The Floral CEO

 Hello, flower friends. Has your business ever felt like a utter hot mess? Or maybe your personal life is a hot mess and you're just always busy, you never have time to catch up. You feel like you're drowning? And this could be, in the start of your business, this could be when you're making a bunch of money 'cause things just blow up.

But. How do you start to really just get a grip on everything? Where do you start when everything feels like a hot mess and there are weeks that everybody feels like their business is a complete chicho. Maybe you are running behind on your wedding. Maybe a bunch of flowers came in bad and are wilting or just not great.

Maybe like you just have clients that are. Testing boundaries, texting you at 11 o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night, and you feel like you are surviving. You feel like you're not running a business, it's running you. And this episode is where we start putting out the fires. A lot of time, this feeling comes from overwhelm.

Overwhelm doesn't feel good, and often overwhelm is really just a lack of systems and decision fatigue. And then constant firefighting, you just feel like you're running around with a fire hose without clear processes. You are reinventing the wheel every day if you don't have a system in place.

This is how I handle something. You are just every day going, okay, here's a problem. How am I going to fix it? Instead of going, this is the problem, this is how I handle this situation. If it doesn't make you a bad business owner when you don't have systems. And I think people feel shame and honestly, they're just kind of embarrassed, but.

All you need is structure. All you need is to figure out where do I start? And so I wanna talk to you about like your start here solution. This is your place to really figure out, okay, this sucks, this doesn't feel good, and what do I need to do to fix it? So you step into. Really, I'm going to start here.

The first thing you need to do is you need to audit your chaos. Write down every area that feels broken. If your weddings feel like shit you know, you don't have enough help, you don't have, I mean, whatever it is, like you're sending invoices and you know they're going unpaid forever. You're VAEs are never your ordering shit never comes on time.

Like whatever it is, step back and look at it. Go, okay. This is, feels like a lot. How do I fix this? And then from there you are going to prioritize. So let's just say you have this system that you feel like you are getting ghosted. Uh, so all of these, consultations for one, you're getting tons of leads.

Tons of consultations, but you're not converting anybody and it just doesn't feel good. So you need to fix that. You need to come up with a way, how am I going to handle this better? Because you are getting so many of them. You're getting behind on your estimates, you're getting, behind on, uh, replies on emails and things like that.

So how do you get ahold of that? Maybe you, when you're auditing it, you're like, okay. It's taking me like three or four days to figure this out. Okay. I need to probably either a prioritize and maybe do time blocking. So twice a day I'm in my inbox and I'm flagging people so that I have a daily follow-up ritual or maybe on.

My morning, you know, your morning coffee, you sit down and you, uh, slam out all of these different emails that need to be sent. Maybe your estimates are getting, overwhelming and the volume of your consultations is overwhelming. Frankly. Maybe even. I was at a point where scheduling.

Consultations felt like shit to me. And so my solution is I got Calendly. Calendly, you can have one booking appointment for free. I have multiple booking appointments that if I want somebody to meet with me for 15 minutes for some simple questions, if I wanna meet with a bride for 30 minutes to kind of rego over their order, if I wanna meet for a 45 minute consultation or if I need to do a full design.

Meeting, like those are all different times, and I send that Calendly link for that person to book. I'm not going back and forth in my email all the time, and that doesn't feel good to me. That seems really wasteful. So I have built it in to my Sunday night ritual that I go in and I check my calendar, I fill it in.

And then from there, everything is booking on its own. I don't have to babysit it. Let's just say that actually making the proposals is taking forever. Do you have a template? Have you spent time and organized your Canva? Have you spent time and organized whatever you're using for your pro proposals?

Maybe you are spending hours and hours on these proposals. Well. How could you streamline them? How could you make that faster? Do you have a template that actually converts? I mean, do you have a template that will print? Do you even know how to fix it? Maybe it's time like, God, I don't even know how to fix this problem.

I would love to do a one-on-one call, and let's really dive into what is feeling heavy in your business, because you can't always fix. What feels heavy alone and you deserve help and honestly for a one hour session is $200. We could make some serious headway in one hour. If you feel like, God, my business is really on fire, an hour and a half, I will have a link in the show notes for you to, um, send a message if that's something that you're interested in, but you need processes If something in your business is feeling heavy.

