The Floral CEO

  📍 Hello flower friends. This is Jen and you are listening to the Floral CEO podcast on this mini soda. I wanna talk about preparing for a big wedding weekend. I have a large wedding this weekend at a venue called the Machine Shop. It is around a $15,000 wedding, and the large part of that is one install, um, almost half, actually over half of it is one install.

Uh, they have this amazing. I call it like trussing, but it's like a beam or a boom arm that goes up and down in the ceiling and it spans the length of this, the whole main floor, which is about 60 feet long and it can lower and rays, uh, all the way up to two stairs tall, down to wherever your heart desires for decorating it.

You know, four feet from the ground if you really wanted it. So it is a pretty magical thing that florists love to play with. And this bride, actually, it was really interesting when she reached out to me, she had some florists that weren't interested and even quoting her wedding. Because the word pampas or pompous grass was used in her inquiry form and they don't wanna work with pamas grass.

So I was like, hell yeah. I'd love to get rid of some of my pampas grass that I have, because I have a lot of it from the Pampas grass era of a few years back, and it was in my storage unit and I was more than happier than hell to. To be like, I could get some of this out of my storage unit. So I wanna talk about the process of preparing for this wedding because when you're doing something, you know, at this scale, and honestly this isn't huge, but this to me is like a good size event that to some preparing for unless you want your week to feel like shit.

So I love to make sure that things feel good that I am. Prepared that I have my product ordered, obviously, and that my mechanics are figured out. So there's no surprises in needing more product or needing more anything. So the first part is for the insulation. I, I need to figure out like how big is this thing going to be?

And the client was very adamant that they wanted it to be 20 feet long. This structure has three sides that are facing down. So they have two sides and a bottom of the trussing. And so they want 20 linear feet to be on all three sides, making this really robust, uh, looking floral installation. They want it to be whites and topes, some sagey eucalyptus, sea greens.

Um, and, you know, pompous grass thrown in the mix to kind of elevate with textures and things like that. So the first thing I need to figure out is how many square feet is this installation? Because I often will build my recipes and build everything off of square footage. So if it is 20 feet long, each part of the.

Trussing is about 12 inches, so 12 inches on each side and 12 inches on the bottom. Then we will have the three sides. So if it is 12 inches, we basically have 20 linear feet, uh, on each side for a total of 60. Linear feet. So with the 60 linear feet, I need to figure out my mechanics. And the first thing that I thought, because my go-to cage to use in installations is a tribute cage, and that is a one brick with no paddle on it.

I'm not a paddle girl by any means, and it's a full one brick. I love those because I can easily replace the foam and reuse them. Um, a lot of surface area in designing in them, and it to me is just a great cage that, uh, is really versatile on most surfaces. The back is nice and flat, so it usually can rest really easily, but it's nine inches, so it's not going to fit in the length of a 12 inch wide surface.

So then I looked one cage up, which is. Jumbo cages. They are usually four of them in a case. Uh, they surprisingly were the same price as the tribute cages, Which I thought was interesting because it's about one and a half times the size of the tri tribute cage. The plastic is a lot bigger. So it was just really interesting to me that that was a thing. But, uh, I then figured out, okay, if I have a tribute cage, which is 12 inches wide, I should be fitting, I actually think it was 13, 13 inches in length.

It was nine inches wide. Uh, how, if I'm attaching this vertically on the sides, and obviously I'm, you know, mirroring that on the bottom, but which would be horizontally, uh, how many cages would I use? And that depends on how wide you can make your cage with the types of materials that we're using. Uh, we're using lots of hydrangeas because this is a mainly white and tope with a little bit of sagey green, so we're not having like a greenery base.

We're not dripping Smile X in this thing took for coverage. So if I'm putting a bunch of hydrangeas in here, I'm going to be able probably, if I'm extending, uh, at least nine to 10 inches out on each side for a total of. About two feet. I should be able to use 10 cages. I'm doing my wrath right? If I have 20 liter feet Oh, yep.

Divided by 10 cages. That is two feet in width per cage all the way down. So if I'm using 10 on each side and 10 on the bottom. That would give me a total of 30 cages to be used in the entire installation to get it to be 20 feet long. But it's not just 20 feet, it is 60 cubic feet because I'm doing each side as well.

So from there, I then have to figure out how much product will go in per q. Cubic foot of installation. So if I have a one square foot and that square foot will take five hydrangeas, three roses, a piece of bleach, ruscus, a, you know, fifth of a bunch of spiral eucalyptus, whatever it may be, I take all of those.

