Florist business tips on this blog are helpful little nuggets of wisdom that you can digest in less than 5 minutes. I’m excited about starting this weekly series and want to welcome you to my first Tip Tuesday video flower friends!
Here’s my invitation to you. Let’s geek out on florist business tips together.
I’ve learned so many florist business tips and tricks over my 15-year floral design career and tons more from many of you over the last 6 months since the launch of EveryStem. This Tip Tuesday series is a great way for all of us to share our time and money saving hacks. So, if you have a tip you’d like to share, please send it my way. I’d love to hear from you.
Today, I want to talk about how to price your flowers with the future in mind.
So many of us feel a tinge of uncomfortableness when we send our clients a price quote or proposal that is more than what we’d personally spend on flowers. Some of the best florist business tips I’ve ever received are centered around understanding that this feeling is real. Feeling all the feels. Then, doing it anyway. Go ahead and price your floral designs based on the client’s wants and not your own.
As my very wise friend Alison Ellis, florist coach and owner of Real Flower Business, says, “It is not our job to make the flowers affordable. It is our job to price our work accurately and leave the decision to our customer.”
Wow, don’t you just love that? Floral design prices are a transaction not a feeling.
Here is the formula.
Flower costs + supplies + expenses + a healthy profit = your price
It’s so important to see that your feelings can prevent you from looking at your pricing as a straight forward transaction.
Feel the fear and do it anyway! EveryStem can help you to push past this stage in your business by acting as your flower price bodyguard. This simple to use program allows you to establish your markup, estimate future prices, and price based on the numbers.
Let’s take a wedding 6 months to a year in the future as our example for this week.
Click Play!
Predicting the future is not an option. So, you can use all the information available to you to make the most educated guess when it comes to price. Estimating on the high-end of wholesale price can afford you some wiggle room with your profit margin. Pushing past the fear of your designs not being affordable will allow you to wow your clients with your designs when the event day finally arrives.
Pricing your floral designs too low creates several problems down the road.
Here are a few issues that may come your way if you are not pricing with the future in mind.
Prevents you from buying enough product to wow the client on event day or forces you to overbuy because you are afraid you won’t have enough if you stick to the numbers.
Creates added stress as you try to cut corners in other places to justify the amount of money you spend on flowers to create the look you promised your client.
Hurts your profit margin and puts you in position to earn less money while doing more work and feeling stress.
So, play it smart and price with the future in mind going forward. A system like EveryStem can simplify this as you can see in the video above. It will show you exactly what your profit margin is and give you the power to adjust the prices quickly and easily!
Do you want to learn more about some of the top profit pitfalls you may have fallen into?
I’ve got some great florist business tips for you in that post too! Check it out here.
If you found this post useful be sure to join our email list so you don’t miss out on any of our future videos!
Until next time,
LuAnn
You got this! Get out there and price your floral designs for a healthy profit. I’m rooting for you!
It’s Cyber Monday and I can’t think of a better time to talk about how to use florist software to make more money in your floral design business.
Are you keeping track of what works well for your business?
Knowing which designs and events are profitable for your business empowers you to do more of what works well.
Let’s be real. If you are not making as much money as you’d like, a lack of systems is probably part of your problem. How can you improve what you don’t track?
This is where learning how to use florist software to make more money comes into play in your business.
So many floral mentors in our industry talk about how important it is to stay on budget and keep profitability in mind while teaching the creative side of floristry. However, there is little real talk about how to achieve these tough tasks without taking up hours of your time or ending in frustration and disappointment.
You are in creative control of your business and by learning how to use florist software to make more money you’ll be able to finally take financial control of your business too!
Beautiful designs can be profitable too with the help of EveryStem florist software: Image by Lindsey Thorne
There are 3 key elements I want to cover about how to use florist software to make more money.
Let’s dig in!
First, track your wholesale prices and your retail prices to build a business with healthy profits.
