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Perfect for gardening enthusiasts at any level, this podcast is your companion to cultivating success and beauty in your own backyard or flower patch. Hosted by Jane Westoby from Fuchsia Blooms Florist and The Hampshire Seed Company.
Each episode is a treasure trove of practical tips, expert advice, and insider flower farming guides designed to help you sow and grow with confidence and harvest with pride. Whether you’re dreaming of rows of neat vegetables or cutting flowers for bouquets all year round, we’ll walk you through every step.
Let’s grow together!
Jane Westoby (00:02)
Hey flower friends and welcome back to the podcast that believes flowers should be local, seasonal and grown with love, not wrapped in plastic and flown halfway across the world. I'm Jane Restaby and I'm the founder of the Hampshire Seed Company and I'm a flower farmer florist who's gone from wedding chaos to seed packet chaos these days. And I also help other growers to build blooming good businesses. So,
Whether you're planning your first tray of cosmos or scaling up for serious sales, you're in the right place. And today I am going to dive head first into a topic that gets, let's just say a little bit uncomfortable for some people, but it absolutely needs to be said. It needs to be discussed. Really it is time to stop undercharging and overworking yourself.
So this is all about pricing flowers with confidence. So how to charge properly without apologizing? Let's face it, flowers aren't cheap. Well, you have to dig the beds, you have to buy the compost, you have to sow the seeds, water every night because it's been so hot, condition the flowers and it takes so long to actually cut and condition flowers. It's unreal.
and all of that labour is not cheap. So let's just take a step back and let's just talk about the guilt to start with. Here's the deal. If you've ever looked at your bank account after a fully booked wedding weekend and thought, well, I'm exhausted and how am I still broke? It's not that you're necessarily doing it wrong.
It's just that you're probably not charging properly. You know, let's me, let, bleh. Let me be blunt. You are not charging for a bunch of stems. You are charging for your time, your labor, your skills, your planning admin. Also the sleepless nights worrying if that fox has flattened the delphiniums again.
or in my case, if the deer have eaten all the Alcamilla mollusks because they love that. And I can't want eating my Alcamilla mollusks literally at the weekend. So we've had to put some more deer fencing up, which has had to go into my costs as well. But you know, you've got also the emotional support that you provide to all those brides and customers and wholesale buyers. It isn't fluff, it's real and it's valuable skilled work. So,
You know, stop comparing your prices to a supermarket. You're not providing supermarket balloons. You are running a floral business and a proper one. And your pricing should reflect the time, effort and flowers that you grow or supply. So you may be a flower farmer florist or you might be just a florist. You might not be growing the flowers, but it's the same principle. The principle isn't any different, okay?
So let's break it down. Let's break down the cost of supplying those flowers. So behind every £30 bouquet or £800 install is a pile of costs that nobody sees. You've got seeds, tubers, compost, fleece, labour, even if it's just you, just your labour. You've got packaging, fuel.
your invoicing time, my goodness, the list literally just goes on and on. and yet don't forget your website marketing, your insurance, your tax. Wow, it's a big list. And these, they're not optional extras. They are all necessities. And when you're under charge, you're not keeping it affordable. Let's get real.
You're not keeping it affordable. What you're doing is you are subsidizing somebody else's flowers. You're paying for their flowers and their happiness with your own time, money, your sleep, your sanity. Okay. So you need to end that cycle and learn how to actually price for profit. Okay. So let's talk formulas.
And I know some of you are really allergic to formulas. You're allergic to maths. I know you don't like a spreadsheet, but you know, gut feel really is not a pricing strategy. And you know, you can do it. You can do it on the back of a fag packet with a pencil. But you know, nothing beats a spreadsheet sometimes. I'll take you along the journey. Okay. So for a...
Profitable business for, let's say, let's start with florists, okay? You can use a basic markup formula. So something like two or three times the cost of the actual flowers, maybe twice the cost of the sundries, and maybe something like a 20 to 30 % design fee, okay? So whether you're making an arch or a bouquet, you you're investing your time.
