Paul Abugattas has signed the books, run the stores, unloaded the containers, and stood outside a crime scene at 24 wondering what on earth to say to the SWAT team. He grew up outside Washington DC, didn't realize until he was 18 that he wasn't a US citizen, and spent the next three decades building a retail career that ran from a suburban drug store counter to running divisions of national brands. By the time he landed in Kansas City, he'd learned that the job is almost always the people.
What You'll Hear
- Why Paul didn't realize he wasn't a US citizen until he registered for the draft at 18
- What the naturalization process actually looked like across DC, Houston, LA, Miami, and rural Virginia
- Getting the keys to a drug store as a teenager and being treated like an adult by a manager who explained why
- Reading his first real profit and loss statement at 19 or 20 and what clicked
- The Norman Schwarzkopf book signing that ended with a bomb threat and a fire truck
- A homicide at one of his stores and the lesson Paul wishes he had learned sooner about showing up for his people
- How a 350,000 square foot distribution operation kept shipping through COVID without a playbook
- What Colonial Gardens is becoming on 80 acres in Kansas City, and where agentic commerce fits into the future of retail
An 18 year old realization about citizenship
Paul was born in Peru by accident of timing. His parents met as first-generation immigrants in the Peruvian community in Washington DC, had their first son in the US, then his mother flew home to see her ailing father while pregnant and didn't make it back in time. Paul came back to the US around six months old and grew up in Northern Virginia, just across the river from DC in Arlington.
He went to grade school. He went to high school. He assumed, the way a kid assumes, that he was an American like everyone around him. Then he turned 18, started applying to colleges, and tried to register for the draft. His parents sat him down and explained that actually, no, he needed to take care of something first. He was a naturalized resident, not a citizen, and the paperwork was his to figure out.
The process, he tells Sam, was bureaucratic in the kindest reading and actively punishing in the real one. His mother helped him assemble medical records and school cards going back to childhood. Every time his career moved, Washington DC to Houston to Los Angeles to Miami and back to Virginia, the file had to move with him. He re-upped a green card once and the card arrived with his name and somebody else's photograph. He got stubborn. He got angry. He set it down for years.
He eventually finished the naturalization process in Madison, Virginia, a small town north of Charlottesville. The immigration office there wasn't Los Angeles or Houston. The staff were helpful. He took the test, answered the questions, got sworn in. What pushed him across the finish line in the end wasn't a principle. It was his dad, and the desire to travel to Peru with him before they ran out of years to do it.
Keys to the store, and someone who told him why
Paul started working in retail at 16, part-time at a drug store in Arlington. He is still in retail. He has never left the industry since. What he names as the turning point isn't the hours or the responsibility, although those came. It's that the person running the store treated him like an adult.
When Paul asked why a process worked a certain way, the manager stopped and actually explained it. When a department was short a person, Paul ended up behind the pharmacy counter or unloading a truck or running the photo counter. He probably, he admits, had no business being in some of those roles at his age. But the trust changed what he paid attention to. He asked more questions. He stayed later. He ran into that manager years later and told him, for the record, that the way he'd been treated had shaped the rest of his career.
That pattern repeated when he moved to Crown Books, the third-largest US book chain at the time. The district manager who oversaw the McLean store walked a 19 or 20 year old Paul through a real profit and loss statement, line by line. She explained why the same expense ratio could be graded differently in two cities because of real estate costs or labor structure. She took him to meetings where every other store manager was twenty or thirty years older.
It clicked. The PNL became, in his words, the ultimate report card. And the habit of sharing it downward, with part-timers, buyers, store managers, stuck with him. He has always tried to repay, in transparency, what was given to him in patience.
A bomb threat, a fire truck, and a class act
Crown Books ran celebrity signings. Paul was usually the young guy on the floor trying to keep a line moving and a famous author comfortable. One of those signings was Norman Schwarzkopf, not long after the Iraq War. The line wrapped around the parking lot. Somewhere in the middle of it, someone called in a bomb threat.
Secret Service grabbed Paul and walked him back to the signing table. They explained to the general what was happening. Schwarzkopf put his pen down, looked at Paul, and asked what they were going to do. Paul had no answer. He was 20-something and in shock. The general kept looking at him. When Paul gave him nothing, Schwarzkopf took the room. No one was going to rain on his parade. They would finish the signing outside.
