Ep. 151: Alex Vaughan Bet Everything on FLWR Shop: Part 2

[Music] Hello! Hello! Good afternoon. Yeah, hey. Hey, this is going to be a very exciting intro. Because you have something you actually want to talk about. Yes. Some days need personality. Yes, some days need one of us have anything to talk about. And then some days we both have something to talk about. I know. We should coordinate better than that. Okay, tell me, what is it that you're so excited about today? Your new personality. Yeah, so I just have a new personality right now. And it's just called Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music. And you can see my dress that I'm wearing. It's this very fun apron dress. She wears a lot of those. And I don't know. Just rewatching that movie again. The costumes are so good. I love the costumes. There's one that this, like, the new wife is wearing. That's, like, this beautiful sashie. Like, I'm like, it's so good. Every costume, the colors, like, the details and the singing. And Julie Andrews is just so beautiful. It's such a beautiful voice. And I just can't believe that, like, these movies have, like, stood the test of time. There's nothing I would change about it. And it's just so good. It's just so good. And Mary Poppins also costumes 10 out of 10 in that. I don't know, and her voice in her face. Like, she's just the best. And she's, you know. Okay, so a new, a new era of Natalie Gill. It's the Mary Poppins. Well, it's actually, it's just, like, full circle. Because this was my arrow when I was a little kid. And now I'm coming back. Oh, okay. Coming back around. I just remembered how much I love. And so, I mean, a real practical question about this new persona. Where would you purchase a bunch of apron dresses? If this is your new look. Okay, there's only one that I found so far. It's on newly. And why don't you even know what brand this is? But beyond that, I don't know. I don't know. She does her own sewing, so that might be part of the personality. Oh, this is turning into a snowball of something. I see some holes in it, but I'm not going to burst your bubble at the moment. Okay, so should we start calling you, like Julia or something on the podcast? Are you going to stick with Natalie? I do love the sound of that. Well, in the movie, her name is Maria. Oh, that's true. How do you solve a problem? Maria. Okay, anyway. You had a question to ask me about Mayesh. Podcasts. No, I don't have a question. I was just going to tell you that's what I spent my morning doing. Actually, I spent my morning doing two things. I had, on my calendar, a 30-minute slot to create one Instagram post for Bloom Trust Co. And it took me one and a half hours to make the world. Oh, my gosh. Am I the only person that is like that? No. No, Mayesh told me it took her two hours to make a real recently. That is stupid. What are we doing that? Oh, my gosh. Okay, well anyway, I was so frustrated about that. But anyway, so that was supposed to be 30 minutes. I think we have the morning. And the other half of the morning, I spent listening to your podcast with Mayesh, with Abby Chick. Yeah. That was really fun to hear you all be on the other side of the microphone there. What was that like being interviewed? And also, thank you for the kindness, the shout outs, the whatever. I don't remember anything. You blanked out. I don't remember. Well, you said nice things about this podcast. Well, I always think it's our goal. So that was great. That's the truth. Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you. I'm sure I did. It was very fun to listen to it. Yeah. How was that being on the other side of the microphone there? Not that I can remember anything about it. I do remember being in it and being like, man, I wish I had had a margarita before we did this. Not that that's appropriate at all. But wouldn't that have been, I was just getting nervous. I don't know. I got nervous. That's what I was wondering. Well, yeah, you did actually say that in the podcast. Well, there you go. That's the one thing I remember is that I just wish I had been drinking margarita. Great. Cool. Don't remember anything else. Was it helpful? Should people listen to it? I think so. It was really great. I mean, it was there. So she kept it perfectly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, y'all were both great. You were both great. That was, I loved it. And so I guess we should get a shout out to Abby Chick because she has this new podcast on the Flores table, which is from Mayesh and hers is called Thorns and All. And Natalie and Meg were the very first guests on Thorns and All. We were the very first. The very first. The inaugural. Yes. An honor. How fun. Yeah. Yeah. That's so cool. That is cool. Thanks, Abby. Yeah. That's so funny because our guests are always like, I'm not listening to that. People are scared to listen to themselves. You know, but I can't remember anything. It's like a goldfish that if I do listen to our podcast. Wow. Wow. Wow. That was cool. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. I don't know that having a margarita would actually help. It helps. It helps those things. Oh, does it? Okay. Great. Maybe I need one. Oh, man. Okay. Well, anyways. Okay. So today we're back. We're back for part two with Alex from Lauer in Nashville, Flower Shop. And, you know, the first one. If you haven't listened to the first one, by the way, it's episode 150. And it was basically her story. And we didn't even get into some other things because her story was so entertaining. It was like watching a Netflix series a little bit. Amazing. Really, really good. Made Natalie cry at one point. So there's just lots of reasons to go listen to. It was very entertaining, very emotional, very encouraging. And then we got through a whole hour and we were like, oh, wait. We didn't talk about some other things. So here we are today. We're going to go back to Alex and we're going to talk about more, more like technical things because she's a flower shop owner who no longer does weddings. And so there's a lot of things we want to talk to her about. And that's what we're here for. You ready? Yes. Let's go talk to her. Okay. All right, welcome back for part two where we've got Alex back for part number two. And we're going to continue the story. We had so many people send messages already after the first section. Yes, because it was very entertaining and encouraging. People said they cried. They laughed. It's been really good. And they're very excited that we're doing this part two. And they've been asking when it's coming, you know, going to come. So it's going to come a little bit later than they think, but it's coming. I think today we're just going to really talk flower shop. Wedding flowers, kind of more tactical stuff to give people some information that I know they're wanting to know. Where should we start? I mean, the question in my head that's number one is like, you were doing weddings. We talked about this in part one and you stopped doing weddings. And we kind of left it there. And I think everyone's like, why did you stop doing weddings? So yeah, well, you get into that. Yeah, you alluded to it. So they know a little, but I think a little bit. