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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.
Hello, flower friends. This is Jen. And you are listening to the floral hustle podcast on this week's episode. I want to talk about selling yourself short. And this is something so many floral designers do. So if this is you, don't feel bad. It happens to everybody. I want to talk about how to stop selling yourself short and making the money that you deserve in 2024.
And beyond. So a lot of ways that I, I see floral designers selling themselves short are financially, uh, creatively, and then personally. And with financially, where I often see that shows up, show up is over stuffing, over ordering, over promising, just a whole lot of over. And so if you are over delivering consistently.
On your weddings, you are normalizing your value to be not as high as it should be. You start delivering work for that price, and that price is way out of line with where traditional formulas for pricing fall. And so then you start conditioning, like, your customers, because once you start doing exceptional work, you're going to start getting referrals.
And so those referrals are going to most likely have transparency into what you have purchased, or it's been talked about or discussed, and I, and often not understand, uh, fully understood, because even if you have a price for something, You know, a lot of times people don't hear like that's plus set up in delivery and tax and all of those additional fees.
So when you condition clients by consistently over delivering, you are not only costing yourself money on that wedding, you are potentially costing yourself money in perpetuity. Going forward, anybody you book that that person potentially knows, but you also start to trick yourself. That, oh, I need to deliver this because that's a comparable value.
And when you're not delivering on that comparable value, it kind of tugs at your heart a little bit, tugs at your mind, like, this seems like I'm not delivering the value that I should be. And so getting away from conditioning yourself and just sticking to formulas. Plan out your recipes, plan out your ordering.
And when you plan out those things, you just follow the equations. And then all of those feelings that, you know, over stuffing kind of tendency just falls to the wayside because it's, it's done, it's over. So when it's over, you, you know, are just like convincing yourself that that's the norm. And often if you are a new designer.
You really want to over deliver because you think you have to, to, you know, really show people your, your worthiness, show people that, you know, that they made a good decision booking with you, show people that you are worth the money that they are spending and all of these, you know, validity of your business.
And really needing to be validated by all these people comes into play. The only person who their opinion really inevitably matters is yourself. And so validate yourself. I do a beautiful job. The weddings that I do are beautiful and I should make money for doing them. And if you start with like foundationally being okay.
with making money, being okay with delivering something that is a good value. That is what's going to help push your business forward because you're going to be able to consistently deliver based on a set of standards. going forward in your business. So delivering on a, a pray over delivering on pricing over delivering on product over delivering on what you promised.
Like you're really selling yourself short because at the end of the year, when you do your taxes, that profit margin is just going to be cut away. And if you keep chopping away, At your profit margin, you're, you're going to end up having a very expensive hobby potentially. And for two, you lose a little bit of that, that like inner worthiness of I am running a successful business that is profitable, that delivers beautiful things.
And when you get rid of that worthiness, like that also like self doubt starts to creep in. And And imposter syndrome starts to creep in. Confidence starts lacking. And then it's just kind of this like spiral that you're start to normalize like the not so best version of yourself that you deserve to be operating fully on the best version of yourself.
So if you keep selling yourself short, stop. Start following formulas. Start planning your weddings. Start planning your orders. Start planning your funerals. Start planning whatever you're doing to a point where you're entering into it from a standpoint of making profit. Because you deserve to make profit in your business.
You are not running a non profit. Most likely. So then if you want to talk about like time, selling yourself short from a timing standpoint, I often see this happen when, especially when somebody is either at the beginning stage of their business or they're at a stage that they're really just busyness makes them feel successful.
Busyness, if you are not making money. It's not success. That is just like taking a little bit of butter and scraping it over some burnt toast. You barely get any coverage because you are run thin. You are stressed out. So from a timing perspective You need to invest where your time is optimized financially, and that means that you are contributing or spending your time on money producing activities, revenue producing activities.
If you are spending a lot of time on non revenue producing activities, you are selling yourself short because you are focusing on the things that maybe you think you need to be doing, maybe that feel like they need to be done. But honestly, you should be spending time on this other thing that would probably a better time investment.
And if you are selling yourself short on this, I would love for you to go through an exercise and do a time audit. Figure out and take just a couple weeks and think of like, this is about what I worked. This is what my revenue was for that time period. This was, you know, the average hourly rate before I took any of my operating expenses out.
When I have done this exercise with coaching clients, we have come up with a, they are making minimum wage. They are working a ton of hours, but they are making minimum wage because they're focusing on potentially doing things that just aren't high revenue producers. And often Like, that's just tracking what they actually sold.
That isn't, like, especially if you're doing daily deliveries, isn't tracking, like, your shrink that you had, what you had to throw in the compost bin, what you had to throw in the garbage, what you didn't sell, all your credit card fees from those, all of the time and effort that it took taking those orders.
So concentrate on revenue producing. You will, I do not sell my, Self short because I know what is going to make me money and I know what activities, what things. I even can tell when I'm like getting bogged down with doing something crazy in Canva or something and go, I understand that this is a revenue producing activity, but this isn't the highest paying revenue producing activity that I have on the docket right now.