You work hard and this piece of floral design, the flower math part, is how you make money. A profitable business will not just magically happen if you gloss over the wholesale and retail prices of your designs. Building a habit of quickly logging into EveryStem to price your work will help you to build muscle memory of how much you need to charge to achieve your profit goals. It’s an amazing training tool for you and your team while keeping you accountable at the same time. Our tendency to underprice our work is something we all must overcome to be profitable.
Florist software that shifts your mindset over time by reinforcing a profit first mindset is a game changer!
I know it can feel overwhelming to price your floral designs. That’s why I built EveryStem florist software.
It does all the flower math for you. You simply enter your wholesale prices, build your flower recipe, and the software will let you know if you are hitting your profit goals!
Whether you want to grow your business and expand into new niches of design or stay small and focus on one event at a time, you’ll be able to drive your business in any direction you choose with confidence.
Second, learning how to use florist software will save you hours of time.
We’ve all heard the phrase; work smarter, not harder.
How does this phrase sit with you?
If you feel like pricing your work, creating recipes, and ordering flowers takes too much of your time, then it probably does!
Fortunately, there is a simple solution.
Floral design software that was built specifically for you by a fellow floral designer who understands how your florist mind works!
When you use EveryStem florist software, there are several things that speed up your workflow. These are major time savers!
You’ll be able to create templates to build recipes and events for specific venues and occasions. This saves tons of time because you are not starting from scratch with every new sale you make.
You can also create quick flower orders that do not require flower recipes for every design. This is great for last minute requests or designers that prefer not to use specific recipes, but still want to achieve their profit goals.
You can also copy flower recipes that work well and use them over and over. This enables you to create a base portfolio and empowers you to drive the creative process with your clients without fear of underpricing because you’ve established your prices in your florist software.
EveryStem florist software is basically a bodyguard for your business. It protects you from underpricing when you rely on it regularly!
Your time is valuable and being effective with your time, using florist software to ensure your profitability, is a no-brainer! Time is money. So, make more money by working smarter, not harder with EveryStem.
Our third and final element about how to use florist software to make more money is so simple, but so hard for many of us to accomplish- less waste.
How many events or holidays have you over or under ordered flowers for lately?
The fear of having too much or too little product is real, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
I’m not afraid of running out of product and I’m not afraid of ordering too much product either. You can feel the same way using florist software.
You can be confident in the amount of product you purchase for every sale you make!
Let me tell you how.
When you learn how to use florist software to price your work, you allow for enough product in every design based on your business markup. This means that if you charge $200 for a design and your markup is 3X, you will have enough product when you spend $67 on your wholesale flowers, mechanics, and hard-goods.
You eliminate the guesswork because the florist software does the hard part- the flower math, for you.
EveryStem florist software calculates your orders in full wholesale bunches. So, this means that you can use every single flower you’ve ordered and still hit your profit margin.
You can walk out of every event venue you work at empty handed, confident, and profitable because you learned how to use florist software to make more money and waste less product!
To learn more about how this works email me luann (at) everystem.com and I’d be happy to set up a demo with you! You don’t have to take my word for it. Hundreds of designers are using EveryStem to level up their businesses, build confidence, and waste less product.
Hey floral design friends, are flower recipes too intimidating or time-consuming for you? Do you know you need to change something to become part of the community of profitable floral designers, but just can’t crack the code?
They used to feel that way for me too, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We as humans tend to overcomplicate and overthink things. Do you find yourself struggling to create flower recipes, client quotes, or flower orders in a reasonable amount of time? Then, this blog post is for you!
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many floral designers over the years and there is one thing that all profitable floral designers have in common. Can you guess what it is?
I’m going to reveal the secret…
They stay within budget!
Now, I’m not talking about the most popular designers on Instagram, I’m talking about profitable floral designers. The ones who are hitting their profit goals consistently. These designers create beautiful work of course, but they are also dedicated to earning a healthy profit on the events they produce. This is the profit first mindset that every successful small business owner needs to have no matter what industry they find themselves in.
