The Floral CEO

 this is Jen and you are listening to the Floral CEO podcast. And kind of a theme of a lot of my coaching calls recently is people feeling overwhelmed. I think of course at this point in the winter, people are feeling a little stir crazy. They're, a lot of people are looking at their book of business for this year and, you know, going, I should have more.

You know, I should have more, I should have more booked, I should have more revenue. Uh, I should have more, more, more. And then, you know, feelings of I'm not doing enough, and how am I actually going to move the needle and what am I gonna do? To turn things around, like all of those things start to creep in.

So if you are like, I'm overwhelmed, I'm burnt out and life feels heavy and I still want to grow my business and not stay stuck here, I, I want to give yourself some permission that feeling overwhelmed is okay, but you can still take forward. Action and build momentum without. Toxic, like hustle, energy, like I always gotta be hustle and I always gotta be doing it.

I always gotta be go, go, go. So I wanna talk about 10 things that you can do when you feel overwhelmed, but you want to grow your floral business. So the first thing is to really shrink your goal. Stop. Like everybody's just like, I am not getting enough business. I'm not making enough money. And it's just this like really big thing.

But then really when I dive in. They don't even know what they want their business to look like. So if this is you and you're like, I don't even know, I know I wanna be bigger. I mean, we really gotta figure out that definitive goal. A lot of people try to just think these big vague goals and then are pissed when they don't execute them.

If you are having trouble with like. Hey, I want to just have this bigger business. Why don't we start with, I want to book a wedding in the next two weeks. I want to book this year an eight k eight K wedding. I want to like something tinier meaningful that impacts the greater good of your revenue and or your visibility forward.

Even thinking about, okay, how am I going to book a wedding in the next two weeks? Like, what do I do to do that? Sending follow ups. I need to like figure out five supporting things that you can do that support that goal. Send a follow up email post in your stories. You know, do a video and introduce yourself and talk about you and your business.

Like all of those things could be visibility. Into working towards that goal. All right, the next, set a timer for 10 minutes and do a floral CEO reset. Ask yourself, what is like one thing that would make this week easier? Reduce the overwhelm. What's one thing I can simplify or frankly tell it to fuck off?

Momentum comes with clarity, not pressure. So just thinking of like, how can this be easier? And I actually made that choice this week. It is Valentine's Week, and oh, for a long time I had the inner narrative at what kind of florist would I be if I didn't participate in Valentine's Day? And frankly, I don't care anymore.

It is more important to me this week. To not gamble on if I'm going to sell things because of moving and, you know, kind of realigning a bunch of things. I also, my son's school has never had holiday parties before and I want to go, I wanna like be the mom that gets to help with the holiday party. So like that is a choice I made to simplify things right now.

That didn't feel good for me to be like, I am also gonna take on Valentine's Day. But the inner narrative for years has been like that. Floris just do that. And as I have grown in my business, that narrative has gone away. And that's what I wanna teach you guys, is that my business felt harder. And felt more overwhelming when I had that narrative of what that ideal florist looks like, and we can leave that behind.

All right, the next thing is choosing the next best step. So the next best step to me is when you are behind, stop trying to just catch up and ask yourself. What is the next best step from where I am right now from where I am right now? What would be the next best thing for me to do? You don't need to have this perfectly fucking laid out plan.

You can like pick one thing that feels naturally like the best thing to do if you totally hate. Like working on social media, maybe that next step is reaching out to a planner. Or maybe you're really trying to be more seen. So like maybe the next step is looking at all of the networking opportunities in your market.

Maybe the next step is I need to schedule posts for social media, whatever that is. What is the next best step to help support that goal and help remove all of this? You know, weight on your shoulders of the million fucking things you think you should be doing. There are a million things that I think I should be doing right now, but my next best step was I need to get my podcast episode done.

That feels like it's more in alignment. My husband left to run an errand and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna do it because then I can be here up in the studio and have nice light and I don't have to do it at night. And that just felt like. I have emails to do and everything, but this felt like the next best step.

So just going into your life with that in mind. Alright, the next create a bare minimum version of consistency. So what I have a lot, social media seems to be themed around this and a lot of people were like, I'm gonna post five days a week, and you're just like. What, five days a week? Like you haven't posted in three months?

And you're gonna go balls out into five days a week. Whoa. That probably is going to fall flat on its face. So create a bare minimum. If you do more than that, that is awesome, but you can celebrate wins, you know, reduce the overwhelm when, when something does feel harder. And that could be if like three times a week, posting feels impossible in for like one super helpful post.

