The Difference Between Busy and Profitable
Hello flower friends. On this episode, I wanna talk about profit. I've actually been talking a lot about profit on the podcast lately, and as wedding season is starting to wind down, I always feel a little tired at this point in the year. And I did a fun wedding this week. This actually today, uh, it was kind of a Halloween inspired, it was a girl with blue and green hair at one of my favorite venues 'cause they're my favorite people in the world.
And you know, like all these things were fun, but I was still tired. And it's because I. I have been busy. Um, I have also been profitable, but one thing that really I think I missed the mark on for years and years in the beginning of my floral business is that I thought busy meant success. And today I wanna talk about the difference between busy and profitable because I.
I personally have seen other florists, including myself, be super booked and everything on Instagram makes them look like they're crushing it. But when you would step back and look at their books, things are anything but crushing it and there is. Really one place to kind of start, um, to figure this out, and that is you have to have some type of bookkeeping system to be able to track your profit, to be able to track your expenses, to really just know what is going on.
And this is also something that I see a lot of florists hesitate on because you're like, well, you know, there's an expense with getting QuickBooks and you know, I just, ah. Everything's kind of simple right now, and you know, or like, I just don't know if I, it looks hard or complicated and, you know, I'm not an accountant or, you know, I, I mean, I have heard the gamut.
I have had the gamut. Like I am really not a person who loves to be living in spreadsheets, but that is not an excuse to be. A bad business owner and I am saying bad business owner, because if you have no fucking clue what is going on with your margins, if you have no clue what the profitability of your business actually is, like you're not being a great business owner.
So what is really the difference between busy and profitable to me, uh, to the core? It definitely is making sure that you have a function or ability to make sure that you can even look and try to figure out what your profit is and not guess. But the second part is really your pricing and making sure that you are not overspending.
It's, it's back to the basics. Your pricing based on formulas that are for profit. You are making sure you are ordering within the guidelines of profitability. You are making sure that your expenses around that wedding are supporting profitability. So what I often see is people also aren't charging for all the ancillary things that come along, like setup, delivery.
Room flips, tear downs. I mean, I have in the past, like I, I will share this because it's so ridiculous. Way back in the day, I charged $30 to deliver a wedding, $30 to come back for a room flip, and $30 for a tear down because I was charging hourly. And a million years ago, $30 was my hourly rate, which is ridiculous, but I, I didn't know better.
And there are so many things out there to help you really figure out how to price. But if you don't know, I have so many episodes on pricing itself. But if you don't know and would like some further insight other than listening to those, go check out floral ceo.com/uh pricing and you can get my full guide that breaks down pricing.
It is one of the biggest things that you really have to perfect in your business to have sustainability in your business because you can get a lot of bookings and you can be really busy, but. Busy doesn't mean profitable. And the difference between that is those core things, making sure you're pricing correctly, making sure that you're ordering correctly, and then making sure that you're keeping all of the other expenses in line with that wedding if you didn't charge.
Enough for your labor percentage, but here it is, you're not able to do, you got this big $15,000 wedding, you're obviously probably not able to make every single thing. I mean, you could and not sleep. You could probably figure it out and not sleep. I hope that's not the business owner or the human that you wanna be anymore.
What you. Realistically wanna make sure is that you're building a labor percentage in it that supports having freelancers. And when you have freelancers in there, I think for one, it's just fun to be working with somebody else. And it's fun to be, you know, I, I think personally it's fun to be helping other florists that are trying to grow their business.
I think it's fun to help them learn. I mean, I literally was giving spiral. Um, technique, bouquet techniques. Oh God. This week I did it two weeks ago. I did it in front of three people. I mean, like, there I find value in giving back and I find value in if somebody's coming, especially now that they're coming to the farm.
I find value in making sure that. They're leaving with with some tidbit or something that help them be a better florist, and you need to make sure that you have that revenue to support bringing those people into your studio. And honestly, like nothing goes as fast as you want it to. All these things can go sideways quickly when flowers don't arrive on time, when flowers are wrong and you need replacements, or they're bad and you need replacements, and that slows down production because you don't have the product or the container wasn't, you know, I mean, there's like just so many things that could go wrong that you wanna make sure that you are prepared.