And the more flowers there are, the more time it will take you to create that piece. So you need to ensure that the flowers markup covers firstly, all of your overheads, like your marketing and insurance, et cetera. And then your design fee actually covers your wage or the wage of the person who's creating that product. Okay, so when you're thinking about these florist overheads in particular, and we'll talk about the flower farming ones in just a second,
you need to ensure that your flower markup does cover all the overheads and that's going to be different for everybody. My overhead is different to the florist down the road and it's different to your overheads. ⁓ So you need to take some time to write down all of your costs. I have a blog to go with this podcast with exactly the same title.
So you can head on over there after you've listened to this and you can take a look at my example. But essentially, I would account for studio space and workspace costs, you know, the rent, the mortgage, the utilities, any council tax which needs to be paid. You've got supplies and tools, admin, know, business insurance, website costs, marketing and design.
You need to think about transport and delivery. So if you have any parking permits or tolls that you need to pay, all your fuel and van costs and your maintenance and insurance, you need to think about all that labor. So here in this example, I'm not talking about labor that goes into the cost of one item. So it's not necessarily the cost of making
one bouquet because you can add that very simply into the cost of your bouquet. You know how much it is per hour, the cost per hour and you know roughly how long it's going to take you to make a bouquet. So if it only takes you 15 minutes to make a bouquet you can very simply work out what the cost of making that bouquet is. So this labour that I'm talking about here in your overhead costs it's things like cleaning, ordering supplies,
bookkeeping. So it's labour that isn't included in the cost of goods. It's other, I wouldn't call it random labour, but it's labour that's very necessary. You do still need to account for that, not just the cost of the labour that goes into actually making the product, making the bouquets.
Then I've got a little section in there as well for some kind of miscellaneous kind of hidden creepers, know, professional membership. So, you know, if you're a member of Flowers from the Farm or if you're doing some training or workshops. And then there's also an extra section in there for setup costs. So if you are an existing flower farmer, or sorry, an existing, if you are an existing florist, you will already have equipment and you might not need to add in this setup cost.
You may have already paid that off, but typically this would include items that you can use for, it's not proportioned to one product. It's something like a printer where you would print out all of your orders. Scissors where you would use a pair of scissors to snip everybody's stems. So it's products that you product and.
It's product which you would use within your business across the board that you've had to pay for upfront. So you've had to purchase that printer at the beginning, those scissors at the beginning, all of your florist buckets at the beginning. But you typically wouldn't pay them every month like you would maybe pay your business insurance. So what you would do is you would work out over a longer period of time what the cost of that is.
So you may decide you want to pay for those goods over a five-year period. So you'd add that all up and you divide it across the five years, across the number of months, and then you'd add in a number into your cost per month to make sure that within your calculations, you are actually generating the cash to pay for that, even if you have actually
put the cash in right at the beginning, you still need to be generating that cash because that printer, you'll actually need to replace it at some point. The scissors, you're going to need to replace at some point, okay? So there'll be depreciation there. You're gonna have to replace them at some point, okay? So there's a line in there for that as well. Okay, so if you add up all of your costs, and in my example, and you'll be able to see that in the blog,
In my example, my costs are £1,135 a month. And that covers everything from the rent, the cleaning supplies, the insurance. What it doesn't include, and this is really, really important, it does not include the cost of goods, your cogs, okay? Such as your flowers, your tissue, your ribbon. You know exactly how much of those you are using to make every
single bouquet. They are not monthly overheads, they are cogs, they are your cost of goods, direct costs okay. So you add those in
you're actually adding those in to your flour cost and sundries cost, okay, which you are timesing by two or three. Once you've actually worked out your costs, you'll know exactly how much you do need to add on there, okay.
