DON’T PANIC! Valentine’s Day Shorts to keep you on track & NOT panicking
We just wrapped up our yearly Valentine’s Day Systems Prep webinar & it made me realize that I’m never quite done giving tips. :) Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting more thoughts I’ve had about this holiday. Stay tuned!
HOW MUCH SHOULD I PRE-ORDER?
Less than you think. There’s no feeling worse than the realization that you over ordered and not only are you going to have lost money, you have to throw away flowers. (Or you have to work your tail off making freebies to give out as “marketing“.)
Pre-booking is great and you get better pricing, but if you’ve overspent, you’ve overspent, and a sale isn’t really a sale if you weren’t going to buy it in the first place. So, if you don’t know how many arrangements you’re going to sell, buy a minimum of pre-booked items to get you started for the week and then order as you go.
Make your recipes and know what you need. And then buy half or even a quarter of what you need. Most wholesalers will deliver all the way through Valentine’s Day. Talk to them and see what things go up the most last minute, for example, ROSES. Pre-Order a few more of those but things like carnations and daisies don’t change very much so order as you go.
And don’t forget to write all this down so next year you know what you bought and when you bought. I have a database where I track every single sale purchase, the date I purchased, and the reason I purchased. Some items I buy in February aren’t for Valentine’s Day and I don’t want to include those in next year‘s order. I can help you build one too.
I DON’T HAVE ANY ORDERS YET
Consistently, year after year, since I started doing Valentine’s Day, 50% of my Valentine’s Day orders come in on February 13th and 14th. Nerve-racking. Nail-biting. What if we don’t sell enough? What if I’ve over bought? All of the emotions! But year after year consistently 50% of my orders come in on February 14 and February 13 so I’ve learned to (practice) not stressing how many orders I have up front.
What to do instead? Figure out where your breakeven point is and focus on that. Keep marketing. It may feel too late to you, but your customers traditionally order last minute for Valentine’s Day.
Do a post mortem after each year so you can look back and remember how many orders come in on the last two days.
WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE DOING IT BY YOURSELF
Know your strengths and your weaknesses. If you’re a fast designer, know how many arrangements you can design in an hour. Know what things take your attention away from designing like answering the phone, packaging for delivery, delivering kids, dogs, cats, husbands, wives.
An eight hour workday is not an eight hour workday. It’s a 12 hour workday with multiple interruptions. But your customers expect things delivered at a certain time. So you have to figure out a way of working with that. And that might be not taking same-day orders, that might be only pre-booking orders and having a cut off date of February 10. That might be hiring somebody to deliver for you or answer your phones.
Just because you do everything all by yourself on every other day, it does not mean you have to do that for THIS day.
And whatever you do, write it down in your post Mortem so that next year you can look back and say yeah that worked or nope not doing that again!
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU DON’T LIKE WORKING WITH A RECIPE
Well, first of all, why not? Some people are great cooks and can throw things together from scratch and have it work out perfectly every time…but they practice to get there. They use the recipe when they started. Designing flowers is the same.
Yes, you can get to the point where you can create quickly every single time. But you might not be there yet and that’s OK. So, while it’s slow, make up your favorite design, write down what you put in it and take a picture of it. Then write down what you could use as substitutions. (By the way…that’s a recipe!)
For example, roses and carnations fill the same space at different price points in a design you can usually substitute a carnation for a rose. Or vice versa. Stock and snapdragons are the same shape. Baby’s breath and limonium are the same shape. These kinds of substitutions are pretty easy, you just need to watch for price differences.
A recipe doesn’t have to be confining, it can be based on your own work and designs. It just helps you remember what you did and why so that you’re faster, so that you can work when you’re tired, so that your work is consistent and your customers are happy.
And don’t forget to write it all down so that next year when you do your review you can look and see what worked and what didn’t! Maybe you wanted to use heather as your filler this year but it was out of season - next year you can remember not to order heather no matter how much you like it. Because you’re not going to get it and so order ginestra instead.