And you have priced properly in case hiccups happen. Bringing any, you know, kind of vision to life, it sounds really easy and conceptual in your head, but by time you're like, like today for example, I'm setting up my wedding and like the HIPA that we were setting up on, literally, it's super windy. The bride did not know, because I don't think she's Jewish.
I think her future husband was Jewish, didn't know that you need a fabric on the top of it and it's, it's gotta be covered. It's like I've never done, I mean, it's a thing. It's just a requirement. So she went and got a bedsheet, and so here is these planners, like God bless 'em, trying to figure out. How to rig this sheet into this, you know, hipa and then it's windy out and we're outside on October 26.
People like, it's, it's kind of a little brisk, uh, as well. And the sheet is almost creating this sale. On and it keeps, like, whenever the wind comes, it's like bending, you know, or bringing a leg out or whatever on, on the hoppa. It's just, it's this hoppa was kind of a mess to begin with. But then we add the sail effect and so like that install just took longer because like the fricking structure was just like moving.
And then also the structure is like a regular two inch kind of round. Um. Kind of pipe, and that's harder to install on. It requires extra zip ties as kind of almost like stoppers and like just a lot. Just a lot. I. I don't ever like to do hoppa that aren't a flat one, but this one with the complexity of them basically just taking a sheet and wrapping it flush and having wind and it being cold.
I, I mean, it was just crazy, but it took longer. The hanging installation that we were doing, um, you know, there that just, of course it was really great that this place has all these hooks in their ceiling, but guess what? There's also chandeliers going up and we need to make sure there's enough hooks for the chandeliers and the floral installation.
So we had to completely change the orientation of the tables. The tables were gonna go, um, kind of like dividing the room in half and we needed to get them to basically, uh, divide them the long way. And so like then we're moving tables and we're doing all these things and like that took another 45 minutes.
I had luckily. People that were there, I just had them do other tasks while we were figuring this out. But that was like, I mean, if I didn't have other tasks, that would've been 2.25 hours of labor that I would've been spending was something that was completely not my fault. So making sure that you're, you're charging correctly.
It is so critical because you can be the busiest florist in the world. And I have known, I have been one of those, I did 130, I think it was 132 weddings one year, and I literally made hardly any money because I wasn't charging correctly. I wasn't, uh, I was over ordering. I was. Working full time. So I was paying tons of labor and like it just didn't work.
So if you want things to truly work, you need to have all of these, you know, kind of ducks in a row, pricing, labor, and making sure that you're not over ordering. If this is a struggle for you, especially on installations next month, um, for the month of November of 2025, in case you're listening to this later, we are going to be digging into installations in the floral CEO Mastermind.
We're gonna be doing a session all about pricing. We're gonna be doing a session all about planning. And we're gonna be doing a, um, session about mechanics, uh, because you also need to make sure you have the right mechanics so that your labor doesn't get out of whack, because if your mechanics are whack or don't work, then you're gonna be in a trouble from a labor standpoint.
So we're digging into that. And then, um, for the month of December, we're actually gonna be. Talking about building relationships with wedding planners and how to really get in with wedding planners, how to market yourself, how to respond, how to interact, like what do you even do with a wedding planner, because sometimes that can be complicated.
So we're gonna be diving into that for so the next two months. Are gonna be juicy. And then January 1st, we have a goal planning party, and we really dive into making sure that we're planning strategic goals for 2026 that are really going to help you move the needle from whatever that means. Revenue, um, work life balance, whatever needle you wanna move, we, we build a plan.
So now is the time to join. Check out floral ceo.com/mastermind. But I hope that 2025 was a profitable, sustainable year and you weren't just busy, you were also profitable if you were busy and profitable. Love it. If that's where you wanna be. I love it, but if you wanna be profitable and less busy, that's great too.
Everybody defines their own success. Thank you so much for listening, flower Friend. And you have an amazing flower filled day. You.
