Exposing My 6-Figure Flower Business | Behind the Scenes of A Real $880,000 Flower Shop

I want to share how I created an $880,000 flower business and I want to pass along the two biggest mistakes that I wish I hadn't made. One of the things that I had no idea about when I was starting my professional floristry journey was the concept of scaling a business. And for me it was like so many floral designers where we just fall in love with flowers and when I started to figure out that you can actually make a career and better yet a business out of our passion, it took me a long time to realize that we have to think at a massive scale. And I wanted to put this video together for you guys because I know it can be so helpful to really understand like what does the inside of a profitable flower business look like. And if you're just at the beginning of your flowering business, I wanted to go through a few of the key pieces of the puzzle to help you really understand the bigness that we need to think in in terms of really being able to make money and earn a good living as a florist. But even better than that, if you've been in business for a while and you're like, oh my god, I don't understand why this isn't working, I'm exhausted, I am like moments away from wanting to throw in the towel, I hope that this video helps you because I so wish I had understood how other successful business owners approach running a business. A few weeks ago, I posted a little question on my Instagram stories to ask you guys, hey, if I was to put a YouTube video together that talked through the ins and outs and really understanding the scale of the business that we created, what are the specific kinds of things that you'd like to know? And there were three very common questions, like three recurring questions that we got a lot, and that's exactly what I wanted to talk through in this video. But I'm also going to tell you right now, if you've got more questions, if you want to know more about the specifics, throw it in the comments below, seriously. Because I spent five years basically trying to figure this out, and I was completely on my own. I mean, I was with my husband. So that was awesome. But I didn't have a Kathleen that I could turn to to be like, hey, so what did you do in this situation? Or hey, can you tell me what I need to do in terms of the strategy and what I need to prioritize? I'll just interrupt myself for a hot second, too. And if you're new here, welcome to one of the greatest little corners of the interwebs. My friend, my name is Kathleen, and you are in the absolute perfect place if you're a floral designer or a farmer florist, if you're a person who is passionate about flowers and you want to build a business from your passion. My mission is to make sure we cut through all of the secrecy that I can share my best tips and strategies and really cut through that secrecy that our industry is so incredibly hush-hush about. And I went to formal floristry school. I have my credentials and my certification. But what my mission is to really bridge the gap between you learning about design and flower care and you learning how to run a business and make money. To give you a little bit of context, because it's really helpful to know that every flower business owner has some nuances and subtleties and strategic advantages and disadvantages depending on where in the world you operate, the size of the population that you can serve, and just some of the nuances in terms of the habits and the trends within your local community or even within your country. So the business I'm going to talk through was based in a general overall delivery footprint of about 45,000 people. The area is basically made up of seven or eight super small villages, but we did do deliveries about 45 minutes east of 45 minutes west, 45 minutes north and 45 minutes south. So it's a big geographical area and it's about 90 minutes south of Sydney, Australia. So the population isn't massive. And so question number one that you guys really wanted to know the answer to was what was the revenue split? And so with a total revenue over the course of 12 months, there were five places that we made most of our money. One of the things to know that in our small town, corporates wasn't a thing. Doing fancy restaurants, flowers, flowers for hotels, like there just wasn't that kind of infrastructure in our area for us to even really prioritize it as a revenue stream. So corporates was zero. The second piece of the puzzle, and this was probably one of the smallest pieces of our revenue pie was funerals. Now over time, this did increase for us because we decided to make it a priority, but funerals as a total amount of our revenue stream was only about 5%. I will also tell you though that I am a floral designer that loves the ceremony and I love the kind of passion that goes into funeral flowers and it's probably one of my greatest loves in terms of being able to design for. So I'm going to give you total permission to go out there and if you want to do funeral flowers, you do funeral flowers. Talk about an underserved market. So back in 2018, we only made about 15% of our revenue from online orders, but this was the year that we changed our approach, which I'll talk about in a second, because we started to see that the quality of customers that were coming online were way better than in other areas of our business. So we decided to make it our number one priority. So obviously over the course of the next few years, our ratios changed, but in our greatest revenue year, $880,000, we only made about 15% of our revenue from online orders. The next place that we got the bulk of our revenue from was phone orders. Now, we used to categorize in our point of sale system if people would actually call us so that they would actually place their order. I think there's a huge percentage of those people that called that literally started the conversation off with, I'm just on your website. So they weren't even calling to pick up anything in store, they were calling for a delivery and they just had a few questions for clarity and then we'd end up taking their order over the phone. So I will say, I think that's a huge percentage of people that actually now are shopping online, but at the time it was about 20% of our revenue. And then the big question and the thing that I was really surprised by was our walk-in revenue was $30,000. So we classified that as somebody who would walk into our shop and either order a delivery or just buy something on the spot or order something and then come back in 20 or 30 minutes to pick it up. So that was 30% of our revenue. And this was one of our greatest learnings, which I will share with you guys and