The Floral CEO

  📍 Hello flower friends. This is Jen and you're listening to the Floral CEO podcast on this week's episode I've seen on social media and it's been a few people talking about basically being a wedding florist sucks and how horrible it is, and like everybody can have their opinion. I actually love being a wedding florist.

I love being a part of somebody's special day. I love being able to have downtime in the winter. I love getting a big, huge booking, like a 15,000, 30,000 like that is really fun for me. I love like talking with people and meeting with them. There are so many positive things, but obviously there is a stigma out there that.

Being a wedding floor sucks. And so I wanted to just talk about it. I wanted to talk about 10 ways how to make it not suck. I feel that, I mean, you could turn any shitty situation into a better situation with the right attitude about it, but everybody can love something different. Everyone can have. A different passion, a different like they just maybe want their life to be completely different.

Maybe like having your weekends taken up, taken up doesn't feel good at all, like no weekends at all. Well, then being a wedding florist isn't for you. But if you are a wedding florist, and this is feeling tough. The weakens, the whatever, whatever is feeling tough. I wanna give you 10 strategies to help make like it a little bit softer, to lighten your load a little bit.

So the first thing is, you know, this is a valid frustration. I, I want you to know that like we are. Action taking, problem solving women or men that can make things more sustainable and more enjoyable. And we can do that at any time. We are not like pigeonholed. I for so long felt like I was just pigeonholed into a whole lot of suck and it doesn't need to be that way.

So. Some ways to make things less sucky. All right. First, take strategic weekends off. If you are a person that you know this is burning you out, being the weekend warrior, doing weddings, then build in time off, build in one weekend a month, build in whatever you want, put a hard boundary. And with this boundary, you say like, I am only doing weddings two weekends a month.

I'm only doing weddings three weekends a month. I want one weekend a month to myself, to my family, whatever it is. Like I, I think that there's a scarcity around making such a big decision like that, but it's better than the latter of you feeling like this sucks and then being feeling stuck and then not wanting to do it all.

What is that like, kind of gray area that we can get into that would make you feel better about it, but still give you the opportunity? All right. Next. Build a team that helps you build a team you can rely on. Build a team that feels good. Build a team that supports you in a way that feels good.

So many florists try to do it all themself because they're like, I can't afford help, I can't. All of these things, you will burn yourself out faster. By doing it all yourself, I realized long ago that the doing it all myself solution was not sustainable. And I have key people that help me with certain things I've talked about in various episodes, like the kind of roles that I've had someone step into, and you can do that same thing.

So find help. You do not need to do it all alone. Hire freelancers for big installs. Bring in part-time help for Prep day. Build a core crew that helps you with certain tasks. All right, my next one, if you are burned out on wedding weekends, you need tear down, help get in. Get out is my favorite motto on wedding day.

But I hate coming back this weekend. I actually have to go and tear down 'cause my tear down person. Is out of town and it sucks and I'm salty about it, but you know what? It's a $15,000 wedding and I'm just, I'm grateful that I have that wedding. I'm grateful for the creativity of that wedding, and I just know that teardown is part of the deal with weddings, and so find someone.

Who doesn't mind being up at midnight? Doesn't mind like being fast as a jackrabbit, tearing everything down in an hour, has a vehicle that has space and doesn't mind bringing it back to you. How easy is that? So finding tear down help. Is to me just a critical, you can outsource it. You can pay like a tear down fee for someone.

You could you know, pay somebody like an higher hourly rate. I feel like it is a very not glamorous and it is a very exhausting part of this whole proposition. So I make sure that I pay the person well. I want my person to want to take Teardowns from me, so you should want that too. All right then to make and almost recharge your battery.

Take time off in the down season. You deserve a break before the next chaos cycle. And you can actually schedule a vacation. And don't put Guinea weddings on that time. Use the slow months for rest. Dreaming, planning, strategizing. I always joke, I am strategizing, um, world domination. Like, um, I'm plotting world domination is what I usually say.

'Cause I'm always thinking, I'm always like dreaming. I'm always, and especially when I have downtime, my brain. Is expansive. I mean, even the downtime of going to CrossFit, my brain is expansive during that. And you could have that same thing. It's very easy to, have your wheels turn when you're not at capacity in your brain 'cause you're doing a million things.

All right, number five, we want to automate and sip. Simp systematize. Sorry. Systematize things. Because we want things to be easy. So I do not use a CRM, but I do have templates for everything I know. Like, I have a process with my proposals. Then my tear down sheets, like all these things I, I have canned emails that I can send for inquiries and follow up.

I have my brochure, I have all of these systems in place, and those systems are really important, so you're not one off doing everything. All right, next, streamline client communication. If you front load your communication by creating a welcome guide to help set expectations, that goes a long way. Answer all their questions before they even get, have them, then use a scheduling tool.

📍 I do not like going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth with people to book a call to meet and. Calendly has a free option for one appointment type. I pay for Calendly because I have several appointment types, but this could be a streamlined way. I make it part of my Sunday night prep to go in and double check my schedule for the week.

If anything changed and I didn't update it in there, and then I can just send someone a scheduling link. Super easy. It's easy for them 'cause they're not going back and forth, back and forth. Just having no clue when you're available. And then also you are leading the charge because if you give somebody an option, they're gonna tell you that they wanna meet at five o'clock.