If networking feels like crazy, send one email, send one dm, or go and comment on five different posts, just so you're putting yourself out there in your name. If you know building a minimum pricing feels scary, like just do one of them today. Really focusing on consistency versus intensity. I think people think it's a sprint or not at all, and it doesn't have to be that way.

You can define what your bare minimum version is and move forward with that, then put one system in place. So a lot of times. People are like, I need to redo my whole marketing and I need to redo my whole brand, and I need to redo my website, and I need to do all these proposals and I have to get back to all these people.

Pick one system, whether it is like you wanna work on making your proposals go. Easy. You want to create like follow up reminders or a calendar system for keeping track of weddings. You wanna make email templates, which included in the floral CEO Mastermind, I lay out all my templates for you for email.

So like what could you do to just implement one system? So systems reduce overwhelm, and that's one thing that I teach. The girls in the Mastermind, like we even went through yesterday in our call, we had office hours and I talked about my system of creating a proposal and how I do it, and why? Because with a system, I'm not having to make a ton of decisions.

I know that anytime there's a floral moment in an event, I'm creating a page for it. I know that if I am getting leads, like I know to the initial inquiry, this is what I say, I know this is what I say. When I'm responding back, I know what to say when a planner emails me. Like all of those are systems and systems that are built into my business to make.

Things easier and to reduce overwhelm. All right? Then protect one block of CEO time a week. I, it is amazing to me the growth people expect without actually dedicating time. Growing a business strategy, even like you coming up with processes or, or even stepping back and looking at the holes in your business physically takes time during that 30 minutes.

Like there's no designing, there's no emails. Just think about you as the CEO and your business, and this is actually one of the questions that when we go through our annual planning that I asked. What type of CEO were you in 2025 and what type of CEO do you wanna be in 2026, and how are you going to get there?

Even just starting with that question? Because you can't grow a business only by working in it. You have to work on it. I have worked on my business a lot over the years, and that's what's helped me get here. All right. Number seven. You cannot plug every single hole at one time, so clean up one leaky bucket at a time.

If you are. Underpricing deliveries. If you have a slew of clients who ghost you, which honestly I can help you with that, if that is happening, if you have no minimums and you wanna install minimums, if you are like, I am so sick of these long emails with clients, I can teach you how to streamline that. Or you can think through, but you have to actually take time to plug those holes.

To create growth without burning yourself out. You can't plug all the holes at once. You gotta plug the biggest first, and when you start plugging the biggest holes first, like all of a sudden the boat becomes lighter and you feel like there's more movement in it. Like it's just, there's so much more flexibility in the brain space that you have.

All right, number eight. And this to me obviously because I, offer this container, this to me is so critical. I actually just joined a new mastermind and it is pretty elevated thinkers, not florists. It is people who are looking, you know, that have multiple. You know, six figure or six figure businesses that are looking to grow even more.

And even the conversations today, they had a call with the leaders of the Mastermind and the questions that were asked just made me think bigger. Like I was listening to how people talk about their business. I was listening to people describe what they do and how they're connecting with people and how they're serving people.

And just like. So much bigger than kind of my scope of influence. And so I'm paying to be in a room not only of the people who are facilitating that because these are people who have multiple seven figure businesses. If not, way more than that. These are people who are also, like, they have a program where a bunch of other coaches support you.

So talking to somebody who is where you're at or wants to be bigger or maybe just has a different perspective, like a coach, a florist friend, a mastermind. That is where breakthroughs happen. And I know if you've been a long time listener, you're probably like, oh my God, she keeps talking about this Mastermind.

My mastermind has impacted and changed lives. Like I've gotten message for people, from people who have been in my mastermind and. They've increased their wedding revenue by 40% and they fired all their wire services. They felt like they have the, had the confidence to have boundaries with their husband wi about their business.

They felt like they could dream bigger because they had exposure to people who did, and it's hard to do that when you're in your own island. So I love to surround myself with people that I can elevate to my level, or I can be around people that I wanna elevate to theirs. And those are the spaces that we all need because I, I love helping people and I love people to elevate themself into feeling how I feel now.

Into the business that I have because I've been where they are. I know overwhelm doesn't feel good. I know not paying yourself doesn't feel good. I know that not having a plan or a strategy feels maddening because you feel like you're just throwing spaghetti noodles, you're driving down the car. In your car down a highway and literally just throwing spaghetti noodles everywhere and you are thinking like that.

