IG LIVE: A La Carte Event Sales
We’re back this month with some more wedding info. There were some really great follow up questions to last month’s pro live session about managing event client expectations, so it made sense to share a bit more here. Next month, we’ll dig into growing your small business with the help of some great free resources.
Today, we’ll talk about boundaries, color palettes, growing plans, opportunities to up-sell, and more. It’s a smorgasbord of the kinds of issues and dilemmas you might not initially consider when adding a la carte wedding/event work to your offerings.
Basic Process:
For us, a la carte = simple. There is no minimum spend for our customer. In turn, our service is trimmed down. It does not include planning or proposals, or any of the extra work that I might do for a big ticket project. It’s very basic. I don’t suggest or collect or promise to refer to any “inspiration images” or mood boards or anything like that. It’s “bare bones.” No frills. Customers place an order as they would from any web shop, and they come and pick it up. If we can’t be here, a waiver is left for them to sign on their own.
We share a list of the dates we aren’t available in the text at the top of the a la carte pick up shop page. We can add to that list as the season goes on or as dates fill up. We’ve never had a mad rush on a particular date. It’s my experience that this is not a concern and that regular daily checks of your incoming orders will be enough to prevent an over booking.
What does it mean to be over booked? For me— it’s more work than my team can reasonably manage on a given day. It’s not more flowers than we have. Because I know I can get more flowers and greens if I need to.
But- there are some steps we take to prevent us from getting “over booked” in flowers, too.
Being “for pick up only” is one way that we manage the scale of our a la carte event work. Big events/big budgets are not interested in our services. They want and expect a high degree of attention and delivery and installation.
We limit the bookings by disallowing flower choice.
We also limit the scale of the work we take on by refusing to prepare certain design pieces that I consider to be “installation” work. These designs are best assembled on site and include arrangements like arbor or chuppah florals, elaborate ground-mounted floral sprays, large/tumbling mantle arrangements, etc.
Flower Color Choices
We’ve tried both offering a few specific color palettes for customers to choose from AND allowing them to list a few colors themselves. We found our sales to be much better when we allow them to share their color preferences (even when their choices were very similar to what we would have offered if we listed certain colors ourselves). This simple act give the customer a tiny bit of freedom that they seemed to appreciate.
We hold the ability to determine what percentages those flower colors are used in. This gives us some flexibility to work with what is available in our gardens.
Growing for Orders
We have a 2.5 acre property. When I was taking large installation events I would absolutely do some planning to make sure we’d have certain flowers blooming around the event dates. I’d even open and plant entirely new sections of our farm to prepare for some very large events. With a la carte orders, we don’t worry about it much. We grow some flowers routinely and in programs that are reliable. We have roses blooming almost the whole event season. Lilies are in bloom. We have perennial flowers that come into play from spring to fall. With the land we have for planting flowers (about 1.5 acres under cultivation), we can manage quite a volume of orders. We do try to make sure that we always have something that is blue— that is the most challenging color for us. The other colors are covered well by the plants that are routinely growing here.
What I found as a designer, was that I could reasonably prepare one event at my delivery/installation minimum on my own. So - one designer for every $4-5k worth of sales. If you’re new to design work, you might want to keep that number lower- perhaps around $2k for the total sales per pick up day or $2k per designer. You can view your orders as they come in and determine if you’d like to close sales and/or find extra hands to help out on the busy days.
These dollar amounts also seemed to correspond with the amount we were able to grow here. Initially, I had fewer flowers. As I became a more accomplished grower, I was growing more and able to handle more event work at a faster pace, too.
Order Changes:
We try to be flexible with changes to event orders in terms of preferred colors. If we can make a requested change, we do. We do not allow for cancellations or subtractions to orders and we do not allow for invoicing or payments outside of our web shop.
Note: When we are doing a high volume of delivery and installation orders and there is a significant change to colors or designs by the client ahead of time, we acknowledge the change in writing (an email) and just keep moving along. I do not prepare new proposals for clients because they change their mind down the road.
Upsells:
a written proposal document
planning sessions/appointments
farm tour the week of the event
option to add to an order
ceremony DIY kit
custom items
delivery
Links:
Visit www.littlefarmhouselocal.com to view our a la carte event offerings.
Visit https://tinyheartsfarm.com/weddings/ to view their a la carte offerings and note their options for ceremony flowers.