How this floral designer turned 2021 into her most profitable year with EveryStem florist software
4 hours per wedding. That’s how much time Ashley Fox was spending creating flower recipes and orders for each client for the first 13 years of her business.
Early on in her career Ashley discovered her love for flowers and wanted to delve into the world of professional floral design specifically for weddings and events.
She quickly learned that the enjoyment of flowers only took her so far in business.
Her vision was to build a business that would be around for decades, so she became focused on how to be profitable.
Ashley’s work has been seen in VOGUE.com, Martha Stewart Weddings, People Magazine, Minnesota Bride Magazine, Minneapolis / St. Paul Weddings, Nebraska Wedding Day, Flower Magazine, Once Wed and many other respected publications and blogs. Opened in 2008, Ashley Fox Designs uses the créme de la créme of fresh, local blooms and beyond to create the most beautiful designs inspired by nature.
Ashley Fox Designs is a full-service floral studio specializing in luxurious styling and fresh floral designs for weddings, events, editorials and breathtaking installations in Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota and is available for travel. She is known for her extraordinary use of color and unforgettable selection of flowers for her clients.
She decided to start looking at her time commitments for everything she does in her business to find the sticking points in her processes. She looked for ways to become more efficient overall.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Ashley about her business and how she’s using EveryStem to increase profits and save time. I’d love for you to watch the interview in it’s entirety— click here to watch it now. Or keep reading for a quick recap!
One of the best tactics Ashley shares in our interview is a technique called time blocking.
It’s a tool that helps ensure she handles not only the tasks she finds fun, but also tackles the tasks she isn’t as fond of in equal proportions. And, it works!
As a wedding florist, she allocates specific days of the week to different tasks. Such as:
Monday: Admin, Email, Accounting
Tuesday: Flower Recipes and Flower Orders
Wednesday: Color Palettes, Design Decks
Thursday-Saturday: Flower processing, Design, Setup
This tactic has helped her focus on all the aspects of her business and put in the work required to achieve profitability, but she was still searching for a more efficient way to build flower recipes, price floral designs, and order wholesale flowers.
After years of spending hours and hours hand-writing flower recipes and calculating prices with an old-school calculator, Ashely moved to the world of spreadsheets. Flipping back and forth from one spreadsheet to another to count her centerpieces and candles in different places.
Ashley discovered EveryStem florist software in early 2021 thanks to our mutual flower industry friend Amy McGee, the creator of my favorite podcast for florists, Botanical Brouhaha.
The affordable price and simplicity of EveryStem enticed Ashley to give our florist software a try. Now, just over a year later using EveryStem her flower recipes and hard good counts are all in one place and the software is saving her hours on each wedding.
Her flower ordering time was three to four hours per wedding before EveryStem. Now she’s creating orders for weddings in less than 1/3 of that time.
A recent wedding with a $20,000 floral budget took Ashley a total of half an hour!
Plus, you need to know that half an hour included the time she spent emailing the order to her wholesalers and flower growers.
And yes, she timed herself! ;)
30 weddings a year with an average time savings of 3.5 hours per wedding is over 100 hours a year that Ashley has freed up for herself simply by making the effort to switch to EveryStem.
Ashley wants you to know the truth, “EveryStem is not going to do your work for you. You have to put the work in if you want to be profitable and EveryStem makes that process super-efficient.”
So, how did she do it?
She spent time as a new member using the software to build her library of flowers, watched the video tutorials, and then customized a few templates specifically for her most frequented venues.
The upfront effort of switching to a new software was worthwhile for Ashley because she’s accumulating time savings and increasing profits with each wedding she produces.
Here’s another example of how Ashely has changed her process using EveryStem to save even more time beyond just the initial flower order.
Before EveryStem, when a client would make a last-minute addition of centerpieces or arrangements after the flower order was complete, Ashley would have to adjust her flower recipes by hand. It took way too long and was error prone to boot. The ability for her to simplify and speed up that process with EveryStem has saved her significant amounts of time and she shares more detail on that in the video.
If you are interested in learning more check out the video link jumps to 5:12 for you.
The topic of over-ordering versus having enough extra stems to cover breakage came up in our conversation because before she started using EveryStem florist software Ashley did not have a system that allowed her to manage the number of extra stems she was ordering based on bunch counts. This process often left her with too many leftover flowers and ate into her profitability.
Now, with EveryStem she controls the number of extra stems she orders for each event.
One specific example was a recent wedding in January.
Ashley and her team produced a wedding with several large installations and lots of centerpieces. At the end of the event there were only 3 small buckets of flowers left over. They came in right where they needed to be with very little leftover and she was okay with just a few extra bunches. You can jump to 7:27 in the video to hear Ashley’s perspective on extra flowers.
Ashley has created minimum order requirements for her business which help her to establish how much she charges for baseline designs like arches, bouquets, and centerpieces, but when it comes to new designs she is less familiar with, EveryStem has become her go-to tool to pin-point the prices of installations she’s never created before. Go to 9:10 in the video to get more detail on her point of view on pricing new designs.
She uses EveryStem to estimate prices of flowers using her flower growers’ price lists from previous years and then updates the prices in her event when order time rolls around.
Flower prices have been fluctuating so much recently. The estimated price of a flower may change when the time to order arrives, so Ashley now easily adjusts the prices of her flowers in EveryStem once she receives them from her flower growers.
This allows her to look at the prices and determine if that flower is worth the cost or if a substitution is in order.
When a sub-out must happen it’s much easier for her to edit the flower in EveryStem and update the flower in all the recipes than using her old method.
By estimating her prices and following up with her wholesalers and growers on price fluctuations, Ashley makes sure she is staying on budget for every wedding.
