IG Live: Managing Client Expectations
Hello— a few members reached out this week requesting some help with farmer-florist event work. Here are the 4 main topics within today’s conversation:
Finding common ground for clients who are lost in Pinterest
Educating prospective clients about local flowers
Helping people understand pricing
Maintaining a sound profit with smaller budget events
And we ended with a Q&A session, which has also been documented in text below.
Find common ground with event clients who are lost in a Pinterest world. I’ve found that the most reasonable and respectful way to begin a conversation with clients is to not accept inspiration images from the start. So I don’t invite people to submit them from the start. Give yourself time to explain what you do to the client BEFORE you suggest they send inspiration images. Make sure you are sharing images of the kinds of event work you can do and want to do. Clear communication can be so helpful. If you do not have any images build some of your work into a your next photo shoot and let the wedding vendors in your area know that you are eager and willing to participate in a shoot.
2. Educate prospective clients about local flowers. I try to make this the most exciting part of the process— because clients simply aren’t accustomed to seeing some of the amazing flowers you grow!
This time can be so valuable and revealing for clients. It’s like a lightbulb goes off and they start to realize how their event can be special.
After I’ve shown what these flowers look like, they realize their Pinterest images aren’t really as applicable.
***See the IG Live session titled: “IG LIVE: EVENT CLIENT ACQUISITION” for more information about how we do this here and an editable sample proposal. You can see there exactly how I present our local flowers to prospective clients.
And it’s important for clients to know that you are growing the flowers — and that for this reason, you don’t commit to specific varieties, but rather promise to meet their color palette.
I’ve seen farmer-florists really upset regarding a difficult situations with clients— thinking its going to be a disaster if they don’t have something in bloom. They over promised with a specific variety. And then in reality— they learned when they actually reached out to the client— that they didn’t care. This farmer florist spent about a thousand dollars extra to order in flowers for a customer who, upon actually talking to them didn’t care and said “I trust you.”
3. Manage communication to clients who think your products should be inexpensive. I find that setting boundaries and being somewhat public with pricing is the most helpful way to help customers understand the cost of your products.
Set a minimum for installation events that is similar to local florists. If you have a lower minimum, people will expect your prices to be lower. A conventional florist in my area with a similar look has a $5,000 to $10,000 minimum, depending on the season and location of the event.
Pricing in the floral world is largely hidden from the retail buyer. It’s hard for them to even budget for an event when florists don’t provide any support for coming up with a reasonable estimate.
We list al la carte items publicly in our online event shop. And we use the same pricing for our full service events, except— those proposals come with installation, special ceremony designs, custom quoted specialty items, etc and of course shipping fees.
We use words like “boutique” “bespoke” “custom” for delivery orders.
We talk about our studio’s own flower farm. And running a farm to support our design studio, because we wanted better, healthier, more seasonal flowers for our customers than what the conventional markets could supply.
4. We support lower budget events and still earn a sweet profit. We learned during the pandemic, and in the years following, when I needed a break from weekend wedding work that several decent size pick up orders could easily generate as much profit for our farm as a single larger installation event, with less stress and next to zero loss of weekend time.
You can find the pick-up order waiver linked on our downloads page here.
But prior to the pandemic, we were also accommodating some clients with pick-up orders— usually due to out calendar being booked for delivery weddings. We viewed these pick-up orders as a no-brainer. They meant that we could book up with delivery events and still earn additional profits on top of that work that took us away from the farm and in some ways limited our team.
Sample A:
$236 wedding bouquet
$125 x 5 ($625) attendant bouquet
$27 x 6 ($162) boutonnieres
$95 x 3 ($285) centerpieces
$195 x 3 ($585) buckets of blooms for DIY work
Total = $1,893
Sample B:
$236 wedding bouquet
$27 boutonniere
$195 x 10 buckets of blooms for DIY work
Total = $2,223
Sample C:
$236 wedding bouquet
$55 hair comb
$27 boutonniere
$65 floral dog collar
$175 x 2 ($350) large arrangement for ceremony
$195 x 2 ($390) buckets of blooms for DIY work
Total = $1,123
Sample D:
$236 wedding bouquet
$27 boutonniere
Total = $263
Grand total: $5,502
Question & Answer session:
Client changes mind:
We also talked a little about being asked to re-write proposals for clients who change their mind. My policy is not to do that. If they have seen a proposal designed for the job they want, agreed to it, and signed off on it— they’ve booked our services. If possible, we accept their color palette changes and/or item changes (additions only). We confirm that acknowledgement by email and say in writing— yep, great, we can do that and we move ahead. I don’t even give them the option to re-do a proposal.
Hiring for events:
I worked hard to hire seasonal staff that could support both farming and design work when possible. Early in my career that was a part time assistant who farmed with me on Wednesday/Thursday and helped with events on Friday/Saturday.
As my business grew, we had more seasonal staff that farmed Monday-Wednesday and supported design work Thursday & Friday. (Or started the week with us on Tuesday in order to help with deliveries on Saturdays.)
Occassionally, when we had very large jobs or multiple events being designed for and/or set up at the same time, I’d hire freelance florists to help out. These designers should have experience and they should be able to “mimic” a design you put in front of them easily. I paid them in cash, by the hour at a rate of $25/hour.
Event take down:
We are fortunate to be in an area where morning event strikes are generally OK. Every venue has it’s own expectations. Be sure to find out. I did not do late night strikes very often. Over time, I learned to document our goods with photos from the event and lists so that others could do strikes for me.
When I did do weekend strikes myself— I’d pack everything quickly into the delivery van, drive it back to the farm, and park it until Monday. It was a Monday morning team task to unpack and compost, recycle, or store for re-use everything in the van.
Candles:
I hate ‘em. But I go back and forth about providing them. We at times were willing to collect pillar candle holders and rent them with new candles for events. We made sure there was a profit in it for us. Event candles are often very messy. Cleaning candle holders is time consuming. From a sustainability standpoint, I prefer to rent and re-use vessels than to see clients buy them and throw them away after events.