I thought as we are all navigating crazy seasons, maybe you've booked on to do 14 billion weddings or you're navigating mother's day and prom season and end of school and summer holidays, or maybe you're none of the above. And you're just getting started. I wanted to talk through one of my favourite. I think of it as a shortcut, you might want to think of it as a framework or a design guide, but it really helps bridge the gap I find between the design that you want to create and the final recipe that you need to order from the wholesaler and this idea of creating a set of floral design formulas for yourself.

Now, this is very contingent upon the fact that you have listened to the podcast from a few weeks ago where I introduced the notion of a set menu. And in the fundamental concept here is that you, as the owner of the business and the creative director are sitting down and deciding for yourself for your business and for your brand, this is the aesthetic.

This is the vibe. This is the kind of work that we do. And this concept of floral design formulas was something that came out of the byproduct of wanting to have more than just me sitting there trying to create recipes. And actually, if you have a team, I will tell you right now, this one concept is going to be so helpful, so helpful because it will teach your designers how to start to create work that you like, which is really good.

It's super helpful. It also creates a level of consistency across your work. And it's really powerful because it gives the decision making and the, I don't want to just keep staring at the blank page and have to start all this stuff from scratch every single time out, because it is overwhelming, right? And it's really taxing on our creativity. Anytime we need to, again like start planning a wedding from scratch or start quoting from scratch, or every corsage that goes out the door is totally different or every set of cake flowers is totally different.

This idea that with every product, every design that you make in your business, you could create for yourself a basic floral design formula. And this is nowhere near as complicated as creating the actual final recipe.

This is like the framework that you're going to follow to help you make sure that you are filling in the gaps. I think this is one of the best structures that you can implement in your business to really level up the work that you're putting out into the world to make sure that you are creating consistent designs going out into the world.

To help you scale your business beyond just you as the designer or you as the head designer, this is really about teaching your team or teaching your freelancers or teaching a support person, how to think the way that you think.

One of the barriers that I ran into when we were really putting the responsibility onto our team, and really actually allowing our designers and wanting to create more consistency with the designs that were going out the door was I was recognizing, how do I teach these amazing human beings to think the way that I think, and it's super powerful.

Even if you're at the beginning of your floral design career, or maybe you're the kind of designer who's like, I just don't want to hire freelancers. I want to do the design work myself. It's totally fine because you can use this framework to really start to free up a lot of your energy.

I think, well, I know one of the mistakes I made early on was not recognizing that there are three different stages to the design process. I used to believe that I was supposed to be able to just, you know, stand in front of a bucket of flowers and make something beautiful and it is possible, right?

We can all do it. Like if we are given an unlimited budget and nobody's actually paying us for this work friends, we can all make something beautiful. The beauty of our work is being a professional floral designer and making a profit from it. And knowing we're not gonna over stuff, the bouquets, we're not gonna give away the stem.

So we're not just gonna throw something else in there just to make it meet our expectations. So this idea, this concept, this protocol, if you will, to be able to sit down and create your floral design formulas for me has been one of the best systems that we've put in place for our business. And I know that systems and processes and like getting organized.

Everybody's like, yeah, it's the thing I think I should be doing, but I just can't be bothered. I'm gonna tell you follow this sit system, and you're gonna have so much of the kind of true infrastructure for your systems in place, because as your business grows.

And I just keep thinking about the year that is 2022 and all of those headlines that fly around of like 11 billion weddings are happening this year and 13 hundred trillion dollars is going to be spent. It's like the economy's trying to make up for two and a half years of shenanigans.

It's like, okay, what an amazing opportunity to get your systems in place? Because it is really unsustainable for us as human beings to be putting our bodies through the test of what is an epic wedding year and not having the systems in place like this is a matter of like saving your sanity, but also really actually saving your health.

This is really about understanding that your systems and your processes don't need to be complicated. Right? Y'all know that I hate sitting down and doing the system and process work. And I like to break it down into smaller pieces, but I also like to come up with these frameworks or these shortcuts so that I'm not having to reinvent the wheel every single time out.