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of layers to it. But first, thank you for having me back on. I'm glad to be here for pleasure. There's a really, there's a lot of layers to it. I think we did it for a really long time doing both. It helped that there were two of us. Like, I run this business with my husband, Quinn. He's not, like, I know a lot of husbands are super helpful. But Quinn is my 50/50 partner in this entire endeavor. And that makes such a huge difference when you have two people who own the business who are both just as invested in its doing well. It's really difficult to do the two separate like daily delivery orders and do event work, especially if the event work that you're trying to do is the like higher end, more creative event work. And, you know, because not everyone's looking for that. Like, not every bride is looking for, you know, a top level or like something creative. They don't all want something hanging from the ceiling or, you know, awesome installations. A lot of brides are just looking for something simple. And that's not really what we were going for. We were going for the big blowout weddings, the really big budgets, high end clients, and doing that in addition to doing a retail flower shop that's open every day. Normal business hours is really difficult thing to do. And we did it. And it was after a while ago, just felt like we were losing all of our weekends. We were spending like not any time together, really, because I was handling the events for the most part. And Quinn would help me out with, like when the event was really big and we needed like some, you know, logistical installations and things like that when it was like too massive for me to handle, he would help out with that. And he was doing a lot of the daily running of the shop. We started to give, we had an employee, we were starting to give her some of the smaller weddings. And she did an amazing job, such a good job that I started to give her more and more of the weddings so that I could focus on just the higher level running the business, you know, and keeping the creative direction going. And I started to get some of my weekends back and spending time with my daughter and Quinn and I getting to spend weekends together and you know, less late nights doing massive strikes which was always on Quinn to handle. And she decided that she was going to move back to Buffalo after like being with us for like, I think five years. And when I was faced with taking those weddings back on, I just had such a terrible sadness. I was just like, I don't, I can't go back to doing that. Again, I can't handle it, especially because we had gone from having like one very simple retail shop in a production studio to being like, having a much more involved retail shop and trying to manage that and like doing all of the buying for that on top of trying to do the weddings. What I discovered over the years was that like, because there was a hard deadline with weddings, anything that didn't have a hard deadline, any project I wanted to get to that didn't have a hard deadline just never happened. I could never get to it because there's an email about this wedding and the wedding has to be a priority because they're gonna get married on April 30th no matter what happens and I have to be ready. But you know, redoing our website or introducing a new product or, you know, making sure I buy enough stuff for the shop for the Christmas season, all of that can kind of get put on the backburner and that's what happened all the time. Is it everything I wanted to do? Every creative project I wanted to work on ended up being put on the backburner because of these weddings. And then after a certain period of time, I felt like creatively, I had done everything I really wanted to do with the weddings as much as I was allowed to, you know? And there wasn't anything else I really wanted to like, do as far, like being like creative project-wise and involving weddings. Like there was nothing else I wanted to do. I just wanted to, I'd done everything I wanted to and nothing else really was standing out in my mind as like something that needed to be accomplished. And so I felt like a good time to let it go. - So then you just didn't pick that back up when she left? - Yeah, so we just didn't really pick up any big events and another thing that happened that like made me feel really deeply insecure in my life was that like we had made a political statement about like gun control, we had refused to do a Republican national convention fundraiser because there had just been a school shooting in Nashville and there were tens of thousands of people who were protesting in front of the Capitol like Democrats and Republicans. They were really upset and wanted gun control laws. And RNC had asked us to do this fundraiser and we turned it down very publicly and asked that our state legislature do something about gun control. And that really pissed off some planners. They did not like that. And as we all know in the luxury wedding industry, the planners are the gatekeepers. And you live and die by them. They decide if you're gonna eat this month, you know? Like they're the gatekeepers to the clients that have the money. And they were really unhappy with us and that was incredibly stressful because it felt like this is my business and this is my life and this is like, I should be able to do with it what I want to. Like it's not involving your weddings or your potential weddings or it doesn't have anything to do with that. It has to do with my values and my business. And I shouldn't have to stay quiet because it makes you happy. That was another piece that made me feel like, okay, I actually really don't like relying on a small handful of people as a gatekeeper to a bunch of money. I feel like I'm much more comfortable relying on a much larger group of people to give me smaller amounts of money on a more regular basis. And then I feel less beholden to like just the small group of people who gets to dictate how I run my business. So that was a big part of it too. I mean, I'm assuming that you did not regret that decision to speak up, to take a stand. - No, I did not. It was a very difficult time because the second amendment people can be real scary with their threats and their phone calls and their fake bad reviews and all that stuff. So it was a really scary time because it kind of, it went viral. But no, I don't regret it. And it was very stressful because I felt like we definitely like took a big financial hit from it. But in the end, it felt like it really worked out well because I feel so much more free to just run my business the way that I see fit and not worry about upsetting that handful of people with all the money. - This is such a touchy subject that nobody talks about it. - Really publicly. But you're not dealing with anymore. - I'm not dealing with weddings anymore, yeah. You can talk about it. What would you say to Flores who are actually in that position that are feeling that way? - It is really touchy and the fact is those planners are gatekeepers to your money. And it's really tricky. I felt constantly abused by many of those event planners. They would rely on me to come up with like these incredible creative ideas that didn't even really involve the Flores. There was one planner who was like constantly relying on me to come up with a really cool stage backdrop for like the band stage. And like that was the centerpiece of, you know, the look of the reception was the stage backdrop. And it always felt like it was my responsibility to come up with something, even whether it involved flowers or not. But then of course, like she would get the design credit for the overall event when it was very collaborative. And I didn't get paid any, I got paid for just the flowers. I didn't get paid for the hours of meetings in which we were discussing what the panels would look like for the stage backdrop. I didn't get paid for any of that. And that was just taken for granted that like I got the privilege of getting this wedding from this event planner. And I'm going to do what I need to do to make sure she's happy so she keeps calling me. And to