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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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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. This is something I hear a lot, "I'm not making enough money, so I must need to raise my prices. I'm doing all of these weddings," and your revenue looks decent, "but I am just like exhausted, but there's never enough money left. I must not be charging enough." And sometimes, yes, you might not be charging enough, but you absolutely are underpricing what you're delivering.
Sometimes you could raise every wedding by 15% and still have a profitability problem because you are overbuying, overstaffing, frankly wasting flowers, buying unnecessary rentals Making last minute trips or getting last minute deliveries because something wasn't planned accordingly. You're giving away la- labor by not charging enough for potentially your setups, and deliveries, and room flips, and strikes.
And you're spending money you never actually accounted for. If you, for some reason, thought that you were going to fit this huge-ass wedding in your small, station wagon, and then you had to get a U-Haul, you never accounted for that. So more revenue cannot really outrun or outsmart sloppy spending forever.
You can absolutely price yourself out of a hole, but you can't keep digging the hole underneath the new price. So the first problem that I often see is knowing the difference if you're having a pricing problem or a spending problem. Pricing problems look like you're consistently calculate a wedding accurately, and there's just simply never enough margin.
So like you did the right things. You did the recipes. Fresh product maybe was not marked up appropriately. You did recipes, but you didn't charge enough for those recipes, or you didn't charge enough for your installation fee. Your delivery was basically free. Your tear down was not charged for.
Your rental pricing is way too low for the labor that it costs to get those rentals ready, to get them clean, to buy them, account for breakage. You're not accounting for your time, and you are quoting from your gut instead of from a formula. You could execute a wedding beautifully and efficiently, and still not make a money...
e- enough money because you have a pricing problem. A spending problem looks a little bit different. Your proposal theoretically has enough margin, but then the actual cost blows past your estimate. You budge- budgeted two Gs for flowers, and you spent 2,900. You planned for 40 hours of labor, but 65 hours actually happened.
You planned one delivery vehicle, but now you actually needed two U-Hauls and four people making trips across town. That is a execution cost control problem. Pricing creates the opportunity for profit. Execution determines whether you actually keep it. The other thing, your profit leak number one, and you guys, we're all guilty of this because flowers are really pretty, and we always wanna make things prettier.
But when we overbuy flowers, we are basically turning the faucet on to losing money. So if you are ordering emotionally, adding just one more bunch, you have constant anxiety or fear that you're going to run out. You're buying things without recipes. You're buying premium product, and then the design does not actually need it.
You're failing to account for substitutions. You're buying too many colors or too many of varieties, and you're not using leftovers strategically. Intentional abundance and uncontrolled purchasing are very common. So questions to ask, did I have a recipe? Did I know the actual stem counts? Did I compare what I ordered with what I actually used?
Did I create a reasonable buffer? Did I order extras because they were necessary or because I was anxious? Fear is super expensive at your wholesaler. And every extra bunch feels small until you multiply it across 30 weddings. All right. The next profit leaker is labor r- that runs wild. Florists underestimate labor constantly.
And part of that reason is because if you are a total fucking rockstar, and you know how to make one of these things, and you've done it a million times, and then you give that same project because you're working on the other really tricky, complicated thing, and you know you could have made that project in 30 minutes, and it takes them three hours You can't do everything, so you need to account for things taking longer than your badass self.
And I know that sounds heady and maybe a little bit, like, egocentric, but I am faster than the majority of people that work for me because the vision is in my head. I can visualize exactly. I've been dreaming about this thing or conceptualizing this thing for nine months. So it's in my head, like a photocopy has just been imprinted in my brain.
I've dreamt up the recipe. I've done all those things. The person you're having w- do that, because you're spending your time on a higher value task, doesn't have that same imprint. So often it takes longer. Or maybe you just, freaked out because this is a bigger wedding and you get too many people.
People are slower. There's too many hours. You gave someone the wrong skill level for the task. So somebody who is a beginner level, maybe you gave them a really hard thing because you think it's easy, but it's not easy to them. Or it's something they've never done before and your wedding now becomes a learning zone, which takes more time.
I am a big proponent if I have freelancers that consistently work for me, I on every wedding will take one freelancer and one opportunity to help teach them or make them better. I will ask them, "Have you ever made this?" And if they're like, "No." "Would you like to learn?" Okay. Then later on, hopefully, when they come and freelance for me again they have a valuable skill that I have taught them, and hopefully after learning that, maybe they've had a chance to practice it somewhere else, but if not, they still had the experience when they were here.
That also creates a learning environment and an environment that people wanna come back to because it is something fun You could have just maybe had really poor prep, and that creates overtime. So if you don't have a wedding the weekend before or the week before your wedding, you should be pulling all the stuff that you can and getting everything prepped, getting your foam made.
Setup takes way longer when nothing is organized ahead of time. So if you have people who are coming to make tall centerpieces or low compotes, but you don't have the foam made, you don't have the foam soaked, you don't have any of those things, this is inevitably going to take longer because now you're slowing down a designer to do prep work
Other things. Tear down without a plan and it just takes way too long. You as the owner are doing $20 an hour tasks. You're paying really super experienced designers to wash buckets or process roses or make foam. More people does not always mean faster. Sometimes too many people can add and actually make production messier So, do we have clear roles defined in the studio?