As your business grows, as you take on more weddings, as you do more work, as you do more deliveries, like wherever you are in your business, maybe you are launching that flower school and you're taking on more students and you're doing more classes and it's like, oh right. The more complicated your businesses, the simpler you need to make your systems. The more complicated your business is the simpler you need to make your systems.

I know that sounds really counterintuitive, but the more like arms that your business has, if you're at the full like octopus layer, right? You've got like eight different departments within your business. Maybe you've got a flower school and you're doing funerals and weddings, and you've got daily deliveries and subscription. And at home styling, you gotta have your systems buttoned down.

The more you can simplify things, the more you will actually see yourself thriving within your business. And it takes a lot of intention, right? And it takes a lot of like, we need to pair it back and pair it back and pair it back. But this I idea of, if you are working with freelancers in particular, you'll start to notice is you bring new people into your team and they have different personalities, brains work very differently to yours.

I'm like, why can't you just think the way that I think I don't understand why my language doesn't make sense to you, but this idea creating a flower formula. There are so many layers of complexity that we get added to when we add more people into the mix, more demands into your business, more clients, more customers, more responsibility, right? And this idea, okay, we gotta order from the wholesalers and then we have to bring in freelancers and getting them to help with a one off event.

Maybe you've got 14 weddings this weekend, and then you're doing mother's day. This idea of where can we make structure and where can we put systems in place to make it even easier to get the outcome that we want. This is the definition of work smarter, not harder. And it really like this process that you can through as a designer in your business, cuts down on so much product wastage.

You have so much more confidence when you're placing your orders with the wholesalers and it makes it so much easier to train new staff. You can actually also bring in very junior, very green non-professionally trained designers to help you with fulfillment.

When you start to map out some of these systems and this idea, like when my accountant came to us and said, you need to start to think of your business more like the way McDonald's thinks of their business. I still think of that concept because the way that McDonald's is set up their franchise is that they are able to set up the majority of their staff with like 16, 17, 18 year old teenagers. They'll pay them, I'm assuming minimum wage and then they have one manager on staff who is paid the premium. So instead of going through and having very complicated systems, they know they need to be able to navigate what will probably be a pretty considerate turnover, right?

Not many of those teenagers are gonna continue on to become managers, but this idea of a 17 year old kid needs to be able to walk in off the street and make a big Mac to the standard of McDonald's.

I think that concept is so powerful because what could be a very complicated system and process has been simplified at so many different touch points. So that even on the worst day, as a 17 year old, the likelihood that they're gonna fuck it up is not great, which is so good for the business, right? So it takes the pressure off of you when you are the designer.

You're trying to do all the things and be on all the places and wear all the hats, this idea that you can sit down and actually create for yourself like your secret recipes. This is like all of a sudden my friends wear now the kernel and we work at KFC or like the secret sauce, except I'm not gonna lie. Like in most cases, isn't the secret sauce, just what did they do? Like mix thousand island dressing with mayonnaise. Isn't this, the secret sauce.

You can create for yourself in your business, your floral design formulas, and it's gonna have such a ripple effect in terms of planning your recipes, creating your designs. It's gonna save you so much time, not having to start everything from scratch and save you so much money, which is so helpful.

This idea that you can start to create a repeatable systematized way for getting work out the door, that it meets your standards. And that is whether you've actually designed it or not. So why I love calling it a formula because it's like, it doesn't actually require you as the designer to do every step of the process. And one of the big mindset shift to make through this process.

I think there's two things to tell yourself one, this is your business and you are the creative director. I spent so long in our business reacting to what our customers wanted and custom quoting and trying to source all the perfect ingredients and just in the kind of back foot in very reactive mode in our business. And that had such a ripple effect of making sales really difficult. It made all of our systems not possible.