Um, you know, factors and then I go in and I figure out one square foot of product, and then I times that square footage by 60 because I will need 60 linear feet because I have three sides, 20 feet long, which gets me to a total of 60. Cubic feet needed. So I take my cubic foot formula and then times that by 60 if I need to have a little bit to transition the cages or whatever.

You can adjust your recipes up or down from there, depending on your budget. Then I recheck in with my budget. Did I meet my budget? Because if you've made a recipe that is basically blowing your budget, that's not going to be helpful. Then I go in and I figure all of those flowers that are needed and I put them on my major recipes.

Like, so my, here's my product needed, here's my recipe, my formula, and I have this that lives all in a Canva document. So from there I go in and I start looking at the other recipes. I look, um, this. Particular wedding has centerpieces that consist of a compote, a low floral that they are putting some floating candles with that has baby's breath and roses.

Then it has, um, butt VAs. So then I go through and I recheck my recipes and I add them into my master ordering sheet. Then I look at my overall ordering. Okay? So if for some reason I'm having to get a whole nother bunch of roses and I'm only using like two of them, and so I'm gonna have a ton extra, maybe I can make a small tweak with one of the recipes with one less rose.

And that would still give me a few extra, maybe five or six extra, unless it's something really delicate that you feel like you'd need more extras than that. I, I think it's a really easy way for you to have some buffer, uh, and just tweak without overspending in your weddings because. Overspending sucks.

So you wanna make sure that you're keeping things in budget. I also allocate a percentage of my budget towards fun flowers. Uh, through the process, I went and hopped on Holics. You guys have probably heard me talk about Holics before. It is a online flower ordering process that most wholesalers, I mean three of the wholesalers here carry it.

And I can order off Holics and it's shipped directly to my wholesaler and I get the flowers, um, through them, but they're being shipped from Holics. They have my name on it, my customer code ev everything. So they come there earmarked for me. So I hopped on there and I found some really fun stuff. So I found.

Um, some Icelandic moss that was bleached white, um, that looked really fun and I thought would be fun filler so that I'm not covering all the foam, uh, on the baby's breath and rose centerpiece. Then there were some bracken fern. That was a really good deal. There was some bleached ruscus That was a really great deal.

You're usually buying a box or a case pack sometimes, depending on the product. Um, you know, if it's fresh, uh, you'll buy 10 stems of calories or 10 stems of something. So it gives you some flexibility. But I love, uh, that it is, you know, all the pictures, all the prices are all there and you know that it's available.

And I think in the. Hundreds of times that I've ordered from Hollis. It's probably more than that, you guys, I've probably ordered from Holics 500 times and I've had two orders get screwed up. One um, was it didn't make the plane, and then one time my Ethereum froze, but Ethereum can freeze period, so it wasn't anything crazy.

But I went on to Holics and I looked for some of my fun things, um, that were bleached and just checked out the bleach product area in general. 'cause they have dyed product area bleached, um, like they have just dried product, a whole dried section. And sometimes I find fun things in there and then they have obviously fresh and I always hop on there and pop in the colors of my wedding coming up.

Because I have found new fun. Like this is how I found pistachio. I was looking at greens and I had a really lush green wedding, and I was plugging it in going, oh my God, what is that? And so then it's coming outta my tester budget. Budget. I'm not going in and just buying extra stuff. I'm going in with.

You know, 10% of my wedding, or 20% depending on the kind of wedding, and I'm, I have this test budget that I can buy fun stuff, and I don't have to worry that I am blowing my wad because I've built this into my budget. So from there, I've got all of my butt faces pulled. I've got my containers ordered, and I've got them already foamed up.

I have the ribbon that I need. I have my bouquet VAEs all pulled. I have my order printed out. If I'm really getting my shit together, I even can have my corsage and BNE tags I use from Vistaprint address labels that I go and write on everything. And. I just use the address labels and I remove the address, and then I just write groom groomsmen and it has my business logo on it.

So those are a few things that I did to prepare for my wedding week, and I hope some of the tips were helpful because preparing for a big week can be stressful, and I like, it's not stressful for me because I just have a system in place to make it easier. You can have those same systems. It is so easy.

You can make your life so much easier, especially if you're in the floral CEO Mastermind. 'cause I would walk you through this entire process for your exact wedding. I have had some of the girls in the Mastermind, like they've all of a sudden taken on $40,000 events and we've walked through how to do that because there are a lot of moving pieces.

And then the client wants. Each week to be a little bit different or wants a tweak from here. And you know, having somebody to do it with you is so helpful. So thank you so much for listening. Flower Friend. If you wanna check out the floral CO Mastermind, head to floral ceo.com/mastermind. Thank you so much for listening, and you have a fun filled flower 📍 week.