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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.
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Hello flower friends. On Monday. I talked a little bit about some pricing a specific Instagram post that it was kind of triggering because it was really not pricing for profitability. And so I wanted to do an episode after I did a coaching call. Actually a couple coaching calls really talking through.
How I simplify pricing and how I can build, and I've done an episode on base recipes before, but how I can really build formulas to make pricing simpler. I also did a one-on-one intensive with some decorator slash florist in the studio, and we talked a lot about this. So like pricing is complicated and if you are struggling with pricing.
This is a like a floris thing, because for one, it's a moving target. Wholesale prices change. Then you are juggling different formulas in your whole equation, you're juggling. Okay, my variable wholesale cost. Then with my markup, then double my supplies or triple, depending on, where you price things at.
Then add my labor percentage, which is a variable depending on your experience, depending on a bunch of things. So with all of those things, like it makes pricing more complicated. I mentioned on Monday, but if you haven't downloaded, which a bunch of you have, and that is amazing, please go download my pricing guide.
It is a free guide that dives into pricing formulas, gives you examples how to price things, and it gives you my cheat on pricing installations or large items by teaching you pricing per square foot. I wanna dive a little bit into base recipes in case you didn't listen to that episode and how it makes everything easier to price.
I, when I was meeting with my client today, we were talking through pricing out and actually, um, building recipes for an upcoming wedding. And you know, of course she's nervous. She's going to make sure that she's spending within her budget. And I knew right away that she was going to be able to do that because I have figured out base recipes, base pricing on many of the items we were talking about.
So we were gonna be decorating a structure and I knew how much one cage usually costs. I knew how much a simple floor piece usually costs, and here's how I know I have those base recipes. So building in floral layers, I often build my base recipes off of the basic floral layers. And if you're not familiar with floral layers, I've done an episode on that as well, and I will make sure that that is both of those episodes on.
The base recipe pricing and the, uh, floral layers are in the show notes, but floral layers to me, which of course could differ from person to person. You first need a greenery potentially, and these are not all like, we don't have to have all of these, but I normally, all of my base recipe pricing has a greenery.
Has a foundational or coverage bloom. If you are doing a floor piece, if you are doing a centerpiece, if you are doing a cage, I need something to cover my mechanics, to make it look fuller. I often will use hydrangeas, I will use carnations in clusters. But normally those are my kind of two go-to, inexpensive because a hydrangea.
If you order properly because hydrangeas come in grades the gray, the ones from South America at least, which are usually white greens blue, and now they're coming out with some fun deep purples, pinks. I've seen, um, some shamrock greens, which are green with a white kind of striped on the middle. So they, they keep inventing things, which is really fun.
But you know, those are significantly less than importing a hydrangea from, let's just say, Holland, and getting like a premium periwinkle blue or a antique, uh, like you want a terracotta ish red color. Those are normally, in my experience, anywhere from eight to $11 a stem. If you source or source a South American blue hydrangea or white hydrangea, those usually are going to be anywhere from a buck 60 here in Minnesota up to 2 25 depending on where you're sourcing and what the grade is.
Those are often graded as. Select, which means like smaller super select is bigger, and then premium, which is usually bigger and fuller. And in my experience, there's a 25 to 30 cents difference each grade you go up. My wholesaler that I mainly buy from stocks only select because honestly, most florists don't know better that there are bigger.
More abundant hydrangeas that don't cost a ton more. If you can get 30% more hydrangea for 25 cents like I am, I wanna do that instead of buying outta the cooler. I also know if I pre-buy using ordering systems like LICs or Comet which are at several of my wholesalers, I know I'm going to be able to get a lot better deal, uh, the prices that I mentioned.
If I order through those systems, if I'm buying out of the cooler, I often are am going to get that around a two to 2 25 price point for the smallest of the hydrangeas. So I have my coverage bloom. Uh oh, I should mention greens are kind of a different story. There's many greens, and then they have recently developed grading of.
Select and super select. I've also seen premium or jumbo. Those are usually when you get that really nice light green color and it's a bigger kind of full. I'm not going into locally grown hydrangeas because that's when you have like the vintage the strawberry fields is one that I personally grow.
That starts out with a nice green starts kind of coloring up with a little bit of blush, then colors up to a more red. Those on average usually cost $2 a stem here to two 50, if not into the threes, depending on how large they are here in Minnesota. Of course, that can vary with where you are at in the world.
Those are also beautiful. The stems are not usually as sturdy because they're a woody stem and they're usually smaller and thinner because the bloom gets so big, it weighs everything down and. In my experience, like they just, they're either really resilient or not very resilient. If a farmer cut them too early that they weren't fully bloomed out and their, their blooms almost became.