Every day, every week, every wedding, we had to start from scratch every single time out. But when you really start to understand, okay, the job when you've registered for the business and you are the business owner, is that you are the head chef in your restaurant. And one of the most helpful things you can do for the success of your business and for the satisfaction of your customers is to decide ahead of time what your work is going to look like.

The idea is like a thousand times more impactful. Once you start to understand so that your customers don't actually know what's possible, right? If we go back to the idea of thank goodness, the engineers at apple, sit down ahead of time and define for us, this is what the iPhone's gonna look like. This is the features it's gonna have. These are the sizes you can choose from.

They've made so many of those decisions for us. When we step into that persona within our own business. And we step into our power and our authority is the business owner. And we decide, this is the aesthetic. This is the vibe. These are the ingredients that I use. This is how my pieces are constructed. And this is how abundant each of my designs is. You make all those designs ahead of time.

Once you do that, then you can start to build the system between, okay, how can I bridge the gap with my recipes and wholesale order and the $320 that I quoted for a wedding bouquet.

This is really about connecting those two pieces of the puzzle to avoid the fact that every week you might be having weddings this week, and then you need to put in a new wholesale order, and you're starting your recipes all from scratch over again. That exercise used to take me hours and hours and hours to do. And no doubt, I would just get kind of bored. I'm not gonna lie, like kind of bored with the idea of continuing to go through the spreadsheets.

This was before Luann had created every stem. If you guys have not discovered every stem yet, go out there and make it happen. If you are not a fan of spreadsheets, go out there and sign up for every stem. But before she had created that piece of software and before we could go in there and copy recipes in the past, I used to just stand there and literally stare at the blank page over and over and over again, until I started to see a lot of recurring themes, uh, structure between the work I really enjoyed the look of and the work that I was like eh I had too much of this or not enough of that, or too little of this or too many of these, and this idea of being able to bridge the gap between the work you want to create and then that final recipe that you're going to rely on in terms of putting your design together.

Once you sit down and recognize that this is your business, and you are in charge and you are the creative director that makes you the head chef and you figure out this is my set menu, I've priced out every, like one of the designs I want to make based off my ideal scenario, this system around your flower formula is really about being able to then make the process of putting your recipes together.

Therefore your wholesale order together, really streamlining that so that not spending hours and hours and hours and hours doing that every single week, particularly if you're one of the Flores who's taking on like multiple weddings each weekend to get through 20, 22, making up for all of the lost revenue in the last couple years, particularly if you find yourself kind of thrown into the deep end of doing multiple weddings, this is really powerful.

It's really simple, but it's really powerful. So here is the thing at the end of the day, what you're gonna see in a lot of other floral design like Facebook groups or communities, is this idea that we are the servants to our customers, right? That there is that whole kind of notion within the world of customer service that the client's always right.

Except one of the nuances within the floral design industry is that because our industry has been so secretive for 5,000 years, that our customers don't have any information to go on. So they don't have any expertise that they can build their perspective on. So they're all walking around thinking that pennies are available 52 weeks in the year. And then we all set ourselves up for so much frustration because we keep believing what our customers are telling us.

This idea of we are literally trained, like if somebody sits you down and this is what happens, most floral designers they're ever into any sort of like mentoring or floral education, you're probably gonna hear from other floral designers that the right thing to do is have your clients send you reference pictures, and then you're gonna create a quote. And then you're gonna go back and forth and da, da, da, da, da.

I'm gonna tell you that you can streamline that entire process and do like 1% of that work. It doesn't need to be that difficult, but once you've sat down and figure out, okay, so I'm gonna charge three 20 for my Bridle bouquets, 2,400 for my basic Archway. My table arrangements are gonna be three 50. My corsages are gonna be 65. My flower crowns are going to be 180.

Maybe if you're doing daily deliveries, your standard size bouquet is one 50 and your premium is two 50 and your small size is a hundred or 80, and you've decided ahead of time. Okay, great. Those are my price points and you've probably done that off of a reference picture, mostly because that's how I teach you to do it.

