Floral designers here's why you need to stop undercharging and overfilling designs. Flower recipes can help maximize your business profits.

Bride and bridesmaids Barr Mansion with bouquets winter wedding Austin, TX

Industry standard pricing is the minimum you should be charging clients for your designs! If you need more information on pricing your designs, check out floral pricing guide in this past post.

Welcome to my final post of the Profitable Floral Design systems series. My favorite part of the business side of floral design is flower recipes. I want to share with you 6 ways having a great system for flower recipes and smart ordering can drastically improve your floral design business.

My general experience with floral designers is that we constantly strive to please our customers.

Florists are a people-pleasing bunch. We often go above and beyond because we covet and collect 5-star reviews. We tend to add just a little bit more to our designs than our budgets allow. A touch of jasmine vine here and just one more anemone over there can really make an arrangement shine, but can also quickly lower our profit margin. When multiplied over many orders throughout a year, those little additions start to make a dent in our profits.

Although these issues are common, it seems like few business owners make moves using flower recipes to correct them.

Alison Ellis of RealFlowerBusiness says it best in her new book Falling for Flowers, "I cannot stress this enough: It doesn't matter what you charge if you overbuy. I work with a profit goal, not a spending goal. This is why I follow recipes to avoid overfilling; I only buy the number of stems I need to fill orders to value. Overfilling is the No. 1 sin of florists. It may sound like I'm saying not to add a lot of extras, but overfilling can mean an addition of just one stem too many.

Here is a quick breakdown of how a floral business can be derailed overfilling by just one rose. If you add one extra rose ($4 retail) per arrangement and you design 25 centerpieces, that's $100 that you're giving away for free. If you multiply that over the number of centerpieces you may produce in a year, the amount can become staggering. In fact, if a shop sends out 25 arrangements with just one extra rose for an average of 5.5 days a week, that's more than $26,000 per year given away for free.

In the end, it doesn't matter what you charge if you overbuy! In other words, turning a profit is directly tied to how much you spend."

Flower recipes help to keep arrangements like this one profitable

All the designs from this winter wedding were made using flower recipes and achieved my profit goals.

So, what is the underlying issue so many floral designers struggle with when pricing and ordering flowers?

The old saying 'which came first, the chicken or the egg' pops into my mind when I ponder our floral designer tendency to undercharge and overfill designs. I often wonder why floral designers feel compelled to add more to our designs than what our self-determined budgets allow. We underprice and then we must overfill to compensate.

I think there are two main reasons why. It's because we tend to undervalue our work and instinctually price our designs without mathematical confirmation.

So, your mindset needs to shift if you are one of the many floral designers who fall into these traps.

Stick with me here.

When you sell a floral arrangement, you determine the price, right?

Yes. It's your active decision to sell a design at a specific price. And often, it's the business owner that doesn't stick to the budget allotted. I've known several florists who've said, "My boss makes me stick to our markups. Then she adds extra flowers to the orders after they are filled to value." This is one reason why employees get frustrated with their boss.

So, how can you take back control of your costs, keep your clients satisfied, and keep your employees sane?

Pricing your designs according to your retail formula and sticking to your budget is honestly the only way to handle this issue. There are so many moving parts to owning a small business that this essential process often gets pushed aside. A loose guesstimate on price often falls short of where you need it. Then, overfilling arrangements becomes the normal tendency to compensate for underpricing your work.

What is the best solution for this costly profitability problem? Flower Recipes and using a system that works.

Hands-down it's the single most effective way to increase profitability without increasing sales. Any increase in sales is difficult to achieve right now with COVID restrictions in place and lots of uncertainty about the future. So, increasing profitability on every order you receive is the best way to maximize your business opportunities.

Let's dig into 6 ways using flower recipes can help increase your profitability

1. Pay attention to your flower costs.

Managing your flower costs is a time-consuming process. However, your flower costs are a significant portion of your overall business costs. So, if you let flower costs get out of hand, it can seriously affect your bottom line. If you aren't in total control of this process, now is the time to stop the bleeding. Take the time to calculate your COGS and manage your flower orders. Then, keep a close eye on the number of wasted flowers you toss at the end of every event. By doing this you'll refine your pricing and recipe formulas with every order.

Let me give you an example.

A floral designer I recently spoke with told me not only is she keeping track of all her orders, but she's also auditing every recipe after the event is over. She keeps notes on what she needed more of and what she had leftovers of with each flower order. Then, when she gets a new inquiry with similar designs to an order she's already analyzed, she goes back and adjusts the pricing and flower recipes to create more accurate proposals. With each new client, she is learning how to fine-tune her flower recipes to maximize her profits. Now, that is a business practice that brings massive value. This florist has a profit first mindset! If you are struggling with pricing and ordering, give this process a try.

