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Struggling to turn your floral design talent into a profitable, scalable, and stress-free business? Welcome to The Floral CEO® Podcast—the ultimate audio destination for wedding and event florists, flower-shop owners, and creative entrepreneurs who want to book bigger budgets, price with confidence, and lead like a true CEO.
Hosted by Jeni Becht, award-winning wedding florist, event designer, and floral business coach with 25 + years in the industry, each weekly episode dives into:
Profitable pricing strategies: markup formulas and minimums fine-tuned for weddings & events
Magnetic marketing & local-SEO hacks: social posts, blogs, and Google tricks that attract high-budget couples and planners
High-converting sales funnels: inquiry replies, proposals, and follow-up scripts that turn curious leads into dream clients
Streamlined systems & smart outsourcing: workflows, templates, and hiring tips that free you from the design bench
CEO mindset & sustainable growth: leadership habits and eco-friendly practices that keep both you and your business flourishing
Jeni pairs real-world success stories with actionable strategies you can implement today, so you’ll spend less time hustling and more time designing breathtaking bouquets, installations, and arrangements.
Ready to scale your florist business and reclaim your life? Follow, subscribe, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. 🌸
Connect & learn more:
Website & free resources: http://floralceo.com
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Turn your passion for flowers into the six-figure floral business you deserve—one episode at a time.
Website- floralceo.com
Social @thefloralceo.com
Hello, flower friends. I wanna talk about three must-dos to build a successful wedding floral business. These are things that, like, I feel are foundations in building a floral business, uh, that is going to basically be able to, to stand a little bit of the test of time, but also having you build a business that is going to be able to creatively fulfill you, to financially be rewarding.
And so some florists make business growth way too fucking complicated. We think we need a new website, a new CRM, another course, more followers, a logo refresh. We need to come up with some real strategy, a lead magnet, 17 million different moving parts. And meanwhile, these, like, three things are just kind of the core that a wedding floral business is really built on, and if you don't have these, we have a bigger problem.
So if I was building a wedding business from scratch today, I would focus on these three things: networking, portfolio buildi- building and development, and getting the damn business foundations right. So networking. This is very cut and dry. I would make a point that, you know, building relationships with people is so important.
You are not selling something to people for them to buy it every month. A couple will likely just hire you once. So referrals matter a lot, and the people who can repeatedly send you business are planners, venues, photographers, rental companies, catering companies, bridal shops, DJs, potentially other florists, and past clients.
So once a bride can hire you, you know, they can hire you, like, once. But a planner who does 25 weddings a year could potentially hire you, get you hired. They're might be hiring you, but the majority are the broker in that situation. That could be like 10 weddings in a year. So your next great wedding may come from somebody who knows your name before it comes from somebody who follows you on Instagram.
So some real practical networking ideas is following local planners and venues, photographers, engaging genuinely and with authenticity on social media, introducing yourself, asking someone to coffee, attending industry events. You guys, I, I literally am planning out my industry events that I'm going to over the next couple months, so this is something super important.
Um, attending, like, local weddy- wedding association or wedding-specific events, going to open houses, referring people before asking for referrals, tagging vendors, in- inviting people as collaborators on Instagram is another huge one. S- sharing, you know, any behind-the-scenes or, you know, images or whatever that you have gathered.
Um, congratulating or just being kind and having kind words or writing thank you notes for working with someone. Um, and then just staying in touch, like, after an event. Networking is not asking people for business. It's just building familiarity, trust, and not seeming like you are the desperate person handing out your business card.
Networking is like a human building relationships. Be useful before you ask to be useful. I am always offering to help people, to, you know, offer solutions, to borrow something of mine, do whatever they need to make something happen Portfolio development, to me, is the next big part that I feel like I didn't do right in the beginning.
Um, I, for one, did not even wanna do Instagram for quite some time, but I realized, like, it's a... I have to. And then when I started getting into actually being like, "Ugh, I would love to do, you know, some more creative, more whatever," I, when I was really diving into, like, wanting higher end wad- weddings, wanting higher end, um, like, cultural events, wanting to do lor- large installations, more editorial work, uh, more color.
I mean, you don't see much white and green on my Instagram page, you guys, and there's a reason for that. 90% of the weddings that I do are color, and I want to keep attracting color, so I want a portfolio that shows a client that I do color well. So if your portfolio says, when they look at you, "I really want to...