So once you have your monthly number, so remember in my example, it's £1,135 per month, you can then calculate your average monthly sales income. So how much you're taking. Now you might not have that number yet. You may be right at the beginning of your journey. So if you listen to last week's podcast,
where I talk about targets, you'll be able to set a target. The best thing to use if you're right at the beginning of your journey is to use whatever your target is for that number. So that will be all of your bouquets, your events, your wholesale orders, et cetera. If you have a number, great, you need to use it. And then you're going to divide your overheads by your income to get your overhead percentage, okay? So if your overheads are £1,135 a month,
And then let's say your sales income per month is 6,000, okay? Nice easy number. So your overheads is 1,135 divided by 6,000, which is 18.9. Let's call it 19%. Okay, let's round it up, okay. So what you'd need to do is add 19 % onto every quote of okay to fairly cover all of your overheads.
So what that means is a 30 pound bouquet would need to include five pounds 70 of overheads and a 3000 pound wedding would need to include five pounds 70, sorry, and a 3000 pound wedding would need to include 570 pounds worth of overheads. That's a big number, but that's what it is. And if you aren't charging that,
then you are not pricing accurately, okay? So if you're a flower farmer, well, this is where it gets a little bit more complicated because you also need to figure out your cost per stem, which I know is really difficult. You need to keep accurate records, but you don't need to do this for everything you grow. know, just work it out for one bed, just one as an example, and use that example.
across the board for everything. It's the easiest way to do it. Especially if you're in, you know, year one, you know, you're part way through year one. As your business grows, you will get more and more accurate and you will be able to refine that. But if you are just starting out, just do it on one bed, okay? Because, you know, really, whether you're paying three pound or three pound fifty for your packet of seeds, it isn't really going to dramatically change your price per stem.
And actually the seeds are often the cheapest bit. It's the labor that actually costs. So I will do a separate podcast all about efficiency and labor, but for now let's concentrate on just getting the numbers right and getting those down on paper. Okay. So if you just focus on one bed, you know, you need to think about things like the compost that you use for putting up your seedlings. Maybe you use some vermiculite, of course your seeds.
any fertilizer that you're going to put on that bed so some chicken pellets maybe some manure some liquid seaweed and then the labour so the labour to actually sow the seeds, prick out the seeds, plant the seeds out and then when it's hot you're going to need to water that bed as well you've also got the cutting and the conditioning as well it's a huge amount okay
So there is an example of this again in my blog and I'll link to it in the show notes so you can see, you can visually see this all then, okay. But the total in my example comes to 232 pounds 97 and you'll be able to see the largest proportion of that. So 200 pounds of that 232 pounds 97 is actually labour. It's a huge, huge cost.
Do not underestimate your labor time. And that's something that once you've done that calculation, it's really, really helpful. So the next time you're sowing seeds, time how long it takes you to sow the seeds when you're pricking out. Calculate, know, set your timer. Just set the timer on your phone so that you can actually time how long it's taking you to do that pricking out. The watering, you know, just time yourself just one night. How long does it take you to water all your beds?
divide it out and then you'll know, okay, it takes me three minutes to water my beds or five minutes to water my beds. I do it every single night or every other night for six months. And you can begin to build a picture for how much time everything is actually taking you. I know that watering my garden when I have to do a full water because it's really hot, it probably takes me about 30 minutes if I have to do...
a water with some feed in there, so maybe some liquid seaweed in there. It takes a little bit longer. It doesn't come out of my contraption as quickly. So it probably takes me 45 minutes, maybe even an hour actually. Well, probably not an hour, maybe 45 minutes. It does take me a little bit longer. So, but that's for everything. I then divide that by the number of beds. Okay. ⁓ So what you can then do,
is you can then split that number. So remember my number was 232.97. You can then split that cost across all the stems that you expect to get from that space. If you're not sure how many stems you're going to cut from that space, then again, head back to last week's podcast, it's number 15. And that's where I explain those calculations. There's a blog to go with that too.
