How to Forecast Your Floral Business Income (So You Can Pay Yourself)

In this episode of The Floral CEO Podcast, Jen walks you through a simple, real-world way to forecast your floral business revenue—using the bookings you already have (or want) to estimate your average wedding value, close rate, expenses, flower costs, labor, taxes, and ultimately how much you can pay yourself.
Whether you’re a newer florist or you’ve been in business for years but still feel unclear about money, this episode gives you a practical framework to stop guessing and start planning like a CEO.

What You’ll Learn (Key Takeaways)

• How to calculate your average wedding order value (AOV) so you can forecast income
• How to use your close rate to estimate how many leads you need to hit your booking goal
• A simple “CEO math” approach to estimate:
  • Flower/COGS percentage
  • fixed monthly expenses (your “turn the lights on” costs)
  • freelance labor
  • sales tax/tax set-asides
  • profit cushion
  • owner pay
• Why guessing creates scarcity—and why forecasting creates confidence
• How to put this into a spreadsheet so you can make smarter decisions all year

The Framework Jen Uses (Step-by-Step)

1) Start with your funnel numbers (your real booking pipeline)

Track these numbers:

• How many inquiries/leads you receive
• How many you respond to / have real conversations with
• How many consults you book
• How many proposals you send
• How many you close (booked + contract signed)

Close rate formula:
Booked weddings ÷ proposals sent = close rate

Jen’s note:
If your close rate is very high, you may be underpriced (you’re “too easy to book”).

2) Calculate your average wedding value (AOV)

Average wedding value formula:
Total booked wedding revenue ÷ number of booked weddings = AOV

This gives you a usable “planning number” even if you have a few outliers.

3) Forecast income based on your goal number of weddings

If you want to go from 8 weddings to 20, you need 12 more weddings.

Projected revenue formula:
(Goal weddings × AOV) = projected gross revenue

4) Estimate your cost of goods (flowers + supplies)

If you’re still learning sourcing/recipes, Jen recommends being conservative:

• 30–35% as a planning range for flower costs (COGS)

COGS formula:
Projected revenue × COGS % = flower/supply costs

5) Subtract fixed “lights-on” business expenses

These are costs like:

• website
• Canva
• QuickBooks/bookkeeping software
• email platform
• admin tools/subscriptions
• business renewals/fees
• vehicle costs (if the business covers them)

Fixed costs formula:
Monthly fixed expenses × 12 = annual fixed expenses

6) Add labor estimates (freelancers)

Example logic from the episode:

• how many weddings need help
• how many hours per wedding
• hourly rate
• number of staff-days

Labor formula:
(Hours × rate × number of days/weddings) = labor cost

7) Set aside taxes (don’t get surprised later)

Jen specifically mentions sales tax and recommends setting aside a percentage (often close to 10% in MN depending on location/rate, but use your local rate).

Tax set-aside formula:
Projected revenue × tax % = tax bucket

8) Build profit into the business (a cushion)

Profit is not “whatever is left.” It’s intentional.
Even starting with 5–7% gives you a cushion for growth:

• cooler purchase
• education
• equipment
• upgrades
• emergency buffer

Profit formula:
Net-after-costs × profit % = profit bucket

9) What’s left can become owner’s compensation (pay yourself)

After subtracting:

• COGS
• fixed costs
• labor
• taxes
• profit

…the remainder is what you can use to pay yourself (owner’s comp), then plan for income taxes/self-employment taxes depending on your setup.

Practical Action Steps (Do This This Week)

1. Make a simple spreadsheet with columns for:
   • inquiries
   • consults
   • proposals
   • bookings
   • close rate
2. List your booked weddings and total revenue → calculate your AOV
3. Choose your booking goal (ex: 20 weddings)
4. Forecast gross revenue (goal × AOV)
5. Pick conservative COGS % (30–35% if you’re still dialing in recipes)
6. Estimate annual “lights-on” expenses
7. Estimate freelancer labor
8. Create 3 buckets in your business:
   • tax set-aside
   • profit cushion
   • owner pay
9. Review the final number and ask:
   • “Is this enough for the life I want?”
   • “What needs to change: price, volume, efficiency, or offers?”

Mentioned in This Episode

Book Recommendation

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz (Jen’s foundational framework for building profit and paying yourself consistently) https://a.co/d/1s9O2mm

What is The Floral CEO?

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.

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Hello flower friends. I had an interesting coaching session. I always love meeting. I always do like an onboarding call when somebody joins the Mastermind to really help understand their goals and what they're struggling with. And I had one of those, and we were really just going through this kind of exercise of figuring out how, as someone who is starting her business to really.

Figure out how she can make money, how she can structure things so that she can actually pay herself. Uh, what would it look like if, you know, she currently had eight weddings at X dollars? How do you figure out, okay, what if I want 20 weddings? What would that financially look like? So I wanna talk through.

If you are just starting out, or even a lot of this, even if you've been a florist for a while and things are not, you're not running your business as a CEO Digging into your numbers and understanding, here's your opportunity for a little refresher lesson. So let's go into, try to think how much money could we make if.

Things got bigger, things expanded. So how I would break this exercise down is, depending on the data that you had, uh, you could start that going, okay, I received this many email requests. I got this many email requests to actually correspond with me out of that. Requests, um, and email correspondence. I got X percentage to meet with me, and then I got X percentage to a proposal, a consultation, and then a proposal.

And then I got X amount of people to, uh, actually agree and send me a contract. So let's just say maybe your cl what I call closing rate is 10%. So most people who I know who get to that stage have a lot higher closing ratio. They have like a 30 or a 50, if not like I 75. Sometimes if your closing rate honestly gets too high, you're probably too cheap.