At the same time, I also find because we are visual creatures, I find that process really, really helpful. So unless you've got the exact recipe of something you've created in the past, finding a reference photo of what you want your benchmark to be for a specific item is really useful because you can pull it up on screen and then you can literally point to it.

I literally will take the back of my penciln I'll be like, okay, three snap dragons and four zinnias, it's so childish. I think the way that I do some of these things, but that simplicity is what is so powerful, but this idea of really understanding, okay, how do I bridge the gap between my set menu? And then the tedious process of creating the individual recipes.

I know for most of us, we probably don't necessarily run businesses or don't want to run businesses where the work looks precisely the same every single time out, right? This idea of it all looking very uniform and every wedding always has 34 white roses in it. That's not really what we want to be doing with our businesses. It's not to say that it's wrong.

I'll tell you right now, the systems and the processes and the repeatable of that nature of a business would be a dream because it would be so systematized, because you'd know, okay, I need exactly 34 van dollar roses, I need exactly this to do that, very FTD, very inter flora version of running a business. And that is not to say that that is wrong in any capacity.

If you're anything like me and you really want to feel that level of creativity and creative fulfillment and elevating your brand and elevating your vibe, it can feel like a giant waste of time you're looking at. Okay. So I've quoted my bridal, okay. At 320 now I gotta sit down and plan my recipes and put my wholesale order through, you know, I used to spend hours doing that stuff during the peak of our like crazy, crazy wedding seasons.

I would get so bored with it that I know that I wouldn't have necessarily done it with the best due diligence possible. So that's when I started to come up with this interim step through that process.

What I want you to do when you are going to sit down and come up with your floral design formulas is I want you to sometimes I'll say like, put your boy brain on this, like very analytical, methodical, straightforward, right? Maybe the perspective to have is like, let's all go back and channel our like eight year old selves, right?

This is just like, we're gonna do a little bit of a science experiment. We're going to create a little bit of a framework. We're not gonna make anything here. This is about really getting back to basics.

One of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself in this instance is if I was gonna train someone to create the kind of work that I want to put out into the world, how would I train them to do it? And this really opens up your creativity and ask yourself what is the formula that I could create to help them create the work to my expectations for the right price.

So there's three steps that I'll tell you to go through in this process. And I want you to let go of the idea that it needs to be absolutely perfect. I also want you to drop that internal dialogue of there is a right and a wrong way to do this. And I want you to simply take this framework, try it out, put it into practice for your business and then continue to make it your own. I literally made this idea up out of nothing.

So please feel free to take it, but also feel free to adapt it. And it's like with everything else that I teach you guys, it's like, oh yeah, here's all of the answers. Now please go out and make it better.

But I want you to go through this three step framework so that you can create the formulas for your business, because I'm gonna walk you through one of my examples, but don't let yourself fall into the trap of going. This is what it has to look like because we can talk about design all of the time and just like architecture, just like painting and sculpture and any sort of art, medium, just like music, your vision and your creativity is yours.

So the reason I want to teach you this concept is to give you a way to simplify the process so that you're are not spending as much time trying to sort through all the things and that you are creating a sense of ease and a simplicity for yourself. I want you to do this as a gift for you.

I don't want you to feel like this process is a burden and you can do this either moving forward, like looking at the next wedding that you're doing, or if there's something that you've created recently or in the past at all, that you absolutely love.

Then you can use that specific design as a way to set the foundation, create your formula to move forward. So the three step process that you're gonna go through, one, identify the language you want to use to describe your ingredients. And this is something I know for those of us, who've been to formal qualification, right? We were taught there's filler focal line flowers. Like that was the language that we were taught and then through the process of creating these designs and creating this formula, I realized we needed to change the language, we needed to change the terminology that we were using when we were describing some of the ingredients.

I want to just offer up to you. You are allowed to describe the ingredients that you use in your designs, however you want to. And I know in our industry, there's a lot of kind of aggressive pushing on like the right and the wrong language to use, to describe things.