Dryable, like to a point that the blooms were really a good consistency so that they could be dried and be fine and not tril up. So that's another option. The purples and the pinks that I've seen recently coming outta South America, I mean, you're usually spending five to $6. But that is better than eight to $11.
And there are, some of them are really beautiful colors. So enough bought hydrangeas. I'm kind of a hydrangea nut. I use them a lot because, um, especially in cultural weddings, we need a lot of flowers and a lot of times they don't have a budget to support you doing this lush rose design or lush, you know, rose and filler Flo.
So. We have our greenery, we have our coverage bloom, then we have our big blooms or our show blooms. Uh, those usually to me are roses. They could be peonies, they could be just anything that if you're using a football mom, anything that's bigger, you often build the structure. Or the shape of your design with those blooms.
If you are doing a Com bowl, I often will have, my hydrant is lower, so my big or premium blooms are showy and kind of on top, which is really pretty. Then, so we have now three layers. We have our greenery, we have our coverage bloom, and we have our big blooms. Then IU use, what's a transition bloom. So a transition bloom is something that we're going in down to a smaller bloom to help create some texture, some visual interest in your design.
So often that could be like a spray rose. That could be a mum, it could be a daisy, it could be something that's got like just a smaller bloom that's, you know, usually clustered. So that you get that really, that transition from big bloomed to your coverage bloom. Then from there you have of course filler flour and then.
You go to one of my personal favorites, but also can of course drive the price up. You go to what I call your dancing flowers. So your dancing flowers could be scbi, it could be Oculus, it could be a Lizzie, a Lizzie Anthes, if it's locally grown, really nice, roughly, very easily. Could be a dancer. It could also, if it was kind of puny and Canadian.
'cause Canadian Lizzie often has, uh, you know, smaller, more plus street blooms that could be a transition flower. So if you have that beautiful local groan that you know, just is jetting out and, and is your dancer, that's. Option. I've seen people use straw flower as a dancer. Um, you could also use straw flower as a transition bloom, but there's lots of different options.
You know, it's really kind of personal design preference. Then I go down to drippy. Drippy is very popular right now, so drippy or cascading blooms. That could be some type of vine that could be amaranthus. That could be, you know, just something that you're using to get that drip effect. And then the last in the equation to me is line flowers.
Line flowers are kind of essential in, you know, making floor pieces or making things that have a lot of movement, giving height to something. Uh, line flowers could be larksburg Delphinium stock. Anything that is really linear and normally a little bit taller. So we have these layers, and so when I'm building a base recipe, I'm starting out with like what is my minimum viable product that I could make something and sell it.
So let's just say that we are making a comparable centerpiece. I am going to use five hydrangeas so that I'm covering the majority of my bowl. Then I would be using, let's just say, a third of a bunch of greenery. And so if I'm estimating high, 'cause depending on where you are in the world, and just for easy math, let's just say we're at $2 in stem for hydris.
So there's $10 right there in wholesale cost of hydris. Then let's say we're adding a third of a bunch of leather leaf. Let's just say that we're spending $2, so we've now invested $12 in product. I really don't like to make, from a brand standpoint, a all hydrangea compote. It's just not that pretty. So I normally like to add at least seven roses.
So if we are using our math skills today, off the top of my head, if we're using seven of them, that would be, you know what, I'm gonna get my calculator out because I'm adding a lot of different numbers. I'm gonna say one 50, but honestly, it depends on the rows you're using. You could be up to like $4, $5 if you're using a garden.
You could be at 89 cents if you're using a Freedom Rose and you reflexed it. Um, so 10 50 plus our $10 plus our $3. So we're at 2350 in product right now. Then let's just say that we wanna add a titch of filler flour. So let's just say that. We're adding Nia or Queen Ansley, queen Ansley to our, our thing.
I'd love to use Queen ans lace. Um, and let's say it's 1299 a bunch, and we're using a third of a bunch. So let's just say we're adding $4. So now we're at 27 50. Now we need to make sure that we're charging for our compost bowl. And our foam. If you're using foam or you're chicken wire, depending on what you're using, let's say those two things together cost $7.
So most people that I have run into double the cost of their supplies. I have seen people triple it, but. Let's to make this easy, just say we're gonna triple it and we're gonna add it to our costs so that we're not doing separate math. So we have $35 in product, in wholesale product, and we're gonna times that by three, gets us 1 0 5, and then we're gonna times that by 25% labor.
