The Importance of Backend Floral Systems for Florists

How many times have you stayed up late working on a floral proposal wishing there was a flower software or floral systems that you could just input your information and output a perfectly calculated proposal or order form? There is, and this exact scenario I described is what led to the creation of Curate, a software designed to help florists create a strong backend system where they can price for profit.   

This flower software has been a game-changer for my own business as I have personally been using it for years to create my floral systems.  Before using this software I was spending hours manually calculating costs and order forms, trying to find a balance between overordering and underordering and not overspending.  It was complicated and time-consuming and I was just sort of winging it with my excel spreadsheets, and this was a big reason why I stopped doing weddings & events.

I recently sat down and talked with Ryan O’Neil, the founder of Curate all about how florists can create an efficient ordering system for their business and ensure that they are pricing for profit. 
First, let’s talk about the importance of efficient ordering and why having floral systems in place are so important.

Importance of Floral Systems for Efficient Ordering

There are a lot of external forces that can impact the ordering process for florists, such as supply chain management issues, extreme weather, farms shutting down, or farms not growing enough flowers, flowers not arriving — this can make ordering flowers a really difficult process.  There are always variables and changes that we have to take into account in the floral industry and the key thing here is that you’ve done your planning ahead of time. You’ve chosen your ingredients, you’ve priced them out correctly, you’ve completed the order form, and if everything goes smoothly then you’ve done all the legwork, and you’re ahead of the game. 

However, we all know that sometimes things do not always go according to plan and it’s much easier to change a plan than to come up with a whole new one at the last minute. If something does happen, say your wholesaler is out of cappuccino roses or they’ve increased in price 400% or if you are in a situation where a client absolutely wanted something desperately, a particular type of flower, then you have to think about the rest of those ingredients and think how do you compliment the rest of these ingredients in a really effective way? Because the last thing you want is a bucket of flowers sitting over after you're done.

Curate’s flower software and floral systems make these types of scenarios a breeze because the floral systems are designed to help manage all the moving parts of pricing and ordering.  On your side, you are able to be able to go in and very quickly, even across 15 to 20 orders, select an ingredient and change that ingredient to something that fits within that budget, because you still have to stay within that budget of what that client paid for. 

How A Flower Software and Floral Systems Like Curate Can Help You Price Effectively

When it comes to pricing something out, it’s really important to make sure you are actually calculating the costs of the product instead of just looking at a photo from the underbelly of Pinterest, and deciding that you could probably recreate that bouquet for...let’s say $250.  If you don’t price that bouquet correctly you’re going to be paying for it.  While chatting with Ryan, he told a story of how when he and his wife were putting together a wedding chuppah and after about an hour of working on it he asked his wife, “How much did we charge for this?” She had sold the huppah 18-months before for $800, but the actual price of the chuppah ended up costing over $1000.  

18 months later, Ryan and his wife were still paying the consequences of not pricing it correctly. I mean hello?! How many of us florists can relate?! This is when Ryan realized that it is so important to have a quick and automated flower software that you can very quickly insert the item you are buying and project the price, especially in creative industries, such as the floral industry where the price of flowers fluctuate because of all the variables mentioned above, so it’s important to keep in mind when pricing how you are going to build it out.  There are general ways to do this like building out the ingredients and then putting a 3.5 times markup and estimating the price you should be able to get for the flowers. Now, that's going to vary from somebody that owns a floral business in San Francisco to somebody that works in rural Illinois and the key thing is that you need to find this out.

For hotel florists, they have an agreement with a hotel for a specific dollar amount per year and they know they have to build up to that. With a hotel, you're having to think of creative and inspiring designs on a weekly basis and a lot of times in situations like those where florists have a contractual agreement that they know they have to work in and what they'll do is they'll take that price and they'll build up to that price.

For other types of clients, like restaurants they may not have the same budget as a hotel, so you’ll have to get creative with how you budget and price your flowers. So whether you're building something custom based on the request of a client for you to price that out, or whether you have some agreed-upon rate that you're going at, you've got to be able to build out those ingredients and work up to that hit budget line.

Whether you use Curate, which I highly recommend or another flower software for your floral systems, making sure to price your flowers effectively and creating a seamless ordering system that you can quickly modify in the event something goes wrong in the floral supply chain, is going to help ensure your success as a florist and especially when working with hotels. As my students in the Hotel Florist Profit Method can attest, at one point or another something will happen, your flower won’t arrive and you’ll have to quickly think on your feet.  A quote that Ryan from Curate mentions is “Creativity comes from constraints” and I wholeheartedly believe this and it’s why I have a whole lesson inside the Hotel Florist Profit Method dedicated to what to do when your flowers don’t arrive or they arrive with issues.

You can learn more about becoming a hotel florist by watching my FREE masterclass. In the class, you will learn the three mistakes florists make when reaching out to hotels and how to avoid them, as well as how to get started.