So how can you build this profit first mindset into your business? You can start by simplifying your designs and focus on creating flower recipes and wholesale flower orders that consistently hit your profit goals.
Later, I’ll also share a tool that profitable floral designers use to make creating flower recipes and wholesale flower orders even simpler.
It’s so obvious that it seems foolish to say, but keeping things simple is often the most overlooked path to success. Let’s dig into that a bit more today!
Keeping recipes simple is one of the main ways to simplify your business workload. I know many profitable floral designers who share this mindset.
Keeping your flower recipes and wholesale flower orders simple has three major benefits.
Less confusion: Keeping recipes simple leads to less confusion when processing and designing flowers for your clients.
Whether you are working solo or with a large team, processing flowers can get complicated, but only if you let it.
My best tip for processing as a team is to assign one team member to each variety of flower. This enables the team to accurately count in the flowers and avoid confusion.
My best tip for processing flowers alone is to tackle one variety of flower at a time, count all the bunches first, then un-package and process with care. Many designers I know do not count their flowers as they process them. It takes a little more time, but it is important to know what you receive is equal to what you ordered.
When you take the time to prepare by creating flower recipes and counting in your flowers, you are setting yourself up for a profitable event. It’s worth the effort! Can you name a company who doesn’t count in their products when they get a new shipment? Flowers are our inventory and it’s essential to count them.
Better prices: Buying flowers in quantities of more than 5 or 10 bunches is typically accompanied by a small discount.
This might not seem like a significant amount of money. However, I know firsthand that little savings on each flower order can add up over several months during a busy season.
My most helpful tip here is to calculate your flower recipes based on the wholesale prices before the multiple bunch discount. That way, the advantage of the discount is additional profit for you. These savings increase your profits because you are the one making smart purchasing decisions.
Think of it this way, if a company that manufactures and sells coffee pots figured out how to lower their wholesale cost on that item they would not automatically lower the retail price of the coffee pot. They would keep the price the same and make more profit. It’s a great example of a profit first mindset and it’s making me long for a cup of coffee!
When you buy in bulk or get a better price for your flowers, you are working smart to fulfill your clients’ requests and do a beautiful job. If you lower your wholesale costs you don’t automatically need to lower the retail price. You can choose to make a little more profit on that sale. That’s the true mark of a profitable floral designer.
Using this concept, you can feel good about making money and making your clients happy at the same time. This strategy can also help to offset times when flower prices fluctuate higher than you planned.
Time savings: It’s easier to create a simple flower recipe with 3 to 5 ingredients than one with 10 to 12 ingredients.
Time spent thinking through complicated recipes is time you could be spending on a lot of other things. So, please remember that your time is your most valuable non-renewable resource and you need to use it wisely!
I’ve spoken with several designers who run large wedding studios with over 10 years of experience and they’ve all told me that over the years their recipes have gotten simpler.
That’s right. They are using fewer flower varieties overall and their clients are just as happy as they were when the flower recipes were super complicated.
I’ve noticed that by using the design concepts of proportion and size progression these designers create beautiful artistic designs with very few ingredients.
This arbor designed by Ashley Fox was created using 4 varieties of floral as a nod to their anniversary: lunaria, beech leaves, dried dill florets and miscanthus feather grass.
Now that we’ve gotten some of the concepts of why simpler flower recipes are beneficial and you’ve seen some examples of how impactful and profitable this strategy can be, I want to share 5 of my recipes with you!
Here’s what you’ve been waiting for. I’m sharing five simple recipes with only five flower ingredients in each, that you can use to build profitable floral designs.
Large bouquet:
5 base flowers, sedum
5 line flowers, foxglove
5 focal flowers, dahlias
7 dancer flowers, zinnias
2 stems of structured greenery, honeysuckle
Just 5 ingredients can create a beautiful and textural bouquet. It’s possible! I know it is.
