Most Valuable Advice
Hello! I’ve been feeling the weight of the fall season here and through many of you out there. There is a point in the fall when it feels like everything comes crashing together. The end of the growing season meets everything you think you need to do before winter and simultaneously sales may be slowing down.
It is this time of year when some growers may be taking stock and feeling unprepared for winter or just a bit unsure of how things will look for their businesses next year. I’ve been receiving some sort of “broad” questions like, “How do I find more customers?” “Why don’t I have savings from my summer season?” “How can I make my business more financially sustainable?”
The answers to these questions are loaded. And quite frankly, you’re probably best talking with someone who can consider your business and situation specifically. It’s not responsible for me (or anyone else) to share tips with you without relaly understanding specifically your market for customers, your strengths as a grower and/or designer, your seasonal offerings, etc.
But I can share these 5 pieces of advice that I return to again and again when faced with moments when I want or need to make a decision.
(from Erin Benzakein at Floret) Don’t ever seek advice from someone who hasn’t already done what you hope to do. It doesn’t matter how well you know or love someone— if they haven’t already done what you want to do, don’t collect suggestions from them. We’re hearing a lot of comments like “I need to ask my husband,” lately. These are concerning to me. Of course- if your spouse is an expert in running a flower business, by all means, ask them. Otherwise, run YOUR business. Reach out to the people that you know can provide expertise. Be wary of FACEBOOK advice.
Everything is figure-out-able. This is an important one. It’s a piece of advice that Karissa (our rosarian and wholesale manager and online course coordinator) reminds us of often. Everything can be figured out. The only real question is: will YOU take the time to figure it out.
You can do anything, but not everything. You have to choose what is most important to you and most inline with the mission of your business. This is one I say out loud several times a day. I know advice #2 is true, everything is figure-out-able, but that doesn’t mean we can do everything, even if we’re curious and eager and full of energy. There is a limit. When you reach the limit, all of your work will become mediocre.
I was thinking about this in terms of watching two different coaches work with my son this fall. (He is a small kid, but has great footwork.
He practices on his own for hours a day because we don’t have easy access to programs here.) One coach on one team told him — “yea, you might have good footwork, but you’re not winning enough balls in the air. You’re not heading the ball enough.” Instead of putting him into a position where he could take advantage of his small stature and move the ball forward with his sneaky dribbling skills she benched him because he wasn’t showing enough agression in the air. He played a game for a different club a couple weeks later and the coach recognized his strength, put him in the right position and he scores a hat trick against his previous team and that coach that benched him. They won 6-3 over the coach that told him he wasn’t working hard enough and we watched our son enjoy the game again as dribbled around his former teammates.
If you or your “players” are not in the right positions, they will be unhappy and you won’t get the result you’re hoping for. No matter how many times you tell them what you’d like them to do.
You have to spend money to make money. I think farmers often fall short in this area. We can be thrifty to a fault. We can choose to actually lose more money by spending way more time on something we know we can figure out or do ourselves one way or another instead of hiring a specialist to do that work and free us up to take advantage of areas of skill.
Take some customers of ours who would drive an 8 hour round trip to pick up 4 crates of bulbs. That trip saves them $120 in postage. BUT they loose a full workday and the possibility of the sales they could make + their own labor + their fuel + the wear on their car. The math doesn’t make sense.
Follow your mission. What is your goal? How do you want your business to be perceived. Our retail motto is “Refined, Sustainable, Floristry.” These words helped me communicate to wedding and event clients what we do. We’ve shifted now to working more with growers - so we need to take a look again at these words and determine if they still make sense for us. Every choice we make needs to be checked against our mission to help us make choices that make sense for our business. I’m struggling in this area right now because our bulb division is really different work than what we did to grow the company in the first 6 years. So it may be time to split off that business and give it it’s own path. Not sure entirely— thinking.