Flower recipes are the best solution to controlling your flower costs. The most profitable florists I know all use flower recipes in their businesses.

2. Calculate your Cost of Goods weekly.

Fear of facing the numbers is real. So, how can you overcome this fear?

The best way is to jump headfirst into the numbers more frequently. It'll be messy at first. That's okay. Keep coming back week after week. Just like one of those funky optical illusion posters, after a while, it will all come into clear view. This weekly meeting with your numbers is important enough to put on your calendar. Why? Well, it's because your salary depends on it. Make a date with your COGS report each week. You won't even have to buy it a cup of coffee, but you'll begin a long affair with a more profitable business by committing to your weekly date.

The use of flower recipes helps you get the most out of your COGS report weekly meeting. The prior week's orders will still be fresh in your mind. So, you'll remember if you chose to go over budget on an order because that recipe fell a little short. Then, you can adjust by raising the price on that design going forward and adding a few more blooms to your recipe. If you do this process monthly or quarterly, you don't have the benefit of a sharp memory. Also, when you compare week-over-week you'll be able to see trends clearly and act before costs get out of control

Winter centerpiece with accent decor candle holders

3. Spend time with your vendors.

Your flower vendors play a huge role in the success of your business. You also play a role in the success of your vendors' businesses as one of their clients. So, communicate with them frequently and openly. They need to know that you value your profitability and that you expect to keep your flower costs as low as possible. They also need to know that you will hold them accountable. When they give you prices for your flowers they need to live up to those prices and provide you with high quality too.

Flower recipes can help you plan a mix of more expensive and less expensive flowers to create well-rounded designs for your clients. Your wholesaler can help with this in several ways. Ask them to keep you informed of box-lot deals, price fluctuations on certain varieties of flowers, and any issues with flower availability and substitutions.

When you provide your wholesaler with an organized recipe-based floral order and they call to let you know that a certain flower is not available, you'll be able to adjust your order easily. Be sure that the order provides them with the price you've agreed to pay per stem. Then, they can use that to suggest substitutes for you that will be of similar quality and color. Be open with your vendors about your business needs so they can help you achieve your profitability goals.

4. Pay attention when placing your flower and hard-goods orders.

When you're busy it's easy to put flower and hard-goods ordering on auto-pilot. But, this tends to lead to over-ordering, which only hurts your business. It's important to evaluate your inventory and modify your orders accordingly. You don't need a year's supply of votive candles sitting on the shelf collecting dust when that money could be used for something more valuable in the moment.

Recipe-based ordering can help avoid these over-buying issues because you can see how much you need of any given item for each event. This system helps eliminate the guessing game on ordering and in turn, increases your overall profitability.

Wedding cake Barr Mansion Fruit and Flowers

5. Choose the right technology for your business.

When it comes to the future of your business, technology is the way to go. Nowadays, software can help you manage all the aspects of your studio. But if you just pick the shiniest looking piece of tech, it could have the wrong effect on your business. Take the time to analyze what type of software will be best for your business.

When it comes to flower recipes I've tried a few different software options.

I wasn't fully satisfied with any of them so I'm creating my own. It's going to be inexpensive and intuitive. Floral designers will be able to customize their orders and it's going to have some extremely useful features. I hope you'll follow my journey with this new technology on Instagram @everystem_. It will be launching in 2021 and I am so excited about sharing it with you. It's going to help our industry streamline flower recipes and increase profits across the board!

6. Dedicate yourself to your profitability.

As I mentioned earlier, it's up to you, the business owner, to dedicate your efforts towards profitability. Show your team that you care about your profits. Trust me. They will follow suit. Remind your team regularly that making profitability a priority is essential. Let them know that it means everyone wins. Then live up to that promise by compensating your team accordingly.

Keep an eye on your best-sellers so that you can share more of those designs on social media and your website. Then, find ways to increase the profitability of those designs as a team. Also, make it a point to increase the profit margins on those designs. Just like a restaurant highlights the most profitable dishes on its menu, you can highlight your most profitable offerings on your website. Use your most requested designs as a starting point. Then, brainstorm ways to make them more profitable!

Make these efforts a priority and follow the tips above to increase your profitability without increasing sales in the coming months. Then, as your business grows, you can keep the focus on making every design as profitable as possible using recipe-based floral design and a commitment to your profit first mindset.

Until next time,

LuAnn

Flower recipes help keep you in business

Happily ever after means your clients are happy and you've made a healthy profit!