A process and a framework will probably fix it. All right. Then you figured out you have this big dumpster fire. Of a business and something doesn't feel good. Maybe it's even your finances. Maybe you don't have any accounting software to really even know what your business is making. Maybe it's ingrained in your personal finances.

Maybe you're doing everything on your own and you don't know what really is an expense or not. So maybe you need to hire an accountant. There's a lot of things that could be what ifs, so you need to dive in and figure out. I wanna fix one of these. How do I get this to feel better? How do I get this to be my first system in my business?

Can you automate it or delegate it? Can tech handle it? Can someone else do it? Free yourself up whenever possible. 'cause if you are on a growth trajectory, you can't do everything. Growth means uncomfortableness. Growth means making changes, and then you need to have a system that you can rinse and repeat.

Add another system only when the first one is working. When you've really nailed like, okay, I can get my proposals now down to 30 minutes, or I can get making my proposals down to X amount of time. Then from there you can go in and be like, okay, I feel really good. I, for a couple weeks now I'm going to tackle trying to figure out QuickBooks.

Like whatever it is, start making a shift so that you can rinse and repeat that process and then look what is next? What can I fix next? But you also have to have the mindset. That I am running my business like a CEO, which means creating repeatable processes that prevent chaos. Honestly, some people love a little chaos.

Some people love the adrenaline of their business being a dumpster fire. Some people love. They don't say, they'll say that this feels so like shit. But then they don't wanna change anything because maybe they're scared. Or maybe your whole life has been chaos. Like all, when I grew up, everything was chaos, everything was tumultuous.

Uh, I mean there was always like this, my body got used. To and almost then crave because you're on this adrenaline system and this kind of emotional response system to like, okay, things feel too calm, to feel good right now. And that I know sounds weird, but that is a very real thing. Some people are addicted to chaos then.

How can I make this not feel like it is so fucking boring that I don't wanna do it? Systems are not boring. They create freedom. They protect your creativity, and when you have systems, you get your time back for design, for client connection, for interaction and base, basically for you to grow your business.

If everything is always a dumpster fire. Growing your business is going to be 10 times harder. So how do you create that shift that allows you to start to see really big things and then once you've picked one recurring pain point in your business this week and you've written down those exact steps you need to take when it goes right.

That's the start of your first system, whatever that thing is, that's the start. When you get started and you get something to feel really good, you might be like, oh my God, this feels so much better. That's where you want to be as the CEO in your business. You don't wanna live in this constant chaos of this doesn't feel good.

You wanna start living in like, I am the CEO of my business. My systems and everything feel really good to me, and then from there I go on to fix and become even better and brighter. I always, I know it's kind of like a, something people are often ashamed of that they don't have these, you know, this things feel heavy or they don't have these things going on in place.

But honestly, that's where like the magic is. That is what success looks like. If you have grown your business so much and you have so much business and you have so much like abundance coming your way, like good job, good job, that your business is at a point that you have outgrown the current systems that you had in place, or the lack of systems that you had in place.

Isn't that cool? To think this is sometimes what success looks like, outgrowing. What was previously Okay. And if you can step back and look at it that way, not that I'm failing, 'cause this is something that was really easy for me to do, is just attack myself. And you don't need to do that. It is normal to have, for one, like have you done this before?

Have you been the CEO before? Have you kick ass and take names before? Probably not. So if you haven't done those things, how can we expect for you to nail these things? I want you to love your business and often systems are the way to start that like love back and forth because when things start to feel better.

So much feels better if you are just getting started and you're like, you have no systems at all. I do have a floor floor starter kit that is absolutely free that walks you through a million different things that will help you set up your business successfully. Go to floral c uh.com/starter. And that is loaded with information.

I will also link it in the show notes, but I encourage you, this is your first step to feeling like the CEO instead of the employee drowning in your own business. You deserve to have a business that's filled with goodness, that is making money, not bleeding money, and that isn't that far away. You could be one system away.

Thank you so much for listening, flower Friend, and you have an amazing flower filled day.