The fire chief pulled up. His trucks parked in the middle of the lot. Spotlights angled down on a folding table. Staff reversed the line so nobody lost their place, rolled shopping carts of books out of the store, and kept taking money. Schwarzkopf signed books in front of the fire engines until the line was done.
What stayed with Paul wasn't the stunt. It was the question Schwarzkopf asked him. He thinks, looking back, the general didn't need the answer. He was taking the measure of the kid in charge and, when the kid didn't fill the room with a decision, filling it himself. It's the kind of moment Paul has come back to for thirty years. Real leadership, he says, doesn't wait for someone else to move.
He tells other signing stories in the same register. Jimmy Carter sharing a packed lunch with the staff. Jay Leno driving his limo to a volunteer fire station after the event to hand-deliver signed books to crew members who'd been called out of line. Class act, Paul calls it. He thinks it's a phrase worth bringing back.
The night a store became a crime scene, and what showing up really means
Not long after Paul moved to Los Angeles to help open larger-format stores, a Saturday night dinner with corporate visitors was interrupted by a 911 page. There had been a homicide at one of his stores. He drove across the city, got there to find the place surrounded by police tape, and stood off to the side while SWAT interviewed his staff. Nobody thought the 23 or 24 year old was in charge. The optics, he agrees, did not argue in his favor.
A manager had been shot during a shift change. The staff who survived got everyone else out of the store.
Paul stayed late into the night. Forensics worked the scene. A hazmat crew he had never known existed arrived to handle the cleanup.
What he regrets, more than anything else in his career, is how he handled his own people that night. He was told to stand aside. He did. He assumed the staff knew he cared. They probably didn't. The lesson he took out of it, and later out of a store fire in Virginia where firefighters were briefly unaccounted for, is plain. Don't assume anyone knows you care. Tell them. Be present. Call the associates. Call the families. Show up physically at the point of the spear. That single habit, he says, is the job.
From Plough and Hearth to Colonial Gardens, and where retail goes next
Paul spent two decades at Plough and Hearth, a direct-to-consumer home and garden brand headquartered in Madison, Virginia. He helped design the first physical stores under the founder, navigated a sale to Evergreen Enterprises during the 2008 recession, and ran three legs of the operation at once during COVID: a call center moved to home offices overnight, a 350,000 square foot distribution center that couldn't stop shipping, and a store network that had to keep associates showing up in person while everyone else worked remote. He talks about the class divide that created inside a single building, with empty office parking lots and full warehouse lots, and what it took from the leadership team to keep morale intact. The CEO and the owners walked the floor. Paul unloaded containers alongside the crew. Pizza parties, he notes, are not the same thing as presence.
When the company retrenched to its wholesale business coming out of COVID, Paul asked to be the one to close the stores he had opened. He negotiated out of leases, gave staff notice in advance, and helped people find the next job. That took a few years. When the last store closed, he started looking for his next chapter and landed at DCA Outdoor in Kansas City in November 2022.
He now runs Colonial Gardens, an independent garden center DCA acquired in 2016 and has been transforming into an agritourism and experiential destination. Eighty acres across two sides of the road. Orchards of apples, peaches, and apricots. Brambles for pick-your-own raspberries and blackberries. A working livestock operation, a music stage, a million-dollar cafe, a curated market stocked with Missouri and Kansas makers. Colonial Gardens was named a top 100 independent garden center for the second year in a row the week before this conversation.
He also talks, with genuine curiosity, about agentic commerce. Not just the upsell at checkout, but AI systems that learn a customer across platforms, surface products before the customer searches, and collapse the friction of buying to near zero. He calls it fascinating and scary. His posture toward it is the same one he's kept his whole career. Always be curious. Invest in yourself. Don't be a cynic.
About Paul Abugattas
Paul Abugattas runs divisions at DCA Outdoor in Kansas City, including Colonial Gardens, an 80-acre independent garden center and agritourism destination. He has spent his career in retail, with twenty years at Plough and Hearth and earlier leadership roles at Crown Books and Mars Music. Born in Peru and raised in Northern Virginia, he joined DCA in November 2022. Colonial Gardens