I'm not talking like you need to be scientific or you need to be a horticulturist, or you need to be certified in any of these things because I 100% will say there is a scientific name for every single one of these things that we touch. But I'm just saying for you in your own business, come up with language that makes this process work for you.

You might stick with filler focal line or you might use things like foundation, focal, fluff, foliage, whatever you want to use. I know there are other designers who then talk about like satellite flowers and shooters. Like I've heard so many different adjectives. So I want to give you permission to define for yourself the language that you use to describe your ingredients. For me, I go with focal and filler. Like I've really started to narrow it down to just some basic basic terminology.

Part of it was the shift that came for us in like 2018, 2019, around like this idea that foliage is optional. And I think that's one of the challenges. If you're a formally trained designer in the way that they teach us or the way that they certainly taught us way back in the day is foliage was like the base.

So you always would have this like intensely vibrant green color and that had to be part of every single one of your designs. But I want to give you permission to let go of every single concept you've ever been taught about the language of flowers, all of that information that we strove so hard to find so that we could feel legitimate. I want you to just let go of it for a second. And I want you to decide for yourself the language that you want to use for your flowers, whatever feels right for you.

I don't care what backyard Betty is calling hers. And I don't care what successful Sussie is calling hers. This is like in your business, what do you want to call the different kinds of ingredients that you use? Whatever you decide is perfectly right then with each of those categories of ingredients.

I want you to create your go-to list of ingredients for each. So if you're using the term filler, what are your go-to most favourite filler ingredients? If you're using the term focal, what is your go-to list to favourite ingredients? And yeah, those favourites are gonna change through the season and they're gonna change over time.

I was telling a couple of you guys the other day that I was like, yep, Nope. Still outta love with the Panda anemone officially had too much of it. I'm sure. One day I will come back into love with it again.

But right now I'm like, no, I'm okay to let it go. Right. And I know at one point in time, very early on in my floral career, I was like, no way. Baby's breath is dumb. Now. Gimme, Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme all your carnations. Nope. Somebody else can have all the pennies and yet you guys can have all the hydrating. That's fine. I'll just be over here with my carnations in my baby's breath. Yeah. And you know what? I'm gonna take the lovely Fern and I'm gonna spray paint it. But guys, I am stuck in 1986,

Welcome to the world of modern floral design. But step one is I want you to identify for yourself the language that you use to describe your ingredients. Number two, I then want you to create your list of favourites for each one and keep a running list. I find it really hard to think. Okay. Right? Yeah. If it's April, what's in season in September,

Like it's sometimes real hard to find that information in your own brain. So give yourself the okay. To keep a running list of some of those absolute favourite. And remember you get to decide all of it. You get to decide the language you want to use and you get to decide your favourites under each category. And then once you've done that, then you can sit down and actually map out your formula. And you're gonna have a formula for each format of a design that you create.

If you're focused on weddings, you will have a formula for your bridal bouquet, bridesmaids, flower crown, button holes, boutonnière, corsages, archways. Maybe you have a version of a standard Archway. And then you have this like crazy ceremony, installation Archway, depending on what you want to offer within your business, you are gonna want to go through the process of creating a formula for each of those design items.

Exactly the same thing applies for daily deliveries. And this is really helpful. If you have the option on your website of the designer's choice or you are bringing in freelancers and bringing in staff to help really pump out the volume of your product in your shop and in your business, creating a formula for like the $60 bouquet, $120 bouquet, the $200 bouquet and giving them a framework to follow is so helpful.

Because for many of our designers, particularly the ones that we know that we're investing a lot time and energy from a training perspective, they really want to do well in their job. Like they want to be given the support and the guidance to be set up for success. And what you can do is then give them the tools to make the design part easier. And this is about translating your vision into a very practical structure.