So I just go times it by 1.0, 1.25, sorry, 1.25. So that five hydrangeas in a compar bowl with seven roses with a little greenery and little filler is $131 and 25 cents. I probably could charge because I did three times markup on my supplies, I could probably charge 1 34 it. If I go and add another floral layer, I'm adding to my cost.
So let's just say that I'm going to add line flowers. I'm gonna add, let's just say three pieces of stock. Well, three pieces of stock. It's 1499, usually a 10 step bunch. So we're at four 50, so I am going to add basically four 50.
Times our three times our labor percentage. So I need to add basically $17 for those three stems to my base recipe price. Now we have a bride that shows us Oculus in our thing, so then we do the same thing. So we're adding that, you know, let's just say they're two 50 a stem and she wants five. Well, that's gonna add a pretty significant chunk to our centerpiece base pricing.
So we're gonna add, let's just say we didn't add line flowers and we added five Oculus, so that adds 1250 of wholesale cost. So then we're gonna times that by three and then times it by 1.25 to add our 25% labor. If you are at 40% labor, you do you, if you were at 20%, I would at least start at 25, 30.
Honestly, when I'm doing personal flowers and things like that, I have a higher labor percentage markup 'cause they are more tedious. So $47 essentially is 46. 87 would be added to my one 30. So I'm taking my base recipe of my kind of go-to floral layers, and then I'm adding that premium bloom element. So that gets me to 1 77.
So I would have to sell my base recipe with my roses, adding that Oculus with my filler flour and my greens for 1 77. That would be my proper markup on that item. So when you build those base recipes, most of us have go-to things and if I have a client that shows me. This really kind of fun, fancy thing I most often am going to go, okay, like that's beautiful.
What I'm gonna try to dig into what their budget is and then I know right away it with, because I have base pricing for everything. Everything. I can just quickly go in and say, okay. You're telling me you want five bridesmaids, a bride bouquet, 10 bhut, five risk CORs, and you need 20 center pieces. And if somebody is telling me at this point they have a $2,000 budget for one, my full service is above 2000.
So I probably wouldn't be here anyways. But if for some reason they were. I could quickly do a little math to show them. At my starting at pricing, my base pricing is my starting at pricing. So if you go in and figure out this, starting at pricing, it's really easy to work backwards when somebody gives you a budget to go, this person is on crack.
This budget is not happening, but you never know when somebody says. They have a $2,000 budget and realistically they had no freaking clue what budget they should say, so they just said the first thing that come to their head because obviously lower always feels more comfortable and they could have a $5,000 budget.
You never know when you start getting into and just say, Hey. I've been thinking through that budget and when I pull, and I've done this in email so many times, because for one, I'm not gonna get to a consultation unless I know that somebody has an appropriate budget that fits my full service products and that they're realistic about their wants with their budget.
So I will send them this little quick breakdown. If for some reason they didn't look at my brochure, a brochure with your starting at pricing is a great way to, for one, have a lead magnet that you can on any third party site, when somebody's on the knot or on wedding wire or on Zola, say, Hey. Can you, um, you know, send me your info.
I want pricing 'cause that's what they're often asking. I would love to send you pricing. If you email me at, I will send you my brochure that has my starting at pricing. All my starting at pricing is my base recipes. So this is a marketing strategy. If somebody sends you a dm, if somebody sends you an inquiry on a third party site, you can say.
Email me because you should have a really nailed down process that you don't have people reaching out to you all over the universe that is going to drive you crazy. You need to have a formalized process that people are reaching out this one way because then you develop a process that wins and this process easily can be.
I wanna send you my brochure that has my pricing, and so then somebody has an idea how much things start at that might not be what they're going to be for them if they have Oculus and Peony dreams, and you can just easily explain that. My base pricing includes basic hydrangeas and roses and a little bit of filler flour and greenery.
You already have it memorized because this is a just easy way you price off of all the time. I often want to use hydrangeas in there because I'm going to cut costs. I'm going to spend less time covering mechanics. If somebody doesn't like it or it doesn't match their color palette, then I have to start over from square one.
I can almost always take someone's inspiration photo. Put white hydrangeas or green hydrangea at the base and get the same look, but I'm covering my mechanics and I'm making something look lusher and fuller for less because hydrangeas usually are less cost. So I'm using this strategy to make pricing easier.
I'm still using the same pricing formulas. I'm still using my, taking my wholesale product and then timesing it by my markup. If your market markup is times three, if your markup is times four, whatever it is you do, you then I'm adding my labor percentage. This labor is separate. Then my labor to set up, deliver room, flip, tear down all the things, so completely separate.
