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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're listening to the floral hustle podcast on this week's episode. I want to talk about making money and I just did my taxes. And of course, every time you do your taxes, you're like, How can I make this more profitable? How am I going to pay myself more? And then I know long ago that my tax person goes this kind of an expensive hobby that seems like you're working your ass off.
And obviously a lot of those things have changed because I've put things in place. What's funny is that I think that there is a perception That as a florist, you can't make money. And so, I want to talk about, as a florist, can you actually make money? Because I've also had people come to me and like, they're all in, but they think that they're going to quit their day job and automatically replace.
They're going to just be able to pay themselves the 85, 000 salary they just had, or the 100, 000 salary or whatever their salary was, they think they're just going to be able to flip a switch and all of a sudden they're going to be making that. Or I've also had flower friends that are like, I want a 400, 000 a year business.
But like. They don't really seem like they're lighting the world on fire from an energy, from an effort standpoint, like they don't want to really work very hard. And so I was recently talking to a one on one, um, coaching client and we were talking about like, what is your threshold for hard work? I work hard.
I make a, like the business makes a good amount of money. Especially from a home based business. I think last year it was at 325, 000 out of my home based business. With I, I think I have 16 hours of childcare ish a week and I have a special needs kiddo. I still prioritize myself like going to CrossFit three to four times a week, having animals, having house, having the urban flower farm.
So like I have the propensity to just work harder naturally. And if you want to get into floristry and you want to, like, have a business that is 300, 000 or 400, 000 or even 100, 000, like, what does that look like from a revenue standpoint? So I want to start out with, like, paying yourself, because most of the time people are running their business, they're running They're, um, you know, paying all their expenses.
They're pricing things out. And then like they siphon off a little bit to pay themselves. Or I've had coaching clients that actually don't freaking pay themselves out of their business. And I want that to stop for you right now. Because you work hard, you deserve to be able to pay yourself a reasonable salary that is compensating you for all this hard work.
But you want to make sure that you can still pay your business expenses, etc. during that process. And one thing that I think is a really interesting kind of angle on this is a book called Profit First. And Profit First is written by Mike Michalowicz. And the The premise of it is that your, your business will eat all of your revenue unless you start divvying it up.
So when you get a 5, 000 wedding, you're putting 1, 000 into an account that is paying you. Then you're putting, if it's 5, 000, you're putting 400 into your sales tax account, if that's what your sales tax is. Your, your operating expenses, you're putting this. And so you chunk out this money, but from the get go, You put your income, or what you're paying yourself, your profit, in a separate account and you siphon that out first.
Because when, and I've seen this happen, when you operate your business by, you know, just rolling with it and not have a strategy, we'll just see what's left to be able to pay you. What often happens is you get money in your account, and especially if you're not great overall with managing money, period.
Period. You're spending it. You're buying that new, shiny, beautiful compote vase at the wholesaler. You're buying some flowers for a styled shoot. You're buying, um, a course online. You're going and buying a bunch of flowers, um, for a You know, different project that you're donating. I mean, on and on. If you have the money there, naturally, most people will spend it.
And if you had the thought process of, I need to pay myself first, and then made decisions off of what was available, but you've already siphoned off what you're going to pay yourself, like that overall is going to be a completely different way that your business operates, for one, what things you spend money on because you will just have less because you're guaranteeing that you're paying yourself.
But let's just say that you decide. That you want to pay yourself 70, 000, or let's just say 100, 000. I've talked about this in other episodes. You need to understand what your operating expenses for your business is. You need to understand what your profit margin is from buying product in a labor perspective.
And once you have those in place, and let's just say With your operating expenses and everything, with doing three times markup and adding 25 percent labor and then charging for your other fees, um, for setup and delivery and teardown or whatever, you're operating at a 50 percent profit margin. Well, that means that your business's gross sales have to be double.
So if you want to pay yourself 100, You need to make 200, and you might be thinking, like, that's crazy, like, how am I going to get to 200? And I usually get either, like, oh yeah, I want my business to be, like, 300, 000, and I'm like, I had to work hard for that. Like, and I built a business for a while. Until you let it really sink in, like, do I think it's possible?
And then on top of it, maybe you're only attracting a 3, 000 wedding. So when you back into it, okay, my average wedding right now, let's just say is 5, 500 or 5, 000. So that means that you are going to have to do a lot of weddings. So what are some of the variables? I'm just gonna like divide that just so I can do the math and not in my head.
That means like 40 weddings at 5, 000 each. But, how can you up that number without, like, completely burning yourself out? What if you got your average up to 7, 000, then you're down to, like, maybe 36 weddings, 35 weddings? What if you upped your labor percentage and so that your profit margin increased? You know, there's different ways to get yourself to that number.
And sometimes you might be even able to play with the number so much that you're working the same amount and making more profit. And so you need to prioritize like, do I really want to be, you know, higher end is, you know, my average of 5, 000. How does that feel? Are these the kind of weddings that I want to be doing?
Is this the kind of work that I want to be doing? Let's say you do daily deliveries, where I often run into somebody wanting to make a lot of money and they are not in the path of getting there anytime soon because they're doing a ton of daily deliveries, a ton of smaller end items, and then they want big revenue results.
You're going to have to find big revenue opportunities and that's often events, weddings, um, weekly flowers. So there are a bunch of different ways to slice it so that you are starting to get, you know, some higher revenue. Producing activities, but like those take work to me. I would much rather, and this is just my preference, I would much rather have a $7,000 wedding than do if I'm doing 150 or a hundred deliveries and I have a $7,000 week to have that same revenue.
I'm doing 70 orders. Like, think about that. How much time is it going to take for you to talk to that person on the phone, for you to source their product, get it, get the product, get it made, get it delivered, and then run a separate credit card transaction for 70 for what you could have done with one wedding.
So I'm all about optimizing. My time and if I did 70 orders in a week, I would probably be like a strung out crack addict because I like that would just be my brain is constantly just going and like chasing this, answering the phone, running and seeing if I can get some blue delphinium because of course this person wants it and I don't have it and on and on.
So I want to spend my time where it is most impactful. Do I think that you can make money doing daily deliveries? Yes. Yes. Yes. You probably would be making more money if you had weekly accounts so that you have a higher lifetime value of a client that is interacting with you. And then you are building in consistency so you can get that with your weekly delivery and you're not having to special order crap and have it delivered.
Because that's when it takes more time, takes more energy, takes more money because you're potentially paying for a delivery fee again. So I want you to really optimize. What you're spending time on that's going to help you up your revenue That's gonna give you the ability to be able to pay yourself more because florists can make money I had one of my coaching clients who were like my husband doesn't think that you can make any money you Absolutely can and I offered to talk to him and go over there are people at my wholesaler driving BMWs, Mercedes, they're driving nice cars.
They have nice houses. These are people who have figured out how to optimize their time and optimize their revenue. You can do the same thing if you really want to get started with understanding. Order the book, Profit First. I think that that will be hugely influential of changing your mindset about how you want to run your business because you, as the CEO, deserve to make money.
Thank you so much for listening, flower friend, and you have an amazing flower filled week.