be honest with you, when I would push back on those things, it upset her and she called me less. And like you really, it does really feel like you end up being a lot of times a doormat to some of these event planners. They're not all like that, but like many of them. - So were you, for the most part, did you have communication with the client or were you mostly doing the flowers and they were talking with the planner? Did you have access to the client? - Yes, yeah, yeah, I would have access to the clients, yeah. Which was good in the sense that like I could present my ideas directly to them and that was great. But you know, I didn't have access in the sense that like I could be like, hey, I'm not being paid for this extra work that I did because it's unprofessional to be like complained to the client or there's no, there's still like no way to rectify that for yourself. It's just something that you accept or you don't. And depending on the event planner, like you can bring it up to them or you don't. And I feel like whenever I had boundaries around any of that kind of thing, like when I was asked to remove things from the quote that I did, I did them and I supplied them, but then they ended up not being used at the last minute and then they want to remove them from the quote and I'm like, but I did all the work and I bought the flowers. And it's fine if you ended up not wanting it at the end, but like I still did all that stuff and I should be paid for that stuff. That made me like in their minds difficult to understand. work with because I didn't just lay down and take it. And that really started to get to be too much for me. I just, it started to get to be too much for me, especially when I thought about how much more money they were making from the event than I was. And also on top of it, like the people who I was doing this work for, and even the event planners themselves, if you, like, I don't know, I think it's like this in most places. I've developed a theory that like, it feels like people, people in wealthy communities hire other people in wealthy communities to help them with things. That's who they trust. They trust other people who are in their same socioeconomic sphere to be in charge of all of the other people who are clearly not. So the event planners, all, you know, their kids all went to the same schools, the private schools in the wealthy neighborhoods, you know, all the event planners like grew up in that wealthy neighborhood and knew everyone there and they knew them. And, you know, they went to the same church or, you know, same private school or they're all within that same community. Those are the people who are trusted, you know. And it really started to feel like the rest of us just need to do as we're told, not have boundaries, bend over backwards, you know, and just make it great without asking too many questions and without, like, you know, advocating for ourselves and if something goes wrong and the event planner points at you and blames you, you don't even know about it. You don't even hear about it. But like, that's, you get blamed for things that go wrong and you don't have, you know, you don't get to say anything about it. And I just like, after a while, I just got to be, it got to be too much for me to take, you know, I just couldn't, it's like, I'm just as much of a human as you guys are. I should be able to have some boundaries around like, no, I did do that work. I don't want to, I don't want to take it off of the bill. Like, that's how that works. Especially if it's in your contract, it's like not negotiable. I had to start, I noticed that I, I like typed something and be like, well, I think, I'm like, no, we think or our policy is. And it's just like, this is the company. It's an LLC. This is the contract. This is not me in my feelings. Like, I don't know, it's so hard. It's so tough. It just, it feels like after a while, they start to get this idea of you that you're just, you're no longer just like easy to work with the planners because those little things like pile up and they just move on and find someone who will just do all of that and not give them any trouble or, you know, not have boundaries. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And I, I wanted to ask you about that because I, I want to hear your point of view based on your experience in your area because I feel like we hear kind of a really broad range. I mean, we're hearing from people from the East Coast to the West Coast to other countries even. And I think it does depend on the area somewhat. Yeah. And business model, but also personalities is just such, I mean, that human factor because there aren't really rules around this and the way that that we work alongside planners or under planners, I feel like it's, we're kind of making up the rules as we go because people handle it differently. Some people are asking for kickbacks and some people are gait keeping like you said other areas. I feel like it's much more collaborative. And I hear really positive things from forest. Some people are writing and asking, how do I get my foot in the door with these planners? Like I can't even break into the circle. What do I have to do in my area to even break in? So it is just, I just feel like it's such a gray area. And all we can do is talk about people's personal experiences because somebody's going to resonate with what you say here. And what I'm taking away is it got to be too much. It got to be too much in, in my area specifically. It just felt like if I didn't play the game in a very specific way, I was going to lose all my money, you know, I wasn't going to be able to pay my bills. And I just felt like I don't, that's why I opened my own business was to be able to like be the ruler of my own universe. I don't want to feel like I work for other people in collaboration with yes, but in a sense where like I do whatever you tell me to, whether it's good for me or not, no, I don't want to, I don't want to do that. And I felt like I definitely felt like that was expected of me that like I do whatever is needed of me. And I operate my business overall in a way that they approve of or I don't get to work with them. And yeah, it just got, I wasn't willing to do that. Yeah. And I think that there's also some social issues around it for me in particular like I am Latina and I grew up in Miami and I have a very straightforward and matter of fact way of speaking. And that is not common in the South. And it's very, it tends to come off to people as aggressive because it's not couched in smiles and, you know, soft language to help it go down better. Like it's, I'm just very matter of fact. And like that, that also was like really a struggle for me. Not so much with the clients. That was fine, but like with the planners. That was a real struggle. So, okay, I want to hear your, I want to hear your take on this because I also have had a couple of florists contact me and ask about we're in a similar situation, but they actually didn't want to do retail. I mean, really weddings are their thing. And so they're asking, what do I need to do? Should I start planning? Should I add that service to my wedding business and just become a planner so that I'm actually offering that service as well? What do you think of that? I think that depends on the size of the wedding you're trying to accomplish because I think a really large scale wedding or larger budget weddings, I think that that's really difficult to pull off both of them at the same time. That's why you have, you know, multiple lenders. That's something that we tried to explore too. And as I've said, I feel like a lot of, what I have run into is like people who are wealthy