Small bouquet:
3 base flowers, sedum
3 line flowers, foxglove
2 focal flowers, dahlias
5 dancer flowers, zinnias
2 stems of structured greenery, honeysuckle
Bud Vase:
1 base flower, sedum
1 focal flower, dahlia
3 dancer flowers, zinnias
Centerpiece:
9 base flowers, sedum
7 line flowers, foxglove
7 focal flowers, dahlias
7 dancer flowers, zinnias
3 stems of structured greenery, honeysuckle
This low and lush centerpiece would work well in a 5 to 6″ wide cylinder or footed bowl. Recipe listed above.
Tall Narrow Bottle:
1 base flowers, sedum
2 line flowers, foxglove
3 dancer flowers, zinnias
1 stem of structured greenery, honeysuckle
You can adapt these simple flower recipes to any season by swapping out the varieties. Consider the types of flowers you want to use and then pick based on the season and your chosen color palette.
Here are some examples of flowers you can swap out in these recipes.
Base Flower: Sedum was my choice for these recipes. However, I could use small hydrangeas, double carnations, or rice flowers.
Line Flower: My choice for these designs was foxglove. There are so many beautiful line flowers- too many to list here. Some of my favorites are snapdragons, delphinium, larkspur, bells of Ireland, and stock.
Focal Flower: I picked some gorgeous dahlias as my focal flower here. Focal flowers can vary in size quite a bit so this plays a factor in the variety chosen, but I love a big lush open peony as much as the next gal. I’m also a fan of garden roses, this time of year locally grown marigolds could be an excellent choice as well.
Dancer Flower: The dancers make the arrangement come to life! So, if you are going up to 6 ingredients, may I suggest picking 2 different dancers for your designs. The size variations of zinnias fascinate me and that is why I picked them for my recipes. I may have chosen something like cosmos, sweet peas, ranunculus, or scabiosa depending on the season and what I could purchase from my local growers.
I hope these examples of simple 5 ingredient flower recipes will spark something in you to simplify your own flower recipes and help to save you time whether you hand-write them all or use a florist spreadsheet on your computer. If you need a straighforward florist pricing formula, check out this post about pricing for profit.
Speaking of fussing with your florist spreadsheet or trying to keep track of all those hand-written flower orders, remember that tool I mentioned earlier that makes pricing your flower recipes and wholesale ordering even easier?
I want to share it with you now because I want you to become a profitable floral designer too!
It’s called EveryStem and it’s the only florist software that’s been created to solve one specific problem: the challenging work of pricing and ordering your flowers for profit.
If you are the type of floral designer who likes to handwrite recipes, but would love to save time and get rid of all that paper, EveryStem is ideal for you.
If you are struggling with a florist spreadsheet filled with uncertain or unreliable formulas, this software is absolutely for you.
Pricing your floral designs, creating flower recipes, and building wholesale flower orders are so much simpler when you use EveryStem. If you are looking for an affordable software to make this specific part of your workflow easier, you’ve come to the right place. Click here to learn more about EveryStem today!
It takes less than 1 week to learn this profit powering software and many designers learn it in one day! It doesn’t need to be as epic as you think. It’s possible. I know it is.
With EveryStem you’ll see your profits on every event. So, you can power your profitability and stay on budget with every flower order you create.
Working smarter, not harder is what separates the profitable floral designers I know from the rest of the crowd.
I hope you enjoyed me spilling a few secrets of profitable floral designers today. Try out the recipes above to simplify your flower ordering. And if you want to fast track your path to profitability, join us over at EveryStem today.
LuAnn
P.S. – In case you haven’t worked with them much yet, Zinnias don’t love being very cold so keep them out of the cooler. Also, a big thanks to Clara Joyce Flowers for the beautiful American Grown blooms I purchased to create these designs.