which will tell you how much you can cut from one bed, essentially. So do go back and listen to that if you don't know, it's really, really important to know, okay? So let's say you're growing snapdragons in this bed. In my example, it's a four by one meter bed. So you'll need around 100 snapdragons to fill that bed. And you will be able to cut around a thousand stems.
spreadsheet from last week has told me that it literally just inputted it into last week's spreadsheet. So that's nice easy maths for you. So the 232.97 we divide that by the thousand stems that we think we're going to get from that space. So each stem will essentially cost you 23 pence to produce. That's without any wastage though, there is no wastage calculated.
into that. You can put some wastage in there if you want to. But that's the cost of goods only. Okay. You'll actually need to do the same calculation for overheads that the florist has to do. So the example that I've just given earlier on, that's exactly the same. You need to do that same thing. You need to add on a percentage for your overheads. You are going to have, you know, some similar overheads in there.
You know, you're going to have rent, you're going to have utilities, all of that still applies. You're going to do the same thing. ⁓ However, your rent is likely to be a lot, lot higher and your equipment is likely going to be a lot, lot higher as well. So in this example, what I'm going to do is I'm going to double it and just say, okay, instead of it being 19%, it's just more than double. Actually, I'm going to double it to 40%. I'm going to say, okay.
With all those overheads, you're probably looking at a good 40 % for your monthly overheads. So that's going to add on an extra nine pence to the cost. So 40 % on top of 23 pence is an extra nine P. So that takes your 23 P up to 32 pence, rounding to the nearest penny, of course.
So that's the bare minimum. 32 pence is the absolute, absolute bare minimum that you can charge to cover your costs per stem for each Snapdragon. But that's without profit. If you want some profit in your business and if you want to invest in your business and you actually want to make money, then you will need to charge a lot more. How much more is up to you. You can double that, you can treble that.
Again, come back to your target, listen to last week's blog, set yourself a target and start looking at that. Okay. So that's quite a lot of numbers that we've actually gone through again today on top of last week's numbers, but it is pretty simple. Once you start to work out your cost and you can price with confidence, even if you secretly hate selling, then
then you can stop apologizing, okay? You're running a business, not a charity. So create yourself a pricing guide. know, packages and ranges can take the awkwardness out. There's no more, how much do I charge for a bouquet moments? If you actually have everything written down, create recipes so you don't get caught out undercharging, work everything out ahead of schedule, okay?
and know your customers. If they want Tesco prices, then let them go to Tesco's. You're here for the ones who value homegrown, seasonal and artisan products. Also think about just upselling smartly, know, add-ons like boutonniers and subscriptions, maybe seed packets with bouquets. They all help to build margin without a lot more hustle. You know, you've already got the customer there. They're already in your hand. They're already buying from you.
So upselling is a really, really great way of actually making more money there.
You know, if they say you're too expensive, you're supposed to be too expensive because they're the wrong people. Remember, you're not for everyone. You are there for customers who care about quality, seasonality, sustainability and style. And these people do exist, but they need to see you valuing your work first. Remember, pricing is not about what you can afford. It's about what it actually costs to run
your business. Okay so here's where to start audit your products cut and reprice the ones that are draining your energy and draining your profit. Okay update your website make your pricing really clear and unapologetic tell customers what they're paying for and why your product is so fabulous.
And use testimonials, they'll build trust and they will justify your price points as well. So confidence really does come from clarity. You need to know what does it cost to produce your flowers and what do you need to earn? Go back to last week's podcast and what kind of experience are you really delivering and price for that price like you mean it price like someone who's building a real sustainable business because that's what you are doing.
Okay, so if this episode has hit home and you are finally ready to sort out your pricing for good, then do take a read through my blogs and start planning for profit. Okay. And if you're loving this practical side of flower farming, then do make sure that you subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next and subscribe on the website too. And then you'll receive all of our emails with all of our blog links on as well. So you don't miss anything.
And until next time, plan for profit and I will see you next week.