“Whoosh…” That giant sigh of relief heard across the country in mid February was the sound of florists, large and small, taking a deep breath because they had done it, they had survived another Valentine’s Day holiday. While surviving the holiday is an important first step, we don’t really want to just survive, do we? Rather, we were made to, deserve to, and should want to THRIVE in our floral businesses!!!
So while we all need and deserve a bit of a breather after pushing through the long slog and holiday chaos that is critical to our business and profitability, it is incredibly important to our future success that we roll up our sleeves and dig into the process of evaluating the holiday and capturing Valentine’s Day lessons. My goal in writing today is both to encourage you to summon the energy and make the effort, and to point you in the right direction of how to do this well.
THE IMPORTANCE OF REVIEWING THE HOLIDAY
Winston Churchill famously said, “he who fails to plan is planning to fail.” Well, in the world of floral holidays, planning for the next one actually begins with your post evaluation of this holiday.
Over my 21 years in this industry, our Valentine’s Day holiday revenue has nearly quadrupled and it has actually gotten easier to handle along the way for myself, my fellow owners, and our entire team. I contribute this to our effort, year after year to evaluate, learn, and then implement our key takeaways. Every single year, we get better because we adjust, innovate, and apply the lessons we learned and the new ideas that come from actively seeking improvement.
In the flower business, Valentine’s Day is critical to your business. It is critical to your sales and profitability for this year but perhaps even more importantly, it is critical for your future growth. The reality is that most floral customers have 2-5 times a year that they are seeking to buy flowers. Trying to market and advertise enough to stay top of mind before potential customers year round so that you might capture them when they have a need is not financially viable or sustainable. However, at the key holidays, these potential customers are looking for you. When you can take their order and handle it well, you earn a new customer (for life if we do our job right). However, if can’t be there for them because you don’t have capacity, they will find someone else or give up on flowers as their chosen gift for this holiday.
Your business can’t afford to miss the chance to grab those customers. Now is the time to dig in and evaluate while what happened is fresh on your mind and the information you need to review is readily available. You need to keep growing your holidays!
WHERE DO I START
The first place to start in capturing Valentine’s Day lessons is always in capturing the key basics, saving copies (ideally digitally) of all key information that you used this holiday. The basic list of what to capture includes your flower order records; your product offerings, menu and recipes; your staffing levels and scheduling; website planning, setup and performance; your sales and delivery statistics by day; your advertising planning and final forms; and perhaps most importantly your final inventories.
Make an effort to capture final inventory for any product you have available for sale. This is the foundation of your plan for purchasing next year. You might need to capture inventories of loose fresh stems, green and blooming plants, holiday balloons, chocolates, bears or other addons, remaining inventory of pre-production roses and bouquets if you pre-produce (if you aren’t pre-producing for the holidays give me a call so I can help you get started), gourmet or gift baskets, and on and on based on your store’s offerings. If you are a multi location florist be sure to capture these figures both in total and by store.
Ideally, going forward, you will capture all of these inventories at the end of the 14th or first thing on the 15th (our Managers have a 1 pm deadline on the 15th to have submitted everything for their stores and/or areas). If you are reading this and you didn’t take inventory, stop now and capture what you can to the best of your memory and ability. Some records are better than no records.
After collecting data, you are ready to evaluate and there are lots of ways to do that.
INVOLVING EVERYONE
I am a big believer that you should involve everyone in the process of capturing Valentine’s Day lessons because everyone has a unique perspective with something to offer and sometimes the best ideas come from the least expected places. Just think of what happens in the tv show Undercover Boss, in each episode a senior executive spends time working alongside employees at the lowest levels of the company. Without fail, the boss always comes away with ideas for improvement that came directly from those employees. EVERYONE HAS SOMETHING TO OFFER.
Whether you are a team of 3 or 300, I strongly encourage you to engage every employee in this process in some way or another. Be sure that you make every effort to explain the why to them. Help them understand that their feedback is invaluable, that it will not only help grow the holiday, but make the work easier for themselves and everyone else. Be sure that they are comfortable to provide open and honest feedback. When only “safe” feedback is provided, you are often missing some of the most important items you may need to act on.
IDEAS FOR METHODS TO USE
There are lots of ways to evaluate and collect feedback on the holiday and through the years, we have utilized them all. To get started, I would consider one or some mixture of the following.
Surveys
You can create a survey with preset questions that every employee answers.
I like surveys because you can set the questions for the areas that you believe need the most evaluation or provide the best opportunities for improvement, guiding the feedback towards the most important areas. The consistency of the questions across all employees also helps to ensure that the feedback is more likely to compound. For example, when one employee tells you customers wanted sunflowers and we didn’t have them you may or may not believe them. When you ask everyone “what did customers want that we didn’t have” and four employees mention sunflowers, now you can act on that response next holiday.
The downside to surveys is that employees can give a lackluster effort and you may even have to brow beat them to fill them out in the first place. Through the years we have offered a prize to the most helpful (or 3 most helpful) surveys to incentivize participation and effort.
Guided Group Discussions
In a small shop this might be everyone at breakfast before work while a larger shop may hold separate departmental meetings, but either way the key is that everyone is engaged in a conversation about how the holiday went.
I like this format for several reasons. First of all, you can follow up in the moment on comments that are made, asking follow up questions, or digging deeper to gain full understanding. Secondly, the group can benefit from the feedback of one another. One team member may have been hesitant to share something, unsure of themselves, until someone else mentions it first. I have even seen someone who had not even thought of or noticed something that is mentioned, then provide an amazing suggestion for how to improve once the issue was raised in discussion.
The downside to group discussions is that it can be hard to make the time to conduct since your shop is open all day. Additionally, if you as the owner or leader are conducting the discussion then there is a chance that the “openness” of the feedback may be limited. At our current company size and stage, we have my Assistant and Department Managers hold the meetings with the assurance to the team that all feedback comes back to Senior Management in an anonymous, group fashion.
One on One Meetings with Key Team Members
Similar to the guided conversation but on a specific and smaller scale, I hold post holiday debrief meetings with key team members who help lead or spearhead various holiday functions. This allows us to go deep together on evaluating everything about their area of responsibility.
Using Conversation Starters
One thing we are utilizing in our evaluation this year is asking every team member to bring two wins to celebrate (something that went well) and two opportunities for improvement. We go around the room at the start of the meeting and let everyone share.
This is proving successful and important on several levels. Starting by celebrating wins sets a positive tone for the meeting and helps us celebrate the team and each member. You always want to encourage your team for the things that go well…what you celebrate gets repeated! Additionally, focusing on opportunities for improvement stays with the positive mindset. “How can we get even better” is a more engaging conversation than “where did we screw up.”
This method also makes it easy to involve everyone and creates the natural opportunity to dig deeper, ask follow up questions, and engage the entire team on a key topic without you having to bring it up as the leader.
STOP READING AND GET STARTED EVALUATING
I could go on and on about what else you could do, but what’s important now is that YOU GO DO IT. Take my encouragement and dive in, you will be glad you did.
Mother’s Day is only 10 weeks away (as I post this). Capturing Valentine’s Day lessons allows you to immediately test and apply them to help you improve your Mother’s Day this year.
If you want or need to discuss anything that I have said further, don’t hesitate to email me at Ben@Edgefloraladvisors.com, I’m here to help you Sharpen Your Edge for Success!
HAPPY PLANNING!