You know, I have... I, I need a big wedding, but when I'm looking at this person's Instagram or website, it does not look like they can accommodate that," we have a problem. If every image on your website is a bridal bouquet with baby's-breath, woods, mason jars, and a barn, but you want to do a high-end luxury, like, industrial-type building, your portfolio and your vision, and especially the clients you wanna attract, are not jiving.
Your portfolio is teaching people what to hire you for. And you cannot consistently sell work that you are afraid to show. So there's ways to intentionally build a portfolio, and I do not want you to sit here and wait for your dream client to magically appear. I create that work. And I help as an educator, because it is not always easy to know how to go about, or sometimes even financially viable, to figure out how to create this work.
And that is something that I've created my, uh, all of my floral CEO workshops for, to help give you guys amazing portfolio images that you helped create that I know are going to help attract your d- dream client, without making it so unrealistic that you're like, "Who in the hell would actually want something like that at their wedding in my market?"
Uh, ways to create work, obviously my style, like the styled shoots and workshops that I put together are editorial type shoots. I mean, many of them have been published. Uh, that's one way. You could collaborate with local planners and photographers and venues to try to come up with something. You could upgrade one element of an existing wedding that you have booked to capture that for your portfolio.
You could design something for yourself and get it photographed, like, or you learn how to take photographs. You could create installation practice opportunities. But I want to put a warning out there, do not make random pretty shit and that looks like it's a uncohesive mess, because that is not going to help show any continuity in your portfolio that this is the kind of work that you do.
If you want to cre- you know, start attracting like premium ballroom weddings, like country club weddings, create premium country club type content. If you want to attract colorful garden style weddings, create that. If you want to get into the cultural wedding space or the, um, let's just say you, you're Jewish and you wanna get in the Jewish space, or you, not even speaking of weddings, you wanna get in the bar mitzvah or the, uh, quinceañera space.
Whatever it is, your portfolio should preview of where your business is going, not a scrapbook of everything that you've done in the past. And it should include quality over quantity. You do not need 100 mediocre images. You need a smaller number of really strong ones. So photography matters, that's why, like, I choose, because I feel that this is the path to the most dollars in your, uh, business.
You know, a photographer that's light and airy, that edits, that it looks like money. You know, the styling matters, the venue matters, the vendor team that you have involved, all of those things matter. The work has to look like what your dream client wants. Then the last is building a proper business foundation, and this is probably the part most florists skip because it is super unsexy You can't network like crazy.
You can have, or you can, you can network like crazy. You can have stunning images. You could be doing super kick-ass weddings, but if you don't have the ability to price things correctly, or you executed the wedding so poorly that you get bad reviews, and then every single vendor there thinks that you're a crazy person, you're going to lose momentum in your business.
So you need to have foundations, and you need to have a pricing foundation. Do you know how to price? Are you marking up your flowers correctly? Are you charging the correct labor, delivery, setup, tear-down, rentals, admin, all the things? Sales process, what happens when someone inquires? Do they get a brochure?
Do you even have a pro- process of what somebody would go through What does your consultation look like? What does your proposal look like? What does your follow-up look like? What does your retainer look like? Are you reinventing the process every single time? Do you have the proper legal or money foundations in place, like contracts, insurance, bookkeeping, separate business banking, tax planning, payment schedules?
Like, do you have all of the things that make your business legal? Are you running it out of your checking? 'Cause if you are, we need to talk. Do not run this out of your personal checking. You should have a business checking dedicated to the business. And if you have been a longtime listener, you know that I am a profit first, uh, believer, which is a principles and system that you can install in your business to make sure that you have profit first built in your business.
I've dedicated several podcast episodes. Th- that is a system to help you be successful Marketing brings people in the door, but your business foundation determines whether they walk through it. A pretty Instagram cannot fix a business that loses money every time somebody books. So these things work together.
Networking without a portfolio, I mean, people who know you, but they have no evidence that you can do the work that they are looking for. If you have a portfolio without networking, you have gorgeous work, but not enough of the right people to know you exist. And then networking and portfolio without a foundation, you finally get a dream inquiry, and then you underprice it, communicate poorly, overwork yourself, and make no money.
Networking gets you seen, portfolio gets you trusted, foundation gets you paid. You can make it a perfect triangle f- of business. And I am here to help support you. Please check out the Floral CEO Mastermind because this is what I preach in there. Go to floralceo.com/mastermind. But I am so excited for you to build the correct foundation in your business.
So thank you so much for listening, flower friend, and you have an amazing flower-filled day.