THE WEDDING FLORIST PODCAST

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Episode 14 | How to Start a Wedding Flower Business from Home

You have just completed your floristry diploma or taken a workshop in wedding floristry and you want to start a wedding flower business from home because you don’t have the finances to open a shop or buy an existing business.

In today’s episode I will be giving you my top 5 tips to help you start your wedding flower business from home.

Grab a pen and paper and sit down with me to make notes so that you can implement this for your business and start on the right footing.
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A very warm welcome to you for today’s episode of the Wedding Florist Podcast.

We all start from humble beginnings in our businesses with a dream to achieve success, whatever that may look like. I too started my business from my living room and then moved into a garage studio with rental storage space for vases, arches, rentals and props.

And I can tell you the working from home challenges as a wedding florist are real! It’s the fact that I had to deal with these challenges that I now can tell you about what obstacles I faced and how I overcame them.

Tip #1 Start with the basics

If you haven’t earned £5k in your business yet you need to look at the basics. There are so many things people are putting out there like complicated social media strategies. But the thing is to keep it really simple. You don’t want to make things complicated. So business is when you have a solution to someone’s problem. So for you as a wedding florist, your couples problem is that they want flowers at their wedding and they are looking for someone to do that for them because they don’t know how to do it. You now need to be thinking what the solution is for them. So for me I’m now helping and showing wedding florists like you setup and make money in your wedding flower business. So if someone has that problem they will come and buy from me. So the most basic thing is understanding who needs your solution, which is wedding flowers. So you need to go and find them and then you need to sell to them. Who can you contact to tell them about your solution? If you are starting out you need to be telling the people in your network, friends, family, connections at the gym, school, people on Facebook, people where you are working if you’re in a corporate job - basically everyone you know about your solution and then once you’ve done that you can start to sell it to them. So the idea is to keep growing leads and then selling to them because the more leads you have the more you can sell to them. And remember not everyone will buy from you and you need to be ok with that. So everyday, the main thing you need to be doing is talking to people to sell them your wedding flowers. Over time you can grow how you reach people in different ways like social media strategies, website, collaborations, wedding fairs and so on but first just start with the people you know.

Tip #2 You need to be thinking about what success looks like for you

What type of weddings do you want to be doing, what is your revenue figure that you want to achieve, what venues do you want to be working at, which other suppliers do you want to be working with. You want to set your yearly revenue goal at the beginning and reverse engineer from your revenue goal to how many weddings you need to be doing a year. For example if your revenue goal is £100000 and your average wedding cost is £5000 then you know you need to be booking 20 weddings for the year. So you really need to plan ahead and understand what you want and what your version of success looks like. Also it’s not about what another florist is doing, it’s about what is right for you and your business.

Tip #3 Learn to get out of your own way

As a business owner you will be doing alot of things for the first time and there is always a fear of doing things wrong and lack of confidence because you haven’t done something like this before. But you have to understand that making mistakes is not the be all and end all of something. In fact, making mistakes helps you learn and move forward in your business and if fear is really holding you back, you have to learn to break it down into baby steps and start taking those baby steps to keep you moving forward. So everything from picking up the phone and reaching out to a lead, pricing the proposal correctly, getting the money from the customer to ordering the flowers to then delivering them and also the back end tasks in your business like setting up the website, employing staff, hiring vans, accounts and finances and so much more. Don’t get overwhelmed and end up procrastinating. Instead break things down into baby steps and you will see the progress you are making.

Tip #4 Space

When you start doing weddings/event flowers from home you will spoon realise the lack of space you have. Wedding arrangements is a volume game and alot of the arrangements you create will be large or you will need space for your buckets and conditioned flowers, to then the vases and candelabras and also the trollies and so on. As a wedding florist, I started from my living room and grew into a studio garage space. At one time I had taken over the neighbours garden and had to put up a marquee and put items into storage as well. So really think about what space you have and if it’s enough. Also, you can reach out to a local community or church hall which are low rates to see if you can work there if your home space is not big enough. It’s always about thinking outside of the box.

Tip #5 Have a clear focus on everything you do

This includes everything from using the right pricing formula to get the right profits, using the right strategy for marketing and reaching people, collaborating with fellow vendors only when it is right for you and your business. I collaborated with various suppliers and at the beginning of my journey I was keen and did a lot without understanding it was taking my time and money and those collaborations and promises to make me more visible didn’t always work. So, understand the implications of what you are doing and what goal you are going to achieve by taking a particular action. This includes cutting your prices because cutting your prices will mean you make less profit. So always stay focused, look at the bigger picture and make sure that whatever you are doing, it resonates with you and your business goals.

In the Wedding Florist Academy I cover all the parts of a wedding florist business journey that I’ve gained first hand from running my own wedding florist business from getting leads to making sales to delivering events and so much more. If you don’t have money to invest at the moment, I get that, I have freebies you can get from me so keep listening. If you want to strip years off your business growth journey then you will definitely consider joining the Wedding Florist Academy.

Now If you've enjoyed listening to my podcast please show me the love and give me a review on i-tunes. it would mean the world to me. Take a photo of this podcast and post it on your instagram stories tagging me in and I'll be sure to share some love back. If you think this podcast will help your biz bestie then be sure to share it with them too.

So, here are various ways you can work with me

I have free resources to help you in your business

Get your Complete Guide to Write Winning Proposals and The Ultimate Social Media Kit with a social media calendar, florist specific hashtags and strategies to grow your audience.

Watch the free training on how I went from hand ties to installations and grew my wedding flower business to a 6 figure profitable business.

I know how hard and time consuming it can be to have the right resources in your business and that's why I have created various digital templates and resources that you can use in your business and these are available for instant download in the Etsy Store

That’s it for now - if there's a topic you want covering in the future let me know and I'll get it sorted for you. So until next week, stay blooming and take care

Hey there Wedding Florist

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