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Are you ready to grow your floral business not only in profits but in creativity and fulfillment? Listen as Jeni Becht a wedding and event designer of over 25 years shares all the juicy details of growing and evolving her floral business into one of passion, purpose, and financial freedom. She shares all the secrets with actionable tips and strategies so you can wake up inspired and on a path to profitability while feeling lighter and more aligned in work and life. Join Jeni in building your business while ditching the overwhelm, avoiding burnout, and feeling fulfilled in work and life.
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Introduction and Setting the Stage
Hello, flower friends. This is Jen. You're listening to the floral hustle podcast on this week's episode. We're going to talk about three ways to start getting paid what you were worth in 2024 and that starts now. The things you need to put in place, the processes you need to put in place to really scale your business To control your margins and really start to attract your ideal client that is going to help you inevitably get paid what you want.
Understanding Your Financial Goals and Current Situation
Let's talk about figuring out what you want to make and figuring out how to work backwards into that math formula. So let's just say. That you are, and this is something that I, I, when I'm like bringing a coaching client on, or I'm talking to a flower friend and they're like, I really want to grow my business because I want to pay myself, you know, what I made at corporate and then they'll have hopes and dreams that they're not only going to be doing that.
They're going to be not working in corporate anymore. So they're not going eight to five to a job anymore. They're not having to take on the daycare expense that they did. They're not having to consider you're now not taking your vehicle and driving it to whatever, and realistically having a 45 minute commute each way.
So when you are thinking about This big equation of replacing your job and this is something I felt and thought heavily about when I left my corporate job, I was making as my salary in the salary plus bonuses, but I was pretty close to made making think it was around 150. When I thought about, Okay, I don't want to live like this anymore.
I want my life to be different. I want to be in control. I want to have more freedom. I thought about what is that freedom worth? What is that worth to you? What is it worth to you to work 20 or 30 hours a week? What is it worth to you to be able to be home with your kids more? What is it worth to you to be able to bring your dog on a walk at 10 o'clock every morning?
What is it worth to you to do the things that you've been dreaming about? Then, from there, put a dollar value on that. I thought not having to be... Driving, even though like where I worked was super close, like not having to get in a car and go was worth like 10, 000 to me and then being with my kids more had like a 25, 000 and they're just made up but I felt in my heart what felt right when I was trying to talk about replacing those costs.
Then, from there, you go in and say, okay, I want to pay myself 50, 000. My salary at my day job was 60, 000, but with all of the life freedoms that I am now enabling, For better quality of life, I'm okay with sacrificing 10, 000 or whatever it is. Or maybe I don't even want to sacrifice it. So inevitably I want to be here, but I know that it's going to take a little bit of ramp up time.
So then you look at, okay, what did I do last year? All right. I did in gross sales. I did 35, 000.
Strategies for Scaling Your Business and Increasing Profit
What was good with that 35, 000? What went well? What didn't go well? Where do I think I fell short with what I was doing to get to this current goal? And really objectively look at, okay, I have a very tedious let's just say process of making proposals.
So that didn't really super go well. I have some Problems with getting my orders in on time. So then I'm kind of scrambling and finding product and it's costing me more. Okay. That didn't really go well. Being at my 8 to 5 job, I didn't have the capacity to work. Okay. Well, that's something if we change that things are going to look better.
And then from there, okay, last year, the 35, 000 of weddings that I did was a median average price of my weddings was X. So let's just say you did 35, 000 in gross sales and my average, your average wedding was 3, 500. Then. Let's look at, after your expenses, what was left, and then from there, you can figure out what you're paying yourself from that net profit.
So your net profit is your gross sales, minus your sales tax, minus your flour costs, your labor, and then minus all of the other expenses that it takes to run your business. So then you can figure out your profit margin. So your profit margin is a percentage of the sale that is profit after you've deducted all of your expenses.
So you figure out what is my profit margin on my weddings last year? Do I think I can, I'm at 50%? I'm at some floors, like they run it around like 60 to 70 percent profit margin. Some of them are at 30. So it really depends on. You're ordering, how well you're ordering, your labor, how much you're charging, if you're charging enough, if you're charging set up and delivery correctly, there's a big equation.