go into a bit more detail, but we had a huge number of transactions that came through from a walk-in point of view, but the value of those transactions was actually really, really small. So then off the back of that, we made 30% of our revenue purely from weddings. So that's the general snapshot in terms of the ratio of revenue and the different streams that we were focused on back in 2018. For those of you guys who are in the Flower Boss Academy, you now know that some of those ratios would be different and I would suggest you prioritize things a little bit differently. However, I know it's super helpful to just know, hey, at any moment in time, what did your business look like? And question number two is how the heck did we get customers? Well, my friend, this is where one of my biggest learnings came from. As I mentioned before, in our total revenue split, 30% of our revenue came from walk-in traffic. However, the average transaction value that we were navigating from walk-in traffic was $45. So if we do a little bit of math and we take $880,000 and divide it by $45, we see that we need to manage 20,000 transactions. That's like 20,000 customers. That's insane and I'm exhausted. But one of the best learnings that we had is just because you have a physical retail shop doesn't mean that your number one priority from a strategy and a marketing point of view needs to be the customers that walk in the door. Yes, absolutely. You want to serve them with phenomenal customer service and you want to have an amazing experience and amazing offer to them. However, I have found, and in working with florists from around the world, it's the same thing. The average transaction value of somebody who walks into the store tends to be significantly lower than somebody who orders over the phone, but better yet, somebody who orders online. So when we really started to dig into our data and understand, you know what, we are having to invest a huge amount of energy, effort, and money. This is when we made a big strategic shift in our business. This was the year that we decided, okay, we need to prioritize online because our online average order value was almost three times that of somebody who walked in the store, which is exactly where you want to get your business to because then you're only having to navigate one delivery. And let's be honest, it kind of takes the same amount of time to make a $45 thingo as it does to make $145 thingo. You're using your staff better, you get to use smarter product usage, and you're only having to manage one delivery. So that is a win, win, win, win for your business. And I think that's one of the biggest things I wish I had known at the beginning is your walk-in traffic, having a physical retail shop might cater to, you might get a broader range of clientele, but do not be surprised if your walk-in average transaction value is significantly lower than that than you might attract online and that you might attract over the phone. I'll also say one giant caveat. This was also before I learned about sales strategy and psychology. If you have our script in terms of how to navigate a customer order, it's very possible that you won't have to worry about navigating the $45 transaction value, but I'm just saying this is how I'm able to share with you guys what works and what doesn't because our walk-in traffic was a $45 customer, whereas our online customer was closer to $145. And making that decision to prioritize online was something that we did from a daily flower delivery perspective as well as weddings. So in both cases, we really started to dig into and understand the online space is where we need to prioritize to get the good customers. And this was also the year that we made the shift to realize, you know what? Our physical retail shop isn't a marketing priority. Our physical retail shop is all about the operations. This is all about where the machine runs. This is the logistics. This is the production space. And yeah, it looks pretty when you look in the window, but we really started to shift our focus and shift our energy to make sure that online marketing and our online strategy and our website was our number one priority. And so when I say make your online strategy your number one priority, it also means that you need to get super specific about what your priorities are for each niche that you're offering in your business. So if we look at the five services that we prioritized within our business, weddings, daily flower deliveries, phone calls, funerals, and then bottom of the list became the shop. For those top three items on our list of priorities, when it came to getting found and really understand digital marketing, this is what we did. For weddings, we went in and optimized our Google listing because we realized this is how we're going to get on customers' radars even faster. Then I went in and created the Instagram hashtag strategy that you guys all know about. And then I really started to understand the world of Google search and understanding the sales page and the sales content on our website. So when you guys look at the example website within the Flower Boss Academy, all of that came from the kind of 24 months that followed this experience where we realized, huh, we really need to prioritize online. We really need to understand that our website is like a virtual shop front and make it easy for our customers to find information. And then when it came to deliveries, this is when we dove into the world of Google ads. So Google ads is where you're going to get the volume that you need to really make profit and really grow your revenue on a regular basis within your flower business. And again, it is a big shift away from prioritizing the people who are walking in to your shop. Then we also optimized the Google business listing to make it really easy for customers to understand that, hey, if you want to order, go online, go to our website, here's some amazing snapshots and here's some amazing tips in terms of getting the best value, best bang for your buck when you're ordering. And then the third thing that we did was really start to understand search engine optimization. And these three things were such a departure from what we had been prioritizing before because we used to like fret and stress over every $45 customer that came in the door. But when you start to really prioritize the online marketing game, you realize, huh, this is about playing a much longer term game because whatever you do in terms of optimizing your Google business listing is going to continue to pay off day after day after day versus the kind of repetition and effort that's required to manage each customer that comes into your shop. And then the third