enough to afford a large scale high end luxury wedding. They really want someone who is also within that same community to be the planner. Maybe it's just like a normal human thing to like trust your own community, but that's what I have found to be true. I even had a conversation recently with a luxury interior designer. And I asked her, it was like, do you feel like your clients would hire you if you were not also wealthy? And she was like, no, I don't think that they would. I don't think if I was not also, I'm not as wealthy as those as my clients, but like I am clearly a wealthy person. She agreed that like, so that I feel like that's really, what is the truth to me of why it's so difficult to break into that realm? This episode is supported by a Madrid flower school. Today, we want to talk about their English professional program. It's a one month program in Madrid where students will spend the mornings in the studio learning and practicing hands-on and then in the afternoon, they'll have time to soak up the blue skies and city sites of one of the premier cities in Europe. Students will learn the latest trends in floral design with an eye on the future and pick up practical techniques that can be tailored to fit their personal styles. Everything from small handheld arrangements to large scale installations will be covered in a wide breadth of global styles. In addition to that practical design instruction, the English professional program will also include business and enterprise instruction with attention to personal business plans and brand creation. It's the ultimate masterclass in floral design that's also a dreamy European vacation, something that only Madrid flower school could pull off. So if that sounds like a great opportunity to you, wherever you are in your design journey, go ahead and go to www.midridflourschool.com to learn more. Thank you to the folks at Madrid Flower School and now let's get back to the episode. Let's just go back to you. So you decided that was too much and your person left and you didn't pick that back up. So now you're 100% into the retail floral business. Yes. And what does that look like? I would love to know like, what does your team look like? And I mean, we know that. The question to bridge that is like, okay, weddings. I always am like, I love doing weddings because as opposed to retail, I can control my budget so much because I go into it being like, I have $5,000 to spend and it's not like, I'm going to buy $5,000 for a flower for the weekend, hope I sell them and then sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. So I just am wondering how you navigated because that like revenue shift because you probably were bringing a lot of revenue from weddings. So like, how did that change stuff? Yeah, we were bringing in a lot of revenue from weddings, but I feel like we found that like, the scale of the weddings that we were doing in the amount of work that it took, the margin we ended up with didn't feel like it was actually an enormous amount because you end up like needing some extra labor or like, the strike is longer, you need more labor for that or, you know, like, these roses didn't come in the way that they were supposed to, so we need to get these other ones and like, just little like nibbles on your margin. Totally. Or you're getting pulled into designing a backdrop you're not getting paid for. Right. Yeah. So in the end, I feel like the actual profit we ended up with from those events just didn't end up feeling like it was worth it. It was just stuck in your time. Yeah. The revenue was difficult in it. We wouldn't have been able to do it without opening our new shop. So our new shop was like the key because we were missing this retail element. We were, we had this little retail store, but it was in a part of town that like no one really went to. So reopening in East Nashville was really good for us and that revenue stream increased a lot. So visibility brought back a lot more deliveries in the core of Nashville, which obviously is going to help a lot. So that increased our revenue and then having the walk in customers, which is, it's not an enormous amount of revenue, but it's enough that it makes a significant impact on our bottom line. And so between those two things, increasing our deliveries and increasing our walk in revenue, we mostly made up for it. And we still do events, just smaller scale, mostly corporate. We're not doing like big installations like we just did an event for a restaurant opening here. It was like four restaurants in a hotel and we did that and it was great. And the profit margin was much better than you get with a wedding because it was really like three weeks worth of emailing back and forth and then buying the flowers and then we installed it and it was done. It wasn't like nine months of meetings and emails and all of that stuff. So that helps to like all of those smaller, some social events and some corporate events that are just like a much more manageable scale. So that's really, let's made up for the revenue that we lost doing the weddings. And then when you calculate like the profit is really the part that matters the most. It's worked out. That makes so much sense. Yeah. So wait, you were asking about my team and like how all of that looks, yeah. So I've got five employees, there's me and Quinn, yes, plus five employees. And we've got, we have to have someone out in the front or who can answer the phones and be out front during the day. So that's one of our positions that gets split between two people because or actually three people because Quinn does a lot of that too. So that's a big part of the labor. And then we've got one full time amazing designer who I hope I know that she will eventually move on someplace else, but I hope it's a long time from now because she's fantastic. She does really great work and she's fast and handles the pressure really well. And then we have another part time designer that comes in to relieve some of the pain points like Mondays are hard because that's when we get all of our fresh flowers in. And then Wednesdays, we get another batch of flowers in. So on Mondays and Wednesdays, we have a part time designer who comes in and helps get everything finished through the week. And she's typically on call. She works from home and it works out really well because when we're in a busy season and then we need more than two days of work a week from her, she's typically able to come in and help us with that. She's a key part in how all of this works out. And then I happen if it's like really crazy, you know, obviously on holiday weeks and May in October is always insane no matter what's happening. I'll do a bunch of daily deliveries if things are like backed up. Yeah, who are your other three employees? You have one full time. I'm taking notes. I'll have full time designer, one part time designer. I have a delivery driver who's full time. And then we've got two, mostly full, yeah, we've got two full time employees who rotate, like as we're open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Saturday. And so that's a really long shift. So we overlap them so that no one's working a nine hour day. So we've got two like phone slash like bouquet making front of house people. Okay, this is so interesting. I would love to learn more about this because in our company, we always float the idea of having somebody who's not like a designer or work our stores. But then we're like, how, what happens when somebody has to take a lunch break and somebody comes in and says, I need an extra large arrangement now, like more like, or like my bridal, like I'm coming pick on my bridal bouquet, but I hate it. I need