She puts the work in to make each wedding profitable and EveryStem makes that process super-efficient.
Another helpful tip Ashley offered up during our conversation focused on how she personally counts her flowers in to check both quality and quantity. This is an important step in her process and she explains why this process is so important at 13:40 into the video.
There’s always something that needs attention or a little something that is missing in each order. So, personal attention to processing the flowers allows Ashley to pin-point what those things are and decide how to handle any missing or damaged flowers quickly.
It’s a great workflow.
The week of each wedding Ashley uses her EveryStem printouts to check off every flower as she processes it and uses the printouts to follow her flower recipes.
Recently, a mother and daughter client come into her studio and as they were leaving the mother said “This must be a stressful job for you, but you don’t seem stressed.”
Ashley replied “That’s really good. I must have a good poker face, but also I do the work on the front end” and that is using EveryStem, a good design deck, and rolling with what needs to be substituted out and not allowing disappointment to sink in when a certain flower variety isn’t available. Ashely added that having a positive profitable outcome in the end because she’s using EveryStem helps her feel good about the difficulties of working with perishable product.
If you’re a new member of EveryStem or thinking about becoming a member, there are a few tangible things Ashley wants you to know.
When Ashley’s freelancers join her in the studio for production there is a lot less question and answer time than there was prior to using EveryStem. The recipe printouts offer the freelancers the opportunity to get the information they need about the designs they are assigned without having to ask many questions. Fewer questions from her team gives her more time to do other things.
As a business owner, you know how valuable clear communication is, especially during production. EveryStem has increased that for Ashley and her team and it can do the same for you.
A lot of decisions are made during wedding weeks. From processing the flowers and gathering the hard goods, to design and installation prep, the stress can put a damper on creativity.
Ashley brought up a great point about why she doesn’t want to think about math during wedding prep and production days. She wants to enjoy designing without sweating about how many flowers she needs in each centerpiece.
She does the work of planning recipes up front purposefully, so that on the design days she can pull the quantities of flowers she plans to use in each design from her recipe printouts, and free her mind up for the creative process of design.
She loves designing without the pressure of calculating flower math on the fly.
Ashley says, “If you got into floral design to enjoy designing, it’s a no-brainer to me to have EveryStem because it allows for that creative aspect to flourish”.
EveryStem is enabling the freelancers to enjoy the experience of design, ask fewer questions, and because she is feeling less stress overall the entire production process feels more enjoyable. That is what Ashley calls the butterfly effect of EveryStem and she wants you to experience it too.
You may be questioning this method and feel that recipes and pre-planning designs can stifle your creativity, but Ashley continues, “…if you have a solid base of a system down the creative aspect can really, really start to come through because you are not stressing and stress dampens the creative process…a small wedding can be ordered without a stem count, but once you start getting into larger events it’s nearly impossible to think about that…We want to enjoy our jobs so much. So why not give yourself the gift of being able to enjoy it? It’s as simple as that”.
Jump to 23:15 in the video to listen in to Ashley’s point of view on creativity and flower recipes.
I found it to be impactful because we often feel stress during production and do not realize that the root cause is preventable.
Our conversation then turned back to pricing new designs and a new hanging piece that Ashley will be creating for a client in July. The client wants to know the price, of course! So, she plans to quickly login to EveryStem and price this exciting new installation later in the day because it’s her go-to solution for pricing new designs.
Speaking of proposals for new clients, since many weddings have similarities Ashley has been frequently using the copy feature in EveryStem to duplicate previous events and quickly adjust orders for new clients. Using our copy feature along with her templates for specific venues are speeding up her proposal process significantly.
Her turnover time for proposals is a whole lot faster thanks to these built-in features of EveryStem florist software. Jump to 29:20 to listen to Ashley explain how she is using her past recipes to speed up her workflow on future events.
The time she saves by using EveryStem allows her to spend more time with her family and the increased profits have allowed her to invest back into marketing and growing her business.
Over the winter Ashley did two things with her increased profits to re-invest in her floral design business. She updated her website and created a Pinterest presence through a new marketing person that she hired.
Pinterest is a valuable place for floral designers to focus marketing efforts. The total investment of under $1,000 has already started generating a visible amount of new traffic to the Ashley Fox Designs website.
The upfront effort of setting up EveryStem, the affordable price, and the time spent learning how to use it is a trade-off that enabled Ashley to spend less time on flower orders, pricing, and proposals.
Her efforts to switch to a new florist software has increased her profits and now those profits are being re-invested to bring in new clients that will fall under her more efficient workflow and continue the acceleration of her business. To hear Ashley’s message for those of you who are considering becoming an EveryStem member jump to 31:56 in the video.
The reward for me is that Ashley has seen real results after a year of using EveryStem florist software. I am so happy she has reaped these long-term benefits of being an EveryStem member and I’m confident that the program will continue to support her business in the future.
Ashely calls the increased time spent with her family and her new Pinterest presence butterfly effects of using EveryStem florist software. One small change can result in some big differences!
I absolutely love the positive ripples this software has sent through Ashley’s business.
Overall, the two greatest benefits are that she has more time to spend with family and do things that are benefiting her business. Those things are worth so much they greatly offset the price of her membership. In fact, Ashley recouped her annual membership fee after just one wedding!
Are you stuck in a flower ordering rut?
Do you need to spend less time pricing your work?
Or are you looking to increase your profits and end the habit of over-ordering flowers?
Try EveryStem for yourself with our 90-day money back guarantee.
As Ashley mentions in our chat, there is a very low risk with EveryStem because the price of our software is so affordable. Check out our pricing and then jump into the program and get started so you can see results for yourself!
If you have questions or want to set up a one-on-one with me to learn more, please email me!
Until next time,
LuAnn