thing that we did was understanding that the phone, really having that sales script in place for our business was really important because we wanted to try and increase the average order value of phone sales that we got knowing most of our customers have been on our website and all that they're doing is trying to ask a question, get some clarity in terms of seasonal availability, making sure that we're an actual for real business, you know, the basic hygiene things that all of our customers care about. And again, your Google ads are going to help attract the right kind of people to actually call your shop and your Google business listing is also going to help attract the right kind of people to actually call your shop as well. So it's really interesting to understand and really helpful to understand that, yeah, that digital marketing space is exactly what you want to prioritize. The next thing that you guys wanted to know more about was what the heck did our staffing look like? And this is where I made so many mistakes because I assumed and I followed I think what is a pretty traditional narrative within our industry that you need to have formally trained qualified designers who need to have three plus years of experience and the way that you scale your business is to just keep hiring more florists. I tried that for a really long time. What ended up actually happening was that we would spend a lot of money and have to pay the premium for very professional floral designers, but they weren't always spending their time and energy doing the highest value pieces of the process. So this is when we started to create a whole new framework for our hiring and for our staffing. So if I could go back and tell Kathleen of 2018 exactly what to do, this is how I would set it up. If you have a physical retail shop, I would divide it into front of house and back of house exactly like a restaurant is set up. So in a restaurant you have like your host and you have your waiters and waitresses do the same thing in your flower shop. Have people and train people who love customer service, have a passion for flowers and always love learning so that you're not trying to hire people who are both great salespeople and great designers and then go out of your way to find florists that you can train to create the work that you want to create. This is one of the things I wish that somebody had told me so long ago is just because people have been in the industry for a long time or just because they have their credentials doesn't mean that they're able to create the work that you want your business to create. So you really get to step into the persona of being a creative director and then train your staff accordingly. In addition to that, the next thing I would do is actually hire a retail shop manager. This is a person who gets to spearhead the development of your team, gets to be in charge of staffing and cost management and systems and processes. And one thing that I absolutely love thinking is that this person doesn't need to be an actual designer. They are there to really run the ship, they're there to be your head of customer service, they're there to be the head of training. This one hire fundamentally changed the game for us and our business because it freed up so much of the time and effort for me in terms of rostering, staffing and wholesale orders and it really provided a better customer service experience for our clients which is a win-win. The other thing that we had on our team and this is very specific to our location was that we had a delivery person slash all-rounder. Now, we didn't live in an area where you could actually have like outsourced to a delivery business. Is that even what they're called? Like a courier service? We actually had to have somebody do the deliveries for us. So you can hire somebody, you'll be really surprised at who wants that job because it is like having a little Santa Claus position in your team but making sure that they're super happy as well to come in and help clean up, tidy up the shop, display, do some all-roundy things because they're just a good human being. The other thing as well and if you are doing weddings and events and something that I wish I had done earlier is similar to having a retail shop manager is actually having a wedding and events coordinator. So somebody whose job it is to help manage new inquiries, plan out recipes and ingredients for your weddings, do the actual paperwork and the quotes and really get your customers from that inquiry to the booking process so that you aren't having to spend all of your time doing that as well. And this is where getting your system sorted is so powerful because that's how you start to scale your business and that's how you start to scale your team. And one other thing that I wish that I had learned really early on is that you get to define what success looks like in your business. The year that we turned over $880,000 in our business, we didn't make near as much profit as we did one year later. So 12 months later, we actually had total revenue that was a little bit less than 880K but we had doubled our profit because I really started to understand the strategic priorities and where are we going to get the good customers and how do we get found and learning the digital marketing is the name of the game. The other thing I will tell you guys, and this is why inside of the Flower Boss Academy I'll be like, hey, so the first thing that I want you to do is get really clear on how you want to define success because 2018 was the year that I said yes to 100 weddings. And who did most of those weddings? Me. I literally thought that success was defined by how busy you were, how many customers you could cater to at once and how many people you could say yes to. Maybe don't do that because you will literally like burn yourself out and be on the verge of having to check yourself into the hospital. So that's a great lesson to learn. So I wanted to go through this process with you, A, just to give you a bit of sense of understanding of what's possible within a flower business, but B, how not to run your flower business because I have made so many mistakes on this journey and I just want to make sure that you don't have to repeat all the same mistakes that I made. So I hope that this has been helpful. As I said before, please don't hesitate at all to leave all of your questions below. I'm always happy to go into the nitty gritty and jump in and make sure that you have the support that you need to make more money in your flower business. I really hope that this has been helpful and as always, my friends, please take care of yourself and I'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now.