you to fix them stuff. So then it's like every single person our team needs to be a fully trained floral designer. But then it's like, I don't know, anyway, so we actually, we just have policies around that stuff. But you can't come to our shop and say, I need $150 arrangement right now. That's just not how it works. The way that we think about it is that, like, it's kind of like a fancy restaurant with a pizza window. The bouquets are a pizza window. You can come and ask for a slice of pizza anytime you want. But like, if you would like to have a bowl of our amazing pasta, you can't just walk in and demand it in a to go box, you know, you have to, we have a line basically. We've got a bunch of deliveries that have to go out and there's a whole line of people who came in and ordered before you. And if it's a slow day and we're capable of doing it, we don't have a problem doing it. But most of the time, we just can't because we're doing all of our daily delivery orders. And so when someone comes in and they want a $150 arrangement right now, we just very kindly explain that, like, we can absolutely make them $150 handheld bouquet, you know, tests and Ashley are here to help with that and they'd be happy to make you a bouquet. But if you're looking for one of our signature arrangements in a vase, we'd have to go check with the design team and see how long that would take because we've got, like, a line for deliveries going. And if it's possible, we'll let them know, like, okay, we think we can get it done by three o'clock if you want to come back or today is super full and it's just not going to happen, but we can definitely have it delivered tomorrow. That works for you. So we tried to work with people, but we kind of just hold a line that, like, we can't just do things on demand. Awesome. Very different than the wedding industry. You're setting your own rules. I love, and I love the analogy of, like, a fine dining restaurant in a pizza window. I love that. What about your website? Do you have the index? Yes. Can they order online or? Yeah. They can. That's incredibly important. You have to have a website where it's easy for people to order. That's just the way that it works now. You can't not have that. I think, I would say 70% of our orders, maybe 75 or even 80% of our orders come in from the website. And most of those come through a cell phone. So even, like, you have to have a website and you also have to have a website that people can access on their phone. Because when I look at the analytics of our website, I think 80% of people are looking at our website from their mobile device. So what your website looks like on a desktop almost doesn't even matter anymore. Most people are ordering their flowers from their phone. They're ordering everything from their phone because it's all like, I don't know about you guys, but for me, I've got all of my stuff is like preloaded. So basically any website anywhere, I can check out in like two seconds and I don't have to type in all of the information. It's all just my phone saves it for me and it saves a bunch of different credit cards. And you have to be that for customers these days. That's what people expect. It has to be easy. If it's not easy, they're going to get annoyed. Even if they go through with the sale, that's not how you want people to feel when they're purchasing from you. You want it to feel super easy. And what platform do you use for your website? This has been such a mess. So we have square space. But As you guys know, flower ordering is different from when you're ordering anything else online because the person who's ordering the flowers are typically sending it to somebody else and there's a bunch of information that you have to collect and that's just not quite the same as, you know, just like a regular ecommerce website. If you're busy, you need all of that information to feed into some sort of routing software so that you can stay on top of your route for the day and make sure that everything is going to be efficiently delivered for the day and you have to be able to easily turn off orders if it's too much. It's complicated. We started off with Squarespace, but what happens on our website is that we use HANA as a POS system for flowers. So at a certain point on our website, when you click order, it clicks over to HANA's website to finish the checkout process so that it goes into our HANA POS system so that all of our orders are all in the same place. And we're not like receiving Squarespace orders separate from, you know, the orders that we put in over the phone. And that's the way that we have been doing it for a really long time. Someone came to us and said, "I can build you a website that will solve all these problems for you." And I was stupidly trusted that person. And they built something for us and the problem was the back end, the back end, where you're taking a phone call and, you know, someone wants to order something for their kitchen island and they want something to go, you know, on the floor outside the door on the stairs or what they're looking for is not like a specific product that you've already preloaded into your POS system. That's how every other POS system tends to work. But with flowers, every so much of it is customized. And that was the problem there, where like the back end system, which we needed, because that's how flowers works, was just a mess. And so we had to abandon that and go back to our old system of Squarespace and HANA. And now, that's what we have. And we're investigating, switching to Shopify, because Shopify has these like plugins now that are supposed to work with HANA still, where it sends the, like, rather than our website jumping from a Squarespace site to HANA's site. It's all through Shopify, but the information just gets sent to HANA afterwards. So we're crossing our fingers that that will work, because we feel like that's going to be better for SEO and give us a little bit more flexibility. So that was a complicated and long-winded answer, but I feel like this is one of those things. People want an L. It's so complicated. It's so frustrating. There's so much about flowers that is just so, like, it lags in technology so badly. And it's definitely, like, that is a frustrating problem. That's why I ask, because everyone's frustrated with it. And a lot of people are moving to Shopify for that reason, so. But no, thank you for that. And then the other thing I'm really interested in is your deliveries, because Nat and I talk a lot about deliveries, just the way they do it, the way other people do it. But how do you handle those deliveries, just logistically, how does that work? Well, we, I mean, we accept same-day orders Monday through Friday, and until, like, one o'clock. Typically, that's, that we found that that's a good time of the day, where normally we're not getting too many orders after that time, and everything is sort of set a new order at, like, 12, 30, doesn't completely ruin the day, most of the time. But that's another thing that, like, is really tricky with the website, is that, like, there are some days where you need to shut that off, because, for whatever reason, we've got too many deliveries at 11 AM, and we can't let more of them come through. So we have a full-time delivery driver. Right now, we've got three vehicles, but really only two of them are in use, and we have, like, a bunch of part-time delivery drivers who are kind of, like, we just sort of rotate through some part-time delivery drivers as needed. Like, on Mondays, we typically need two drivers, because there's, we get started with the actual deliveries later in the day, so we need two drivers to get all of them out on time. What