So I need to back up and go a different direction. And you might need to do that too. But having at least a little bit of a push mentally into that direction is going to make a huge difference. Once you stop selling yourself short from a time perspective, you create space. And when you create space, you create opportunity.
I know when I strategically create space in my life that I am Think of bigger, more bolder, badass ideas. I have space to think creatively about a project. I have space to plan out my recipes. I have space to just do more strategy in my business. If I am bogged down with chasing 50 daily deliveries, I am not going to have time to really focus on getting a 20, 000 wedding.
Which, you deserve to have those big revenue bursts into your business. I do the occasional daily deliveries on conditions. I have the flowers, or I've grown the flowers. They're already here, or I already have a plan that I'm going to the wholesaler for something else, and then I can fit it in. But I don't do, like, under a 50 delivery.
I just tell them that it's not great. I don't feel good about delivering 50 because I want that person to get something nice. And with the cost of flowers, like I'm just, I don't feel great about 50. And I have people that they're like, okay, I'll call around, proceed, call around. That's amazing. I hope you find some other dumb ass that will do that because I don't.
I have my value and my worth and you should too. Don't undersell yourself. Even if you got this wedding and you've just done a couple weddings and you have this bride reach out to you and they're just wanting you to do like bend over backwards and do all these things, you need to have them like to a point where they have some commitment for you to do a bunch of work.
For you to go in and do a site visit with them, for you to go in and really dig in, you need to have commitment. Your time is more valuable than running around with a bunch of what ifs. And if somebody can't respect that, then they're not your client. All right, then you, you selling yourself short. And a lot of these things are interconnected, but if you do not value you, your worth personally, that your work, your mind, your vision, yourself is worth more money, is worth like someone being excited.
to do business with you. I had, um, someone email me back that I bid their event. They absolutely loved my design board. They loved everything. They loved meeting with me and it circled back and I said, you know what? I like, they wanted to add some, a little bit more color. So I said, you know what? This is the direction I think we should go because I think that's going to carry the bronze and the peachy and the orangey in that you mentioned.
So I said, That you like. So I'm thinking something like this. If you guys are okay with that direction, I would love to move forward with securing the date. My contract is attached. Great. We will send that back. Like it was that simple. Like I, my time, my investment and they value me. They value my creativity.
They value my, and they were like, we're so excited to work with you on this. Like seriously. Like. I, I'm, they should be because I'm excited to work with them. There's a synergy. There is like this, this reciprocity of energy when you were working with clients that are on the same level that you should be working with.
They're, you're all excited. Like if that excitement isn't there, I don't honestly want to do the wedding very much. I'm like, if I can make money, then I'll do it. And that isn't being coy. That isn't being like I'm not being an asshole about it. I just know that with the limited amount of time that I have to invest in my business, I want to invest it where I'm going to make the biggest impact.
And you should do that too. You deserve to be in a place of making impact in your business, making impact in your, your finances, making impact in your life. Making impact in who you are, like if you start valuing yourself to a point like that people can see that they can, that is like attracted to a certain type of person that is like, I love that energy.
I want to be around that energy. Like I want that energy at my wedding. I want that energy at my event. I want to deal with someone with that energy and that frequency because like I know that like the whole Experience is going to be better, and I deserve better. You deserve better. We all deserve better.
So, like, let's start having the expectations that better is what we get. Better is what we attract. A financial abundance is what, like, should be coming your way. I always talk to myself like I am magnetic. I attract my ideal client because they value my creativity. I deserve to make money. I deserve to make an abundant amount of money to be impactful.
Like, I speak to myself in that way. I don't speak to myself like, that I hope I get this wedding. They should want to work with me on their wedding. They should want to work with me on their event. They should, as a coaching client, like, I pour in my mastermind, like, I pour myself into that. Like, today we normally have an hour call and it was like an hour and 35 minutes because like I was just so excited about our hot seats and everything that everybody was doing.
Like, And I, I mean, I was jacked up. I was like, let's light the world on fire, everybody. Let's go. This is amazing. And I'm excited about like somebody, um, is redesigning their logo and another person is putting a styled shoot together. And we were going through like recipe planning and it, it's just like, I pour my heart into it.
And so like. It is an investment and it's not a very big investment compared to the masterminds that I've been in. I mean, this, it's, it's a very minimal investment to be a part of like me jacking you up. I gave a pep talk at the beginning of it because I just was at the wholesaler and I could feel like there's just like a negative energy.
Not only at the wholesaler, but I felt it like when I went in the group that people were just a little down in the dumps. I'm like, let's stop. Like I got emails like weddings are going to be slow. I have huge, I just booked 30, 000 of weddings for June. Like we can still make 2024 super kick ass. I completely believe that if we start thinking differently, we will start attracting differently.
So repeat after me, flower friends, I deserve abundance. I am magnetic. I attract my ideal client. I am creative and people want to hire me for what I can create. I produce exceptional work. I am magnetic. Go magnetize 2024 to be the best year ever and start attracting what you deserve and stop selling yourself short.
because I believe in you. Now it's time for everybody else to see what I see. Thank you so much for listening flower friends and you have an amazing flower filled week.