Labor charge. For that, then I am making sure that I am talking to people in a way that I'm optimizing my time. I'm not spending time with people who have unrealistic budgets because I'm using this strategy with my starting at pricing, I'm using this strategy to help cultivate people in, to bring them down my.
Lead path, my lead conversion path of inquiry, and then I've talked about this before, equal energy exchange between me and the client. Me giving them brochure, me asking them questions, and then seeing how they respond. Then if their response is. Thoughtful. They gave me and answered the questions that I asked.
They sent me pictures so I make sure it's in alignment with something that my studio wants to do because if they send me a bar and wedding with a bunch of baby's breath in mason jars, I am gonna say, you know what? I, I looked, and actually this weekend, this would be really hard to pull off because I have another event.
I mean, I would make something up because I wouldn't wanna do that wedding, but I wouldn't wanna hurt their feelings and tell them that their baby's breath wedding is ugly. It's like calling, I think I said this in a recent book, calling somebody's wedding ugly, like an ugly baby. They're super excited about it, but that doesn't mean that you need to be, people have different visions.
I couldn't execute a wedding well. That was not in alignment with my studio. It's not going to be my best work. I try to always approach a wedding that I don't really wanna do something unless one part of it is Instagram shareable. At this point, I don't need to do those kind of weddings. I'm going to find a wedding that is super fun.
I'm going to find a wedding that I'm really aligned with. I'm gonna find a wedding that speaks to me. And so if that is you. You are taking any wedding, you're going to burn yourself out, and you're really not gonna develop a signature style or definitive style in your work because you're doing everything to make everybody else happy except you.
So try to develop some base pricing. Use the formulas. Go download my free pricing guide. At the floral CEO, so floral ceo.com/pricing. I'll also put that in the show notes. It gives you like the foundation of how to price for profit. Then from there, you wanna make sure that anytime an inquiry comes in, you are not reinventing the wheel.
If you can use your base pricing, use that as a tool to build. Pricing formulas and recipes. But at this point, because I know and I'm so dialed in, I can look at a picture and I can, you know, ask the client, Hey, this is really full. Are you wanting something this full? Or are you trying to be a little bit more budget conscious?
I'm basically in an underlying way telling them that this is going to be more expensive because it's so lush. They have no comparison to what is less. They only have their picture. I try never to duplicate a picture because I think expectations come around that picture, and I don't want a wedding day for somebody to be holding up their photo and looking at that centerpiece.
So I always try to change a variable so that I never run into somebody saying it doesn't look identical, the picture, because that never feels good, and I don't want the pressure of duplicating things. So I will go in and say, you know what we could do one probably simpler than this, around one 50. Is that something that would work for your budget?
I know that my base formula is one 30. Then if I can go and add five to seven more roses if I wanted. Or I could add some other flour to round out my design to maybe get it closer to theirs, or I could quickly go, here's my base pricing. Okay, in this picture, I need to swap out three of the roses for peonies.
'cause I see a few peonies in here and I see three Oculus. I can quickly take my one 30. I can go and say, okay, I need to take, um, you know, a dollar 50 of roses off times. So I'm taking $12 of roses out 'cause that builds in my markup and my labor. So I take my one 30 minus that. So I'm down to one 18, right?
Yep. One 18. And then I need to add, what do three peonies cost? So three peonies at $5 a piece, that's $15 times three is $45. And then I'm gonna add my markup, which is a total of 56, 25 for you to add three pe, andies, everybody. So then I'm gonna add that to my one 18. So then their compost with three p and e.
Then that would be, if we had seven Roses previously, that would be four Roses would be 1 74. So if they had something like that in there, because I wouldn't wanna probably go down to Four Roses, I would probably say I could do that Com bowl for $200, because then I'm gonna have some room to get some roses in there and get those panties in there.
Or I can just say, I'm not going to take anything out. I'm going to add those three peonies to this design, and so then I would just take my one 30 and add my $45 and or $56 in peonies, so you can easily kind of pivot your recipe to be something that will work on the fly in a consultation. If for some reason things feel really tight, if you don't like that pressure.
You could even practice, okay, this is my base recipe. Their, you know, inspiration photos have Oculus in them. If I added a few Oculus, like at least three or five, what would that add to the price? So I could tell them they're getting a lush compote of hydrangeas roses and Oculus with a little bit of filler flour and greenery to accent it and fill it out.
That's a pretty easy way to approach pricing. I can do a similar thing for a cage on a backdrop, like if they have a, let's just say arch or they have hopa or there's another structure, I know my base recipe formula for those things because of the cost of the cage and needing to fill out with more greener and filler.