Planning for the Future and Resources for Growth
And if you do have a question on that, please go download my, it's my most downloaded freebie. It is my pricing guide that walks you through how to price things. And that is the floral hustle. Forward slash or the floral hustle dot com forward slash pricing. So it's super great. Super transparent.
It's also, if you go to my Instagram stories, it's in my my highlights of my stories that you can just link and find it, but. What you need to figure out is what that profit margin is and then start working backwards. Okay. If I want to have this much money after all my expenses that I can pay myself, this is how many weddings I would need to do if everything was the same.
So let's just say on your 3, 500 wedding, you are making a, we'll just say 50 percent profit margin. So that is inevitably out of the 35, 000. And the 10 weddings you did at 3, 500, you now are at 17, 500 or 15, 000, whatever that number is for your, let's just say it was at 50%, it would be 3, 750. So I think if I'm doing the math correctly, that number gives you a guide point of what to look at for next year.
So then you can take, I want to pay myself 45, 000, 50, 000, whatever it is at your current profit margin, that means you're, let's just say it's at 50 percent and you want to pay yourself 50, 000. That means you need to have a gross revenue of 100, 000. So that means at 3, 500 average wedding. You are going to need to do a lot of them, 30, probably 35 to 40 of them, but you also need to maintain all the other variables.
You can't just go balls out that I want to do more weddings. You need to make sure all the math is running true and how you can make that math run true is you're making sure you're pricing. So here's number one, you are pricing your flowers correctly. You are following pricing guide guidelines. You are not.
You know, just willy nilly quoting things that you have never made before and have no idea how much product you've put thought behind it. You are not trying to be super competitive on your price and race to the bottom. So that's number one. You need to make sure that you're pricing correctly and that you're maintaining that pricing throughout all your weddings.
Number two, you need to make sure that your profit margin stays comparable. A lot of times when people start doing volume, their pricing margins go down. They start spending more on product because they have less time to actually do planning. And then they start buying more stuff to attract more people.
And so then your profit margins stay out of whack with that. From there, you need to start, obviously number one and two are in place, but number three is you need to start attracting more of your current client. Or if you have tweaked things in your business from a profit margin perspective, from a pricing perspective, whatever, and you are now at a higher pre profit margin, maybe at the beginning part of the year because you've changed things, you still need to attract more, but not maybe quite as much more if you were at your previous pricing margin.
So growing your business can look. In a million different equations different from a million different floors. If something feels good, like, I really would feel good if I locked in my expenses this year and maybe I canceled being on the not or or wedding wire or I canceled my blue nation subscription and did something else.
Or I. Stop doing this, or I stop doing that. Whatever it may be, you start controlling your profits by making sure that I'm ordering properly at the best prices that I can because I've made the time to be able to do that, or I'm making sure that I am strategically selling to my couples so that I'm opening up opportunity for extras.
There's a bunch of different ways you can get to that same point. But! Making sure that the basic foundation is there so that in the end of the year, all the math has led up to you being able to write yourself a check. I personally pay myself on a quarterly basis. I pay my state sales tax, I pay my federal tax here in the United States, and I also am paying my workman's comp and social security.
I also have set up a 401k so that I am contributing that to that in the max amount. For a business of my size, but that also gives me the ability to do a match that the company also pays. So all of those things are expenses that I include in my forecasting. So if I want to pay myself 100, 000 this year, in the end.
I'm going to need to do X and even writing that out and having a plan that you can look at will be huge for you.
Conclusion and Invitation to Join the Floral Hustle Community
If you have a CEO day, which I've talked about on the podcast before, where you're dedicating time to grow your business, it could be an immeasurable amount of success for you. And if you have questions, you're like, I just don't get it.
I'm going to be having a masterclass about goal planning in the Floral Hustle Facebook group. It's on Facebook. You just go search the Floral Hustle and the masterclass is going to be in there. It's free. It's a goal planning workshop that we're going to talk about forecasting and it's going to be so amazing.
Please hop in the group. It's going to be something great to help kick off 2024. to get you paid. Thank you so much for listening, 📍 Flower Friend, and hope you have an amazing flower filled week.