we have found over the years is the key to being able to take same-day orders until one o'clock, and get everything done in a reasonable amount, reasonable amount of time without an enormous staff, is that you have to be a day ahead. So our designers make everything that's come in, like, on Monday, they make all of Monday's stuff, and that goes out, and then they move on to Tuesdays, and they make everything that's come in for Tuesday. And when that's, when you're doing that, and you're just, like, a day ahead of everything, you can still take some orders the next day, and fit them into the route, and you're not, you're not trying to make everything that day, and then also delivered that day. And that's been, like, a really big key in helping us get ahead, and that key to that was having two drivers on Monday to get everything started. Getting the flowers really as early as we can on Mondays, for a little while we had some flowers come in on Fridays, and then we would hold them in the cooler over the weekend, so that we had some things that we could get started with on Mondays, and that was really helpful, too. Yeah, I think that covers it. [Music] I would love to know how you and when, like, diversify your roles, like what areas of business are you guys each tag teaming? I think that the key for us working together well, because we're both extremely opinionated, and very sure that we are right about our opinion. Very stubborn. Cool, cool, great. We have our lanes. Like, he is Quinn is customer service, because he is so much better at that than I am. You know, people's unreasonable expectations get under my skin, and I, like, so I am not customer service, I'm not customer service person. He is an excellent customer service person. He is very rarely upset by people. He has this amazing ability to be just endlessly empathetic, even when someone's being just so rude, which is incredible. So, he is customer service. He does logistics. He manages the drivers. He manages the daily commings and goings of the shop. I do much more of the creative end of the shop, so I do all of the buying, flowers, and then also products for the shop. I maintain our website, so my role is to come up with some sort of promotion to get, like, right now we're doing, we call it a local's only, I call it, that's my role. It's at 100% local flower arrangement. That's like a fun promotion, and then I've got to take pictures of it and put it on the website so that it's, and that's the kind of thing again, where I could never get to that when I was working on weddings. It was just a thing that would be in my brain, and I would never be able to get the time to, like, actually make a 100% local arrangement, and then take a picture of it, and then put it on the website, and then, you know, make sure that everyone knows that this is what we're doing now. So that's been really great. Those are our roles. When it comes to, like, design and creative vision, you know, doing promotions, buying, that's my lane. And then when it comes to daily logistics, managing drivers, customer service, that's Quinn's thing. For the most part, like, our employees know, like, who to ask, depending on, like, what question they have. And then we cover for each other when that's needed, you know, like, if for some reason, like, if I'm sick on a Monday, Quinn is fully capable of doing the flower buying. And then he's out of town this week. And so on Tuesday, we didn't have coverage in the morning. And so I went in and I did his role of, like, opening the shop and getting the deliveries situated and making sure that the day was on course and all of that stuff. But yeah, we've agreed to very specific roles and we stick to them. Yeah, that's good. That's good. What is your gift buying philosophy? Like, what kinds of gifts are you excited to bring in? Oh, that's such a great question. I feel like one of the things that I think is incredibly important about having a business of any kind is sort of like defining what your brand is. And as a business defining what your values are and as a brand defining what, like, what are the parameters around what you provide and what you carry everything that I purchased for the shop I run through this, like, sort of filter of like ritual beauty natural beauty. And there was one other thing, and I can't remember it, of course. and being asked about it, but those are the two big ones, like ritual and natural beauty, are things that like interest me. Oh yeah, and then like women and art. So that's kind of like the theme of you, you wouldn't just pick that up necessarily, but it helps keep everything that we sell in our shop. Pretty cohesive. Like you can curate quite a range of giftable objects from using like pillars like that. So you know, everything that we carry, like the necklaces that we carry in the shop are all like natural stone. We've got bracelets that are like natural like not bone, but like porn. So the jewelry fits into that category of like natural beauty and then we've got like incense or we have like books that like that go into details on like from from witchcraft to like rituals of Judaism and then Catholic saints. So like it's a really strange and broad range of things, but they all kind of tie together because they either have natural beauty in common or like ritual in common or we've got lots of books on art and then lots of books on like just women's history and things that are from like a woman's perspective. I love that. That's so cool. I love that too. I like I like the filters and the pillars for making decision. It just seems like it makes it a little bit simpler than the whole wide world is open to you. Yes. Yeah, I feel like that is that's the key I think to building a brand is like it's just as much about what you edit as what you you know what you allow in. You have to have some parameters otherwise there's no cohesion to your brand. It's not super, it's not recognizable to people. People understand I feel like even with our gifts, if you receive a gift from our shop, it's there's a good chance that the person receiving it is going to be like, "Oh, did you get those at flower shop?" Because they all kind of fit like a loose theme. Love that. What about social media? I mean, we all follow you on social media. And well, not everybody, I need more, more, more. Well, I do. I have for a long time and I know a lot of people do that listen to this podcast, but who's in charge of that? What's your philosophy on on social media? I am in charge of the social media. I do have a person that helps me now with like editing things, keeping a schedule for things because that became too much. My problem was like I would have all of these great ideas and I would, you know, film some of them, but then like I wouldn't have the time to edit them together or like the amount of time I spend editing something is just way too long because I'm too close to it, you know? So, you know, it's been two hours editing a video that's 45 seconds long and that's ridiculous. So now one of our employees, she's like part-time in the front of the shop and answering phones. Her other portion of work that she does for us is social media. So she will help me film things and she helps me edit them and she gets them scheduled and posts them for me and like that's really been enormously helpful in staying on top of social media. But what I've found when I've tried to use like an agency or just sort of give it over to someone else is that people can tell right away and they stop engaging because they don't want to, at least with with our audience, they don't want to engage with a puppet. They want like the real person. They want to know who they're purchasing