To me is about 1 95 if I don't want it to suck. 1 75 if I want bare bones. And that's with, you know, doing roses, hydrangeas, and then a little bit of filler, and then filling out with more grains, and then buying my one brick crate cage. So you can build base pricing for Bud Bases. You can build base pricing for corsages and ERs for ride bouquets.
You know, my standard bride bouquet is, 17 roses, and then I'm adding a transition, or if I can, if I'm adding something more than just roses and greenery and a little filler flower, then I would maybe do like 15 roses. I like big bouquets. Everybody like my bouquets usually are pretty. Banging and big.
I just, that's my kind of, my thing for brides. So then I could, if I'm gonna add a transition bloom, I, my really base is I like to at least do 15 roses, five transition blooms. Usually a spray rose a third of a bunch, at least third of a bunch to half, a bunch of filler, and then a third of a bunch of grains.
So that base price. Would be figured off those ingredients. And then if somebody wants something different, let's just say they're sending you something with light blue delphinium in it, that's almost like $20 a bunch. So then I would just go and add, okay, does it have a lot of delphinium in it? A little bit?
Uh, okay, it looks like it has five stems. So then I would add, add $2 a stem. I would add $10. I times that by my three. Then I add my labor percentage for processing and putting it in and designing with it. And so then let's just say we end up with around $40 to add those five stems of delphinium to your base recipe pricing.
Simplifying pricing is one of the best things that you could do for your business. Simplifying pricing will make you faster, will make you more confident. Confidence sells in your consultations. You really dialing in your pricing and not tiptoeing in when someone's asking you pricing questions.
When you're putting your pro proposals together and you're pricing everything from the ground up like that is painful. You don't wanna do that. You wanna come in there like the CEO that you are and come in. Hot with pricing that you feel confident in that you know you're going to be profitable. Let's just say you want to start using flat rate pricing.
You also, if somebody's giving you a fall inspired photo, let's just say you wanna use some broom corn, you wanna use some monks, you wanna use cosa. Maybe if you want to have some creative freedom. Mark up your base pricing to add some fun into your equation. You wanna get some dahlias. You wanna do something fun in your things.
Add that base pricing flexibility so that you have the ability to go in and maybe buy some locally grown product. Maybe go order something fun and inspiring for you. Like I love using broom corn in Fouquet. I love using SC FBO case. I love Dalios in fall bouquets. I grow dahlias. They're one, they're one of my favorite flowers, but they do not ship well, so I'm not gonna probably ship dahlias in.
If somebody's in love with them and it's November, I'm gonna tell them, I'm sorry, it's probably not happening. I just don't want to go through the heartache because when Dahlia's ship normally from Holland to the us. That's three to four days of time, and then we got three to four days maybe that it's sitting at the wholesaler and then it's in my cooler.
That thing is aged by time. You're usually getting it in a bouquet, and that's why they fall apart because they're old. That's what happens to dahlias. They fall apart usually when they're old, and I don't want that to happen when it's in a bridal. Okay, depending on the time is when I'm using that creative freedom to get blooms that are really fun and inspiring for me.
I often will save part of my budget for fun blooms. So maybe I'm picking my line flower to pick something fun. Maybe I'm picking. 25% of my large blooms, uh, so that I'm finding like a gido gerb. Um, I'm finding, you know, something that's really fun and inspiring for me. Some locally grown dahlias or even, you know, I've, when it comes to centerpieces, I've, you know, swapped out those big blooms for like Sumatra Oriental lilies.
You are the CEO in your business. You get to build your pricing formulas and your recipes on something that makes you feel like I can post this on inter on Instagram and I wouldn't be ashamed. I don't wanna post anything on Instagram that I wouldn't wanna make. Again, that doesn't attract my ideal audience.
If you are posting greenery clusters. You are doing a disservice to yourself because I don't want you to keep attracting greenery clusters. I want you to attract big, beautiful, tall centerpieces and low composts filled with lush blooms. If you keep posting Bud VAs, you're gonna keep attracting Bud VAs.
What you put out is like a boomerang to come back to you. So make sure that you're getting and creating things that inspire you. I hope this was helpful. Flower Friends, please go download my free guide@floralceo.com slash pricing if you are struggling with pricing. We also dive deep into that often, and I am basically in your back pocket to answer any of your pricing questions, recipe questions in the Floral CEO Mastermind, which you can learn more at floral ceo.com/mastermind.
I hope you have an amazing flower fill week flower friends, and I hope that you have a profitable flower week. Thanks so much and have a great day.