This is like as framework protocol systematizes, you can get to really simplify things and give them almost a paint by number so that the likelihood of what's gonna come out, the other end is going to fit to budget and it's gonna fit to brand. So this idea might be, let's say you're doing a hundred dollars bouquet. You might have decided that your language is focal flower, line flower, filler flower, and foliage. So that's the language that you've decided. And then in your shop, in your business, you might have your go-to list of the focal flowers, line flowers, filler flowers, and foliage. So what you're gonna do with your hundred dollar bouquet is going to end up looking like your formula might run down something like this three times focal flower a, two times focal flower B, three times line flower, four times filler flower, two times foliage.

So it's not about going in and actually going as D tailed as a recipe. But what this does is it gives you a framework to follow so that then you can look at it and go, oh, okay. A hundred dollars bouquet has five different kinds of ingredients in it. And then you just start to fill in the gaps.

It's so much better than having to go, okay hundred dollar bouquet, now we're gonna cost up per stem and then you just chuck it together and throw it out the door. And you're like, what didn't I like about it? This is really about helping you bridge the gap between this is the work I want to put out into the world and how can I make it easier for myself and how can I make it easier for my team to be able to meet that expectation?

Definitely. Yes, there is some nuance in there understanding if you're doing daily flower deliveries around budget and making sure everything is fitting within that structure, but you get the general idea. So even for me, if I'm thinking about making a wedding bouquet, I know for sure I'm going to have either six or seven ingredients in total, there's going to three focal flowers and four different filler ingredients. So that when I'm going through, it's so much more fun to be able to map out within that framework.

So Sally's getting married in August and it's gonna be anemones and as like the focal flower, and of course I'm gonna have carnations. And I wonder if we'll be lucky enough with any sort of ranunculus, but let's go see how we go and maybe stock could be considered like a focal flower. You get to really open this up to your own interpretations and then you get to play around with color.

And for me, this like creating this formula really started to open my eyes to a, all of the different nuances of floral design. Because even when we were in the early days of trying to sort out this framework, I remember doing a wedding once where with my complete obsession with roses. So we had put her bouquet together from a recipe point of view. And I think it was like five or six different kinds of roses and not enough filler or texture for our liking and realizing it's like, well, that was really actually a good exercise because it had pushed the pendulum too far.

This is when we started to come back and refine and going, oh yeah. Like it really is for us about finding the balance between the focal flower and the texture. So again, just come back, give yourself permission to define for yourself the ingredients that you love to use, find the language and how you want to categorize that. And you're allowed to forget everything that you were taught at school.

If you've worked with a designer before and they had a certain way and you loved it, feel free to adopt it. If you've taken a course and they had a certain way to describe it and it didn't make sense to you, or it felt too complicated, let it go. But really knowing like you get to decide for yourself, go through this three step process and you will start to see you're taking so much of the pressure off yourself because you're bridging that gap between your set menu and your wholesale order oryour set menu and the recipes that you get to create.

It's so incredibly helpful. My friend and I will tell you, this took us at least 24 months to come up with and don't, I don't tell yourself, don't put the pressure on yourself that you need to perfect this the first time out.

This is really about understanding that you get to adapt this system. You get to make it work for you and you get to Finese and refine it, but just use it as a tool in your kind of systems toolkits to free up your time and energy to make the planning and ingredient process wholesale, ordering process a little bit simpler for yourself and use it as a way to really level up and create more consistent work coming out of your business.

If there's multiple designers, right? And really making sure that everything is meeting your expectation. So my friend is called the floral design formula. It is super helpful. So go out there, my friends, put it into practice for your business. As I said earlier, go out there and make it even better, make it your own. And if you are a systems and process person, I know you will love this and you will eat it up and you are going to just really shine in your business.

But also no, if you are not a systems and a process as person, this shortcut is one of the best systems you can put in place for your business right now, particularly if you're looking at your wedding calendar and you're looking at mother's day and you're looking at pro season and you're like, how am I gonna get through this? How am I gonna get through all of this, sit down and take an hour and map out for yourself your floral design formulas.

You will love yourself for it so much. My friends. Okay. Enough is enough enough gibber Jabber. Let's get back to work, have a beautiful day. My friends get some sleep, drink some water. We'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now.