One Secret Of Successful Florists.. They Use Consultants

Looking for help is not an admission of weakness. It is the first step on the path to greater success.

One of the fascinating thing about the most successful companies is a relentless focus on what they don’t know, an obsession with what they could be doing better. There is no pride or blind allegiance to what they are doing now, have done in the past or simply believe to be true…. they just want to know what they are doing wrong and how they can do it better.

Too often small businesses do let pride get in the way. They see looking for help as an admission of weakness. Even when things start going wrong they insist they are doing everything right.

One example is sales training. There is an amazing correlation in this industry between the health of a shop and their use of an expert sales trainer like Tim Huckabee. A high percentage of successful shops have him at least once a year, sometimes more, sometimes for multiple consecutive days.

In this case “successful” doesn’t always mean “huge”. Yes – there are some very large shops that bring him in for two or three consecutive times a year. But there are also very many smaller shops that bring him in on a regular basis. “Success” isn’t defined by gross sales but by healthy profits and higher order values.

So many shops that are struggling just can’t accept the idea. They insist that their employees won’t change, or that their customers won’t spend more… despite the fact that almost every shop that has benefited from FloralStrategies training had those same initial concerns.

And sometimes shops insist that they read a few articles which means they don’t need the training. That’s like saying that seeing AIFD designs in a magazine means the ability to design like an AIFD designer.

Most florists also benefit from the help of an accountant that specializes in the flower business – someone like Derrick Myers of Crockett Myers.

This doesn’t mean that they don’t understand their financial statements, it just means that they want to do better and understand that an expert that works with hundreds of flower shops might be able to help.

One example is a shop that was paying enormous rent to stay on the resurgent main street of their booming town. They were in trouble, struggling to make the rent and payroll, but insisted that the location was the key to their success. The problem was that it wasn’t generating nearly enough traffic to justify the expense. An experienced account can instantly spot that kind of discrepancy. It’s much harder for the florist who is so close to the situation to see it.

Online marketing is another area where florists can use help. Many do the occasional quick search for their own and are content if they rank well in the results. What they may not understand is that those results are tailored specifically for them, and that other people may see very different results.

It’s the same thing with social media efforts – just posting to Facebook, Instagram, etc. isn’t really enough… it needs to be part of a bigger coordinated strategy to maximize return on investment. An online marketing specialist like Strider can help with this.