Frankly Speaking Florally

hehehe, I laugh when I look at this picture because it's so typical of my two employees Sheryl and Melissa. Prompted by me to do something funny for the camera, they looked at each other and said "Let's skip" and off they went laughing and skipping.  Ok, so the point of the blog and what the heck does it have to do with owner or managing a flower shop? Well, we all know in this business that we work hard and most likely for fairly low pay. Why would anyone want to work at a flower shop? Well, maybe as small business owners we have flexibility to create fun work environments. We work daily with beautiful flowers, making people happy. Yes, we run businesses and we have to run them as such but who says that we can't have fun doing it, right? The whole point of this blog is to have fun. Let your employees have fun. Encourage them to be friends and to laugh together. Play music, dance, take funny pictures, dress up for Halloween or treat them for fast food after an e

A friend of mine that owns a flower shop in another state asked me how we get so many corporate orders. Of course,  the topic had come up because of Professional Administratives Day (or Week as I like to refer to it) is next week. As I told her we already had quite a few orders and many of those were multiple arrangements going to the same business. Gosh, you have to love those, right? Well for us, our corporate orders are a very large part of our client base and it's not easy task keeping them happy which got me to thinking about this blog. Are you a flower shop owner that would like to have more corporate orders? If so here are a few things I think you need to consider when going after that business. Do you have convenient hours of operation? Many of the companies that order from our shop start calling us at 7 or 7:30 am. Wow, you wouldn't think they would but by 8 am for sure, our phones are ringing. Are you still operating with traditional retail hours? If so, you might be

Recently I was talking to another flower shop owner and I asked him if he tracked his toss. "Oh yes, I sure do" he replied. Being curious as I usually am (I know, it's such an annoying trait to those around me) I asked him how he did this. You see, the way we track toss at our shop is anything that gets thrown out gets recorded on a toss sheet tracker that we have created. Pretty much the drill is, if you can't use it and we paid for it, it gets recorded. So, of course, I was wondering if perhaps he had a better way to track his work loss then we did. When I pressed him further as to how he tracked it, he did not have an  answer. Oh boy, that means he thinks he's tracking it but actually he wasn't. Not a good thing. Below is how we track it, what we do with the information and why it's important. How do we track it? Each designer has a toss bucket at their station. If the flower is not sellable (past it's prime, broken, whatever) it gets tossed in the

It's a Monday morning. I arrive to work early, about 7 am, like I usually do. I help with prepping flowers, getting the sales area organized, give some direction to the staff and then head up to the office to get my own work done and that gets me to thinking. Once I am able got get up to the office, I start by reviewing my To Do List. I look at what's been done, what needs to be done and add any items that I now know need to be done. I've tried putting my list on the computer but the truth is I love the act of writing it down on paper. It just makes it more real to me. And so, the inspiration for this blog! I'm a big believer in To Do Lists. For me, they help me organize my thoughts and prioritizes my responsibilities. If you own a flower shop or any small business for that matter, you probably walk around feeling overwhelmed. Why? That's because as a small business owner it's easy to get sucked into the vortex of day to day operations and depending on the size