Uh, but. Let's just say this person has now booked eight weddings and they met with and did proposals with 16. So they have a 50% closing ratio, and I'm just making these details up. They have eight weddings booked currently and they have, um, let's just say. You know, their total revenue for those eight weddings is going to be $25,000.

So what I'd like to do is go and figure out what is our average, even though we got some outliers. Um, I think that they got an $8,000 in there, but they have a 7,000. They have a 1000. So if I go 25,000 divided by eight. To get an average, the average wedding 'cause in hopes we're hopefully gonna get another eight.

We're hopefully gonna get another seven. We hope we're gonna get less of these a thousand dollars ones. So her average we could just guesstimate to be 31 25, 31 25. Is a number that if we wanna have some estimates or some educated guesses of what our revenue forecast could be, we would go in and go, okay, if we need, we have eight weddings and we want 20, so we need 12 more.

Weddings. That means with our current close rates, we need to speak to 24 additional people with our current closing rate of 50%, and we need to have an average of 31 25. So those additional. Would be those additional 12 weddings. If we had them at the um, $3,100 mark, which was our average, that would be in an additional three thou 37,500.

So then we add our 25,000, that is our eight weddings. So that's 62,500. Well, obviously we have. Expenses against this. So what do those expenses look like? Um, if I take, uh, let's just say we pay $50 a month for a, a website, and then we have Canva Pro, and then we have some type of, uh, QuickBooks or something like that for $60.

So let's just say on a monthly basis. You have about $400 of expenses. Um, you know, annually here in Minnesota, we have to pay the Secretary of State to renew our business name. That's a hundred dollars. Uh, the, like, personally, my vehicle is in the business name, so I gotta buy tabs and all the things that come along with maintaining a vehicle, gas, everything.

So. You need to go in and figure out what are my expenses to turn the light on for my business? Then the second layer is, okay, if I am operating in the correct pricing module of, you know, at least three times markup, if not 3.5 to four. Then backing into, I could safely probably say 30%, especially if you're learning 30 to 35% is probably going to be spent on buying your flowers because you're learning, you're probably not great at sourcing yet.

So if we say 35%, we're gonna be really conservative. So if we take.

Our 35% off, we have $40,625 left over. Then if we minus out our, let's just say our $300 of expenses that are to turn the light on, so that's gonna be $3,600.

One second, plugging it in. Okay, so then we have $37,000, let's say we estimate per wedding that maybe we're gonna have. 'cause we'll have 20 weddings and maybe we'll have two days of freelancers, uh, on. Four of the weddings, or five of the weddings. So that's gonna be, let's just say we have them for six hours and we pay them $25 an hour.

So one 50, so 300, and we have that five times, so 300. So that's gonna be $1,500.

All right.

So then we have

minus our $1,500 in our labor. So right now we have $34,510 left. So what, here's what I would do next. I would figure out. I want to make sure that I'm saving for my taxes, so I need to minus. If we were at 6,500, I'm gonna estimate 10% to be taken away for sales tax. So that gets us down to $28,000. So at $28,000.

I wanna make sure that I'm building a cushion. What if I wanna join the floral CEO mastermind? What if I want to, um, you know, buy a course? What if I wanna buy a, a cooler, whatever it is, I would build and take some profit or a savings net and start to equate that into my business. So if I'm looking at 28.

Thousand dollars. I can go and say, let's just say I'm going to dedicate 10%, or even if that's scary, 5% to be dedicated to a profit bucket, which is a bucket that is just where your business actually deserves to make money. So if I do. Ten five percent, that is $1,400. That is not going to buy you a cooler or anything like that.

So what if I did, if I did 7%

times point? Seven, seven equals

okay. So that would take away probably a fair enough chunk that you would have a little bit of cushion 'cause you have a little bit of profit now. The rest realistically. Could go to owner's comp, so. With making 60, I think that we were at a $68,000 total. Minusing expenses, flower costs, uh, labor taxes, and building in some profit.

We could potentially pay you as the owner about $26,000. Out of that $26,000, 26,505, we definitely do need to pay our, the government, um, because you know, we're gonna have to pay Social security, Medicare and Minnesota sales tax, federal income tax, all the things. But that just gives you a way, especially if you have some numbers to be able to back into.

If I blew this up, if I grew this, what would that look like? Because when you can do that, you know, you. You can see the future, and you can do this in a spreadsheet. Like put all of your weddings in a spreadsheet. You can put the totals that are estimated to be at now. So then that's how you can get your formula of what your average wedding is.

And then you can do that same thing with the number of contacts, the number of leads, and what position you got them to, you know, consultation or whatever. And then you can divide. And really conquer, like knowing your numbers and so that you can confidently go forward with making estimations in your business.

Using this formula or this way is just another way for you to actually be able to forecast the future. A lot of times we'll just say, we don't know. We have no clue, but when you have no clue. It's really hard to make any logical decisions or any decisions that you feel like are going to be impactful in your business.

You are in a scarcity mode because you have no idea, frankly, what's going on, and I just want better for you. So go and do some preliminary numbers. If you are in a spot where you're really trying to do big things and you have this big dream of maybe, you know, quitting your job or just. Yeah, contributing on a significant level or whatever that is.

You have the freedom to go in and, and just look, just soak up that information and start to feel confident in your numbers like you never have been before. And I keep mentioning, uh, the. Basically profit and this kind of foundation comes from the book. Profit First, which I have talked about on several podcasts.

It is a book that really breaks down how to actually build profit on in your business from day one. So if you've never rid written, read that. I will put that in the show notes because. It is a great book for you to take advantage of, um, really learning some different fundamentals in your business. I hope this episode was helpful.

Uh, please, uh, take us on Instagram with your biggest takeaways. I love to hear from you guys, and I appreciate you listening to the podcast today. Thank you so much, flower friends, and you have an amazing flower filled day.