Business, Training and Consulting Services for Florists
Business Consulting
These services are provided on a one time or ongoing basis depending on the service. They can be provided singularly or bundled into and annual agreement.
Financial system design - no matter what your shops' level of automation, we can assist with the daily data gathering necessary to facilitate your monthly financial statement preparation. This could be developing a manual system to gather data or to configure your POS system to provide the data efficiently.
Financial Analysis - Do you know what all those numbers and percenatges are telling you? Are your financial statements prepared in such a way that industry standard benchmarks can be applied to your business. We often find that bookkeepers and accounts not familiar with the floral industry record income and expenses so that the bottom-line is fine but the sub-categories (sales, Cost of goods sold, other income, etc.) are not comparable to the rest of the industry.
Cost management - based on your financial analysis, we help you manage the costs that are impacting your profitablility. Starting with the most obvious and working down to even small changes that can have a significant impact on profitability. Some of the areas include:
Cost of goods sold - identify the components and any problem areas and work with you and your staff to prioritize and lower these costs.
Cost of labor - work with you and your staff to determine that employees are being as productive as possible and to see if there are ways to re-allocate labor to reduce costs and increase profitability.
Other income - this area has become increasingly important as other costs have risen. Are you maximizing this revenue source?
Human Resources - an area over-looked by many shops due to time constraints and profitability. This leads to the revolving door of employees coming and going. Team-building in small to medium orgaizations can have a huge impact on profitability as your staff are made aware of benchmarks and learn to work together as your profit team. Other items in this area include:
Job Descriptions - sounds simple but people want to know what is expected. A job description should include benchmarks and be measurable.
Evaluations (development meetings) - two-way feedback with employees is critical to long-term success. We all want to know how we are doing and how we can develop and advance in the organization. No shop is too small for this.
Personality profiles and training - is your sales staff cut out for sales or are they just order takers. That difference can make or break you.
Marketing - this area doesn't have to be alot of work. Most shop owners don't have the time to put forth to do a simple email campaign or a plan for each holiday. We can help you create a plan that could take literally minutes per week and boost your bottom line.
Design Management - All too often owners do not know if their designers are overstuffing the arrangements. We did a study in our shop. If every designer overstuffed the arrangement with one carnation in each arrangement, that could have cost us $52,000. per year. We can show you how to audit your designers arrangements and give your designers a format to design to the sales price of the arrangement. Most designers say that using recipes stunt their design creativity. Well that is not true. We can show your designers how to use the same recipie and give at least three different looks.