Did people know what they are re- responsible for? Was the production plan even realistic? Was the prep done before the team arrived? Was I paying a designer rate for a basic production work? Did I compare estimated labor with actual labor? Labor is not expensive when it creates efficiency. Labor is expensive when it is chaos.
Do not hire five people because you failed to make a plan. All right, profit leak number three, poor recipes This ties into both product and labor, 'cause if every centerpiece is created completely from intuition, one gets 22 roses, one gets 13, one gets 8-- 18, one gets 31, one gets three extra stems because it looks like it needed something.
Now multiply that over 25 recipes. Basic recipes help create predictable cost structures, predictable production time, consistent design, easier ordering, easier delegation, and easier profitability analysis. Recipes are not about removing creativity. They're about protecting profitability. So profit leak number four is giving shit away.
Things florists forget to charge for, ceremony delivery, the regular delivery, pickup, setup, room flip, ceremony transfer, repurposing, installations, strike, tear down, rental cleaning, candle setup, ladders, late night labor, extra venue walkthroughs, and additional revisions You might have a f- a customer that's actually paying what they should for the actual flowers, but they super require super service and are expecting all of these additional services that are not standard.
So your flowers may be profitable while the service is eating you alive. And we don't have to do those things without charging. If they had a 9:00 to 5:00 job and their boss was requiring them to go and run and get some additional resources, they would bill their employer accordingly. You would tell them, "You owe me extra money.
This is extra work, and we deserve to be compensated accordingly." All right. Profit leak number five, rentals and I'll just buy it. This is a famous one because, oh, one of those vases is only $4 each, but then you have to have 75 of them. And then you need bins, and you need shelves, and you need storage, and you need someone to wash them, you need someone to load them, and somebody inevitably breaks nine of them.
You need to calculate more than just purchase price, purchasing costs. Rental inventory has a purchase cost, a storage cost, a cleaning cost, a packing cost, a maintenance cost, a breakage cost, a transportation, labor, and replacement cost. Owning something does not make it free
I want to have things in my rental inventory that I can turn around and rent over and over and over again to increase profitability. I do not want to do one-off oh, I'm gonna buy these things, unless I am so excited that I know I'm gonna sell them to at least rent them to at least three, three couples.
If I can't rent it to three couples at least, I don't wanna do it, because I'm gonna have to store it. I'm... I am not a rental company. I am a florist who offers rentals
Profit leak number six is last-minute chaos. Poor planning creates very expensive emergencies. Examples of that could be overnight shipping, emergency wholesaler runs, hardware store trips, U-Hauls added last minute, extra freelancers called in, paying someone overtime, second delivery trips because something was forgotten.
Individ- visually, that could be 80, 150, or 300, which doesn't seem catastrophic, but across a entire season, that could be thousands
The biggest thing that you need to know is that chaos has a line item. You just usually don't see it on a proposal. Profit leak number eight is your own time. Florists often calculate flowers, freelancers, delivery, but owner labor becomes invisible. If you personally spent four hours doing a consultation and proposal, three hours ordering, five hours prepping, 12 hours of designing, eight hours wedding day, three hours tear down admin, you as the owner are 35 hours deep, and did you account for that?
If the only way the spending is profitable is because you worked for free, it was not truly profitable
So how do you actually be know that you're underpriced? When you're looking at everything from afar, you're like, "Look at, this is a $10,000 wedding. I'm gonna make so much money." But if you run efficiently and margins are still poor, that is a sign. If your product percentages consistently exceeds what your model allows, that is a pro- problem.
Labor is controlled, but profit remains low. You are fully booked, but exhausted. Clients say yes very, very easily. Demand exceeds capacity. Your pricing has not changed despite increases in costs. Your minimum no longer protects your weekends. Then raise your damn prices. Efficiency cannot say... save you a fundamentally underpriced wedding.
So you could be efficient AF, but if you underprice it, you underprice it. Cost control is not a substitute for good pricing, and pricing is not a substitute for cost control. Both truly matter. So I want you to think about your wedding profitability and auditing it. So what did we sell? What was our total reven- wedding revenue?
What did we actually buy? What was our actual flower cost, product cost, production, all those things, like the stuff to make it, how much did it cost? What did we pay freelancers? What did we spend money on? Delivery, transportation, rentals, consumables, miscellaneous costs. What did we actually use of the owner?
You as the business own- owner, like what did you work? And then what was left? And then I'd love for you to compare the estimated v- versus the actual Feelings can tell you wedding w- that wedding was like really hard, but the numbers can tell you why So go in, audit your price, your product, your people, your process, and your profit.
You deserve as the CEO in your business to make money, and now is the time to start if this has not been your world. So if this is something you need support on, the Floral CEO Mastermind is the place for you. We talk about money. We talk about profitability. We talk about systems. We talk about creating a business that pays you.
And so go check it out at floralceo.com/mastermind. Thank you so much for listening, flower friend, and you have an amazing flower-filled day.