The Floral Hustle

  📍 Hello Flower friend. This is Jen and you're listening to the Floral Hustle Podcast on today's mini. So I wanna talk about should you be raising your pricing and to many florists that that even whole thought of raising your prices scares the bejesus outta you. And I wanna talk about just like some signs that you probably should be increasing your pricing.

I. That I see a lot of florists run into, and then they run the other way because they're just scared. And so here is a little pep talk and if something here resonates, like go deep and think about that because you deserve to be paid for what you are doing. And I think a lot of women in general, especially moms, That own their own business.

They're very much a people pleaser. And I know I struggled with this for a long time. That part of people pleasing felt like I needed to do things very cheap. Um, if not, not make any money because you know, like I'm doing something that is really fun and enjoyable and I'm helping somebody on their special day and I'm not getting paid for it.

And I deserve to be paid for the work that I'm doing, the expertise that I have, the. Uh, thought and planning and hard work that goes not only into planning, ordering, processing, designing, and then setting up. Like I used to deliver a wedding for $30 was just like a, like I heard somebody had charged $30 for setup and I was like, oh, that sounds good.

What in the hell was I thinking? And I charged that for years. Um, until I, all of a sudden this, this button just clicked, something clicked in my head that said like, I'm losing money, especially if I'm paying someone to come with me. What are other people charging? And then I'm like, holy crap. Have I been grossly undercharging?

And then having people take advantage of the situation because I didn't know better. Like I would work with planners and they'd be like, oh yeah, go over here. Because I was giving away all of my hard work for nothing, and I know that I deserve more. And I hope you know that you deserve to be paid for your hard work.

So here is one thing that I look at, and this would mean a little bit of tracking on your part, but I track how many, what is my closing percentage. So if I am. Getting the inquiry, I am getting to a point that they are responding because, you know, there are those inquiries that the person doesn't respond.

Uh, so they filled one out and I don't know why, and then they never respond to your initial inquiry. If I'm filling that out, getting to that point where they're responding to me, I've sent them my brochure, which I've talked about in several episodes with my pricing guidance with a little bit about my business.

And then I'm getting to the point where we've met and I've provided a proposal, and then I've closed them. So if I get up to bat with doing a consultation and providing them an estimate, I wanna know how many times do I get up to bat, and how many of them am I making a home run. So that is my closing ratio.

If I am closing. 75 to 80% of those people, it's probably time for me to increase my pricing because I'm probably not charging enough for my designs, for my expertise, for my service. For the flowers, I'm probably not charging enough because this is too easy. This should honestly hurt a little bit because.

You want your prices to be like, I want them to be a good value, but I also want to be paid. What I'm worth and what I'm worth is sometimes more than traditional markup. Maybe my design fee higher, maybe my setup and delivery is higher because of the venue situation. It being a really difficult venue to work with or whatever.

So I'm. I'm looking at each situation, but I'm making sure that I'm maximizing my profit and my potential profit for that wedding because of all the expenses I potentially could incur. Uh, do I, uh, if a venue is difficult and I'm having to pay for three people to pay for parking, If I'm having to load into a loading dock that's just ridiculously hidden, and I'm gonna have to have two of my staff drive around the block three times probably before they find it.

Like those opportunities, I need to make sure that I'm charging what I should be for the amount of headache related to that venue, and if I am closing a big chunk. I need to make sure that I'm probably adjusting my pricing in some capacity, either with my design, labor percentage, my setup and delivery fee.

Um, my tear down fee, whatever fee will help you get to a higher like average wedding cost. I probably should be looking at raising my prices because I'm having such a success rate and. That might not make sense to some of you because you're just like, why wouldn't I just be happy that I am getting the wedding?

Well, you're, you're not maximizing your potential profitability per customer, per per bride because you're comfortable with what you're charging. We want to be a tad bit uncomfortable because we want to be pushing our potential profit per wedding. As far as we can without us popping the bubble of it.

And it's so important for you to be making the money that you're worth. And I know some of us are just, you get so happy that you're just doing a wedding or you're just whatever it may be, and then you're just undervaluing the service and the work that you provide. So if you're booking too many, you're probably should be raising your pricing.

The next thing, if you are only doing weddings a certain amount of weekends, let's just say you have a wedding season in your market of six to seven months, and in those six to seven months, you want to take on, let's just say 13, 15 weddings. I'm doing really low. My average I do is 45 to 55 weddings in a year.

And with that I know. How to to do that. But if you don't and you wanna have a higher average wedding, it, you're only booking a small amount of the weddings that, or weekends that you're available. You wanna make sure that you are charging because if people want you and you're only available a little bit, the scarcity around working with you is there.

So what is that scarcity, and can you up your prices because, Your availability is scarce. So those are two things to look at. And the third is, are you doing things that command a higher price point? If you are doing custom work that is going to command a higher price point, if you are making magical floral things happen that your intellectual property is figuring out or that our.

Really just like difficult things that the majority of florists don't know how to do. You should command a higher price point, therefore a higher labor percentage or wherever you want to play with your numbers as long as you get to a higher average per wedding. Because what you do is hard. What you do is magical and it's not something the everyday florist can do, and therefore you should command.

A price point commensurate with that. So if you're doing really custom things, you need to think about raising your prices at all as well, because those customizations deserve to be compensated accordingly. I hope this episode was helpful, flower Friend. I thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have an amazing flower filled week.