from and like who's behind the company that they like and they don't want to feel like there's like a weird like puppet between them and that person. And so they pick up on it very quickly and engagement disappears and our videos stop doing well. Yeah so I'm like very much involved and like like if you comment and I reply it's me. I'm replying. It's not the social media manager. If you send a DM and I respond to the DM like that's me. She doesn't check the DMs or the comments or anything like that. It's still that's still me because I've found that that's really important. Even though it's very time consuming. Yeah it is, it is. I mean it makes me feel better when I hear somebody say that just because we do talk about delegating a lot and you're right. I mean Natalie and I just talked about this right before we got on the call with you. I mean I did that this morning. I was going to do 30 minutes and I'd spent an hour and a half doing something that should have taken me 30 minutes. It just makes me so frustrated and I'm like okay am I just not good at this? I mean I'm not so I can answer that question for myself. Somebody else could do it quicker but that has always been my thing about handing it off. I mean it just feels it feels like I found this kind of like creative collaborative way to do it. That's not like just I'm not just delegating it to somebody else but the parts that are time consuming. I have someone else help me with and then just the fact that she exists and like she she needs to have work to do. Right. Keeps me on a schedule. I can't not film videos because she's relying on that paycheck and she's got a clock in for those hours to like do the editing and she can't edit things that don't exist. Which keeps me on a very strict schedule which is good for the algorithm and good for our engagement. Do you guys use any tools to help you? Yeah we use I've used in shot in the past. I've been trying to use Instagram's new thing edits. That's been helpful. I know that when we do like graphics and stuff for the most part Ashley uses. What's it called? Not cap cut. What's the thing? Canva. Canva. Yeah. Yeah so we use Canva for that. But that's pretty much it. Yeah nothing too fancy. Yeah. Yeah nothing too fancy but definitely I've learned that like having good audio and having like clear video is incredibly important. Well having a space that looks like your space is also incredibly helpful. I had a conversation. We went through a really rough period where we had to lace and people off because it was like things were getting I think it was like when we kind of were moving away from weddings and when before we opened the shop and there was like a huge boom of events after COVID that kind of like slowed down because there was like a bottleneck you know. And in that time when everything was really intense like we had lots of delivery orders because people were not seeing each other in person but then suddenly we also had lots of events because everyone was going to see each other in person. So we ended up with like a huge amount of employees that we needed for a short period of time and then kind of didn't need any more and took us a minute to be like oh okay we're really this is this is not a dry spell this is a different economy. We've got to let some people go and at the same time yeah. Same here. Like a lot of businesses like that happened with a lot of businesses. And thankfully we did it in time to like keep going. And one of my employees who has had worked with us for a really long time and felt comfortable like speaking to me as like a person not just her boss. We laid off some people and she was like I don't understand. I know that you're spending like quite a bit of money on this build out for this new shop but you've let these people go and I just want to understand what's what's going on there. Like why are you buying a $300 toilet when you know a cheap toilet could work just fine. The reality of it is that people don't they're not super interested in going to a retail shop anymore unless you're providing them with a really cool experience. So I feel like you can't have a white box with pretty flowers in it anymore if you want people to come into your shop. If you're just doing deliveries and you just need a space that like says hey I'm here. That's fine but if you're doing any kind of retail shop where you really want people to actually come into the store you have to have a place that looks really cool and like something that people want to like experience in person. And then even if you don't really like social media such a huge part of the way people experience the world now if you don't have something really gorgeous to show them like it's very difficult to like get that engagement and get people interested in what you're doing. And having it's a small space like the space that we actually put like invested money into is really tiny, but we made it so. something that was incredible to look at, because we felt like that's the only way you're gonna get people to actually come into your store, because they don't, I don't go anywhere in person. If I don't need to, you know, like life is busy and hectic and hard and traffic sucks. Like you need to provide something worth driving to if I'm gonna come see it. We just had that conversation, too, around, like, hey, I mean, it's just, it's so hard, but it's like, just, I mean, and you're allowed to ask, you're allowed to ask, why are you making a decision to invest in one area, but you're cutting back in another area that feels personal to me. And it's like, well, for these reasons that are hard to explain, that we have to invest in the physical presence of the business to attract customers so we can pay more, so we can hire more people, so we can be busier to grow our margins. Like, it is, it's one of the most difficult parts about being a small business owner, is like being able to make those incredibly difficult decisions, you know, sometimes you are in a position where you are making an incredibly difficult decision that is going to very much impact someone else's life. And at the end of the day, you have to weigh that against your own future. I personally feel like a lot of florists specifically treat their floral business like it's a hobby. And I really wish that they would stop doing that and like treat it like a real legitimate business because it's one of those businesses that's very, like very much associated with women. I want women business owners to be taken super seriously. Like, we deserve to be, we deserve to be. And part of doing that is like, take yourself seriously, take your business very seriously. When you do that, it's very clear to the outside world that you take it very seriously and they should also take it very seriously. That's a huge part of building trust with your customers is like, and that requires hard decisions. You have to make hard decisions. Like, I am going to let this person go because we can't afford to keep them and we do need to have some of that. We need to take some of that money and weirdly buy curtains and invest in this tile floor that is going to make an enormous impact on the look of our shop because that's what's going to, that's what's going to make people take videos of the store when they're in the store and then post them on their own social media which then spreads your business far and wide and it's a difficult decision to make. But it's a necessary decision to make. And when you're, as I feel like the employees, like she understood, when I explained that, she's worked with us for a long enough and like, she is, she knows that we treat people really well. As to the best of our ability, we treat people