people running a subscription company needed to put a recurring appointment on the calendar.

A recurring order establishes an obligation. Someone still has to fulfill it.The work behind the flowers

You cannot download a city manager

H.Bloom’s expansion also needed people who could run local operations. In 2011, the company launched SEED, short for Startup Education and Entrepreneurial Development. Participants spent six months in workshops, shadowing managers and rotating through the operation, with pay and benefits.

By February 2013, five people had graduated and two were participating. One graduate had opened the Dallas market. The program became a finalist in ERE’s onboarding awards that year. The distinction was finalist, and the underlying idea was practical: expansion required people who knew what they were being asked to run.

Burkhart also wrote about welcoming new employees. His discussion of onboarding drew attention to the details of a person’s first encounter with a workplace: preparation, useful information and the sense that somebody expected them. The subject belongs comfortably beside delivery planning. In both cases, an organization decides whether arrival will feel considered or improvised.

A separate glimpse of his working connections comes from the University of Texas business community. Michaela Lindsay described approaching him after a Venture Fellows talk; the connection led to a role at Worksmith. The anecdote is a reminder that a company’s next relationship can begin after the formal presentation has ended, when someone simply walks over to speak.

The rest of the boutique

Worksmith began in 2015. Burkhart has traced its inspiration to a conversation with an H.Bloom customer, a luxury coffee retailer. The executive described the difficulty of coordinating many local providers across boutiques. Repairs, cleaning and other jobs generated scheduling problems and invoices. Burkhart recognized an opportunity to apply what he had learned about organizing services to a wider set of recurring needs.

The chronology matters. Worksmith’s founding preceded H.Bloom’s documented 2016 acquisition by Tenth Avenue Commerce. These were overlapping chapters in his career, rather than a tidy sequence in which one business ended and the next immediately began.

Worksmith combines software, service providers and account management. Its facilities offering covers the process around a job: finding a vendor, scheduling work, following its progress and dealing with billing. The current services also include floral and décor programs. Flowers remain in the picture, alongside considerably less photogenic responsibilities.

There is a good business question hiding in that progression. If a customer trusts you with one recurring service, what other coordination work consumes their day? The answer may be adjacent to the original product without resembling it very much. A flower delivery and a maintenance request look different on a receipt. Both ask a retailer to trust that another person will arrive and do the work.

The building and the people inside it

In June 2025, Worksmith announced its acquisition of Progress Retail, adding a business focused on retail operations and workforce learning. The proposed combination brought training, tasks and employee communication alongside facilities and service management. Ray Riley, Progress Retail’s CEO, joined Worksmith while continuing to lead that business.

In April 2026, Worksmith announced that Leap would deploy the full workforce suite across its network of more than 100 stores. The current Worksmith offering uses the names Workplace and Workforce. One side concerns the physical setting and the services it needs; the other concerns the staff and the work they need to coordinate.

That broadening has a familiar risk for any software business: bringing more functions together also creates more work to make them useful together. The acquisition describes a direction. The everyday test happens in stores, among people trying to finish jobs, answer questions and serve customers. A unified platform earns its keep through those ordinary encounters.

In his own public account of the combined business, Burkhart has emphasized the gaps between separate tools. The concern is consistent with his earlier career: the customer experiences one shop, however many systems and service providers are involved in preparing it.

A repeat engagement

Burkhart’s public entrepreneurial advice includes the brisk phrase “Rhino it!” He draws it from Paul Johnson’s Rhino Principle, using the animal as an image of persistence. It is an unexpectedly muscular mascot for a career that includes bouquets.

The more telling continuity is quieter. He keeps returning to work that must happen again, performed by people whose reliability becomes part of somebody else’s business. At H.Bloom, that work could be seen in a vase. At Worksmith, much of it disappears into the welcome a customer feels when a shop is ready. The achievement is easy to walk past. That is part of the job.