And I don't like to do evening. I actually, I think I've done one evening consultation. It was just because I love the wedding planner and that's it. So streamlining that communication if. If keeping track of client communication feels hard, get a thing like HoneyBook, dato, something that can help automate things and take them off your plate.

But I don't feel, with the volume of inquiries and the volume of weddings, the most inquiries that I'm really managing at one time is probably five. If I can't keep track of five leads, like there's a bigger problem. Five leads to me completely manageable to manage communication. If you wanna even have like a cadence of communication to a inquiry, but you still interact, you can have an email kind of workflow set up that.

Literally you use flow desks or some type of email server that when they hit that, initial inquiry form, that it could just trigger this whole cadence of communication. Uh, but you know, I like the hands-on. I like to be able to plug the individual things in. I like to. You know, ask curious questions.

I like to dig into my inquiries and especially if it's something I'm excited about. All right. The next thing that I think is really critical, and it took a long time for me to learn this, is you need to curate the work you actually want. I was a wedding factory. I was making things for everybody else but myself.

I wasn't making cool shit. I wasn't super inspired or like, oh my God, I'm so in love with all this stuff that I'm doing. So how that really started to change for me is I wanted to show what I could do and I wanted to book things that were cooler. So I started making sure that I was posting cool stuff on social media.

I was making the ask when I met with someone that had a bigger budget to do cool things. I would say no to things that didn't feel good pretty easily, and I mean with confidence, because if it doesn't feel good, I just don't wanna do it. All right. The next, if you feel the least bit salty that you are not getting paid your worth, you need to raise your prices seriously.

If you are undercharging, that can equal burnout and resentment very quickly. You should be auditing your pricing regularly. You should include every labor hour, even like your emails, and tear down to really make sure that you are getting paid your worth, own your value and stop apologizing. You know, I see florist apologizing for why flowers are so expensive.

They're a lot of work. They have no clue and honestly, it's none of their business like it's, we know how much work this takes. We know what it takes to get all of these pieces to magically come together for their wedding day. Every bloom being completely bloomed and beautiful. That bloom even getting in your studio or shop, like we know what that takes and if somebody doesn't see our worth, there either is a breakdown in us showing them the value in us, or potentially like they're just not your ideal client.

All right, next batch your work week. If you're multitasking across. Orders across meetings, prep and chaos, like that's not going to feel good. Chaos never feels good. So set batching days, marketing Monday, or admin on Monday. Studio day Prep Studio day. Um, let's just say processing studio day. Install day, create a system so it's not like you're just blowing in the wind with all of this stuff.

Protect your time. Like it's a bouquet on a windy hilltop, and you want it to still be perfect in photos. Your time has value, and we often don't value ourself enough. We drop our pants, drop our prices, and then we're mad about it. We're mad that people don't see our value. We have to see our value and our time is one of our biggest asset.

All right. Next, build a supportive florist community. If you are feeling alone, like you're gonna be a little bit more resentful stew a little bit more because you have nobody to talk to, you going to spiral a little bit easier when something does go wrong because you're doing this alone. So how you can do this?

Facebook groups, local florist groups. I founded the Minnesota Floral Collective and it is a space of 500 Minnesota based florists to connect, support each other, find freelancers, find whatever, talk about a situation, whatever. And then places like my mastermind, the floral CEO Mastermind, like literally just today.

Somebody's like feeling like their business is growing really fast and they really need systems and they're trying to figure out like, what systems do I need and like, what should I be doing with email and what should I have A CRM? I took this CRM class. Like those are conversations like that suck to have just in your head.

And then another florist like, how the hell do you do this? It's this beautiful baby's breath cross with it arching across the cross and coming down on the floor. Like it is beautiful, but it is complicated. It's not a super easy thing. So like having somebody in your corner that's there to support you, that you don't feel alone, that's gonna make this easier.

And even getting like a floral bestie collaborate, don't compete. I always open my Minnesota Floral Collective events by say, saying, community over competition is alive and well in Minnesota. And I almost get chills saying that because I have helped shape a culture in Minnesota that it is okay to be like friends.

It is okay to help one another. It is okay to support one another. It is okay to be there for one another. We don't need to do this alone. And you can do that in the floral CEO Mastermind. Head to floral ceo.com/mastermind or see the show notes, but you could do it yourself too. Like I just want you to have the support so that you feel empowered to kick ass and take names to make money.

You can make so much money being a wedding florist, and I know there are fancy contracts and there are are, and I love that. I love that for you, if that's what you want, but I don't want you throwing the towel on potentially a very big business. Because you were burnt out, because everything looked shinier and because you couldn't figure out how to make this feel good.

So take these strategies and put them into place. I was on the road to burnout, feeling like shit, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like, God, maybe I just, I need to take a break. But I knew I loved it and I just had to make it feel better. I would love to know which of these 10 you need to implement right now.

Send me a message on Instagram. Or even take me in Insta with what your favorite tip was, because I love hearing from you guys. It is so amazing to me to see you guys listening to the podcast because this podcast is a lot of work and running another Facebook group, running a whole nother business is a lot of work.

But knowing how I can help you grow, help you have a business that feels good, that is making the money that you deserve. Is so important to me and I'd love to hear if you tag me at the Floral CEO on Instagram. Thank you so much for listening, flower Friend. I hope you have an amazing flower filled 📍 week.

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