really well. We give them, we give them benefits in vacation time and we treat them like human beings, couldn't I both worked in flower shops for many years before we opened our own and were treated poorly many, many times and had lots of really terrible bosses. And we made a commitment to treat everyone really well. I feel like when you treat everyone like a human being, it's easier to make that difficult decision because you know your values and you know you're not doing it out of callousness, you're doing it because this is about the best thing for your business and the survival of your business. - And that was gonna be one of my next questions was like, what to you is the definition of being a good boss? Like what is your philosophy in leading a team in leadership and what's your advice there? - I have done so many things wrong for sure. When I first got into this, it took me a really long time to realize that like my role is different now. You're not like everybody else now. You're like, you can't even have the same conversations like person to person that you would like you know, designers have little shitty conversations at the table. And I would try to participate in those conversations, but because I am the boss, every opinion that I have, but may not have anything to do with flowers whatsoever. We're talking about something totally different just a personal thing, but every opinion that I have is just way more weighted because I'm the boss and it's uncomfortable for people to disagree with the boss. And so like that was something that I had to like learn that like being the boss is different from just being another one of the employees. There is a hierarchy and there's a separation that like means you have to act a little bit differently. You're going to be, you're a little bit more separated from them and that's the way that it needs to be. And that was a big lesson that took me a while that like, okay, I can't, we're not friends. I love these people and they're really wonderful. But we can't be like friends. The best that I can hope for is that we can have this sort of very friendly kind human relationship that is almost more like mentor mentee. And that's a really, really delicate and very serious role to play in someone's life. And you've got to be super careful with it. But I think really the philosophy that we take with it is that we just really try to treat people like human beings. And like the way that we would want to be treated. And I think it helps that Quinn and I were always, we've always just been like, you know, basically blue-collar workers. Like where we don't, we don't come from any money. We had, you know, minimum wage jobs. We know what it's like to like, you know, feel burnt out. Like we've got mental health days. So we have sick days and then we also have mental health days. And like those mental health days are like, no questions asked like you're just gonna, you can say like, ugh, I can't, I'm not, I'm taking a mental health day. And like that's it, no questions asked, you get a mental health day. In addition to sick days and vacation days, those are just like separate things because there were so many days where I just made up an illness 'cause I just couldn't do it. And I feel like everyone does that. And so if I want to have an honest relationship with my employees, I just give them a way to do that where they don't have to lie to me. They take that day. They are also human beings who deserve, as decent pay as I can give. It's flowers is not a high paying job. And as many benefits as I can possibly give them that isn't going to sink me. And just like human understanding. - Do you do any kind of like one-on-one? Do you have any way for people to talk to you? - I just started it actually. Yeah, so on our website, if you go to flowershop.com/consulting, there's like two options. And one of them is a very simple, just like an audit of your business in brand, where I go through and just kind of look at your website and your social media and kind of figure out like what is your brand saying that you might not be aware of? Or like what are things like where are places that you can kind of clean up your brand or convey a better message? Is the message you're trying to say is it being conveyed by your branding and your social media and all that stuff? So that's an option. That's the simpler option where you like, I just basically look all of that stuff over and then send over like an action plan or like set of notes of what I've noticed. And then there's another option that's more intense that involves both Quinn and I kind of doing that audit but also like having a more in-depth conversation about what your goals are for your business and going over that with you and coming up with like an action plan of like ways we think could be beneficial towards your goals. (upbeat music) - I think that's gonna be helpful. Are you like speechless? Y'all have so many similarities. - I know. - Only really is wild. - It is just the whole, you know what all I could think about when she was talking about the tile and investing in the tile even when you're having to let someone go and all that, I was thinking about that anthropology chair in the native poppy. - Oh my God. - And that's here. - Well, I remember one time you were saying, I think you were saying in a circle or something. It's like don't get the expensive anthropology chair that the kids are gonna get up there and do all this stuff. And then I'm never gonna do it again. I know, but then I was like no, you had to have that chair. That's what made native poppy. I don't think. Native Poppy would be like skyrocket, like the popularity of it without the aesthetic. Like, you know what it is? It's the chair, it's the tile, it's the hanging installation. I know and this is good to talk about like and remember because we're going into building out two new stores right now and I am like. I don't want to spend any money, but also it's such a fine line. It is such a fine line because there's a part of me that is like, do not spend money because it is so hard to make it again. But then also, it's also so true that the more beautiful the space is, the more enticing it is to come into and to trust the brand and to want to buy from the brand and you're telling the brand's story. It's like such a fine line. It's just. Yeah, well, the whole time she was saying that, I was thinking the same thing for you because I really do think that has made. I'm not saying that Native Poppy wouldn't have been successful without those things, but I really think it makes such a huge difference. It's because you believe in the vision, build out the vision, build out the brand's story through the visual storytelling. But it also is so hard that now I've spent like years mentoring people and be like, try to spend less money, but it is so hard to get yourself into debt to open a flower shop because a flower shop is not easy. Right, right. To make a lot of money yet is just not. Yeah, that's hard. It is, but I've never really heard anyone explain it exactly like what she said, you know, that you're really investing in a space that people will want to come into. That is true. That is true. I mean, that's why we do our seasonal installations. That's why we do the silk installations on the outside of the store. It's like a lot of stuff. Yeah, but then you got to do a lot of business to make a lot of revenue to pay for it. So it's it is a fine line. Wow, okay. Well, I loved it. I loved part two. Thank you. Part two in the books. All right. Thank you so much for listening everybody. We'll be back again with a new guest next time. Okay. Talk to you soon, Nat. Bye. Bye. (upbeat music)