Frankly Speaking Florally

A few weeks ago I made a point of discussing our Toss/Work Loss percentage with our Design Team. Over the summer months I noticed that our percentages had been "creeping" up. Basically when those percentages go up it could mean that we are “stuffing“ the arrangements with unpaid for flowers, tossing out too many flowers (perhaps proper rotation methods are not being followed) or we are purchasing too much for our current sales volume. I was trying to find a different approach with the staff and started thinking back to similar situations in my pre-floral career. I remembered the "Kaizen" concept I learned back in college. Kaizen was a concept I had used many times before in my previous corporate life. Loosely defined Kaizen is the Japanese word for "Improvement" or "Change for Better". It's an ongoing, continuous process that never stops and teaches us to always look for a better, more efficient way to conduct our business. The process of c

Honestly, Kevin and I were very resistant to giving our design and sales staff incentives over the years but a recent visit to a floral conference had us rethink the concept. We thought - hey, they work for us, we are good to them, our employees should do whatever is in the best interest of the company, right? Well, human nature doesn't work that way. Let's face it, as business owners, we have a big incentive each and every month to have our sales be as high as possible and our expenses and low as possible - it's called paying the bills. If you don't do what needs to be done, you can't pay your staff, yourself or your bills. Each month as owners we stare at that check book and know we need to get out there and sell effectively or die trying!   Sometimes even the best employees in the world could use a boost and why not reward them for their efforts, right? This past year we revisited the concept of incentives, first for our sales staff and then for our designers.