It's gonna come with this really nice, perfect plate of spaghetti noodles in the end, and it's really just like road smear. And now you have frozen noodles all over your car because there was no plan of how this was actually going to unfold. You were winging it. And winging it is expensive. I spent a lot of money winging it, doing, um, you know, like open houses that I shouldn't have do, doing style shoots that it, I shouldn't have.

Uh, not having processes in how I was gonna handle inquiries. I mean, just like so many things. Not pricing correctly, not doing recipes correctly. I mean, these are things that I've learned over 1700 weddings. And strategies that I've learned managing a book of business of over $6 million for the sales organization.

I, I work for like who you are influences, you know, like that person that you're around influences that next version of yourself. And I just want more for you. You deserve more. You deserve bigger. You deserve to make your dreams happen, and you deserve to not be at the back burner of that. All right, the next one, number eight, is lowering the bar for good enough.

Perfection, frankly feels like paralysis. So send the email, post the post, let it be messy because progress beats perfection every single time. I have had, i, part of my process is building a brochure and I teach in the Mastermind and on my one-on-one coaches how to implement this brochure and making your life easier and reducing ghosting, using pricing, transparency, all these things.

But that brochure is like so hard for so, so many people because they pick apart every single page in the brochure. And if this is you, I see you. Because I see people like going, this is my brand, this is me, and I don't wanna undercut myself, and I wanna make sure that I look really professional and I didn't get a photo shoot done.

And I, I don't have the content to put in here, so it just stops you in your tracks. I didn't know what to say. We have chat GPT now. I didn't know, you know what I should include. I give you a template in the Mastermind. I mean, like there are so many tools that are out there. To support you to make this easier, and I just want you to know that things can be better.

They don't need to be perfect, and you don't need to lower your bar of like, this is good enough because it's just, and I hate it and I don't like it. I would rather you at least do something then do nothing. But it's okay to show up messy when I look at my content from like four years ago. I'm like, holy shit, I can't believe I posted that.

But even with that, I still have a multiple six figure business. And you can too, because everything progress starts somewhere and progress beats perfection every single time. And then the next thing in number 10 is I want you to really reconnect with your why. Why? Are you doing this? Like why did you start a business?

What kind of life do I want? What would success actually feel like to me? Growth is filled with like purpose and not pressure. And I, I always say like being a florist and a mother were my two purposes in life, and being a florist has helped me be the mother that I wanted to be because it created the freedom and autonomy to be the mother that I wanted.

And so they, they kind of go hand in hand, but I want you to ask yourself like, why did I start this business? What kind of life do you want? You deserve to have a life you absolutely want. What does success mean to you and not somebody else? Like what is your actual definition of success? Mine is like getting my children off the bus designing with joy.

And not angst or like, like feeling uninspired, like being inspired is super important to me. And those same, same things can be very true for you. Part of, I literally was just outside feeding my donkeys treats and I just hugged my mini cow, like that's part of my definition. And even a year ago that wasn't.

Even on the roadmap of like what I thought was going to happen. So it can change. It can absolutely change next week if you wanted to, like your definition of success could be like, I don't wanna do another wedding at this venue or a venue like this, like barn venues. I don't wanna do another barn venue wedding, like, because that sounds horrible to me.

Whatever it is, you are the CEO and you make the decisions. And those decisions help reduce your overwhelm or potentially could add to your overwhelm. So don't choose with so much clarity that it's holding you back, but choose what feels inspiring, what feels good, what feels doable, and what is actually moving things forward.

You don't need to feel ready to grow. You don't need to take one small step while you're overwhelmed. Like just like think of what's one little thing, like one little thing. You just need to take that one little step. You don't need to be like, I'm gonna tackle posting on Instagram five times now every week.

That is going to be so hard for somebody who hasn't posted in three months. And then you get into a shame cycle of I. I try to build habits and do things based on that. I can keep promises to myself because if you start to not keep the promises to yourself, you're in big fucking trouble because then your brain starts to believe that you talk shit, that you are saying all these things, but don't make them happen.

We need to start convincing you inside in your heart and in your mind that you keep the promises to yourself to move yourself forward. That's where the magic happens. That's where things really can shine. And if that's something that you've struggled with, I, I'd love if, if you've had some things fall flat on the face, flat on your face, like step back and go, do I really keep the promises to myself?

Do I really believe that if I say something, I'm doing it because I do. I am unstoppable, whatever I wanna put my mind to, I can do it. I can figure it out because I am an action taking, problem solving woman. And so are you. We all have the capacity. We just need to to be on the gas pedal in a way that makes us feel good.

And when that happens, your business starts to feel so good and you deserve that. All right. Thank you so much for listening, flower Friend, and you have an amazing flower filled day.