I put a call out on Instagram a few days ago saying, Hey, complete transparency, no judgment, no criticism. Send me all of your questions. I want to make sure that I am recording podcasts that are totally in line with what you guys are looking for. And this was a good one because one of you guys was literally asking, Hey, could you map out for me? Like literally, what is the number one way to help me increase my order volume?

It's like, yeah, let's sit down and record a podcast that can very specifically talk you through exactly how to increase your order volume, because it's a question that we all have. And I particularly was talking the other day to one of you guys about my experience very early on in my floral design career, when I still had a totally separate job when I was doing flowers as a side hustle and really wishing somebody had recorded this podcast episode, it's like, oh, Hey Kathleen, why don't you record this podcast episode and be like, oh yeah.

Okay. So literally step by step here is how to increase your order volume. And most of you already know in order to build a successful and thriving business volume is the name of the game. Now this doesn't mean that you have to be saying yes to every budget bride or every budget order that you receive. What it means is that you need to think at scale. And we're gonna do a little bit of math today.

So please remember you can come back and re-listen to this episode, anytime that you want to, but this is the math that I wish I had done in that first, like just when we were in like baby flowering mode, baby business mode. And this is the exact math I wish I had done back then, because it's so helpful in understanding where do we need to get this business to in order to earn a living income and even better than that in order to really skyrocket our business to the next phase of growth and this little bit of math, isn't complicated.

So if you like to be a person that says I'm not good at math, I don't know how to do these complicated things. Great, welcome. Because I am not all that good at math. And that's why I love going through some of these step by step processes. Because for me, I've really helped to see how much it's shifted my own perspective, because I was thinking so small. I was trying to convince myself to be grateful for whatever order came in the door.

But at the same time, I was like, how long do I have to keep up my really shitty, I don't like this day job. So if you're in that kind of tug of war, you're in exactly the right place. You're also in exactly the right place. If you've already got your business up and running and you're like, I want to reach my next milestone.

I want to reach my next sales goal. I want to just learn how to increase my online order volume. So that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today. Because when I think back and I rewind the clock, absolutely 100% hand on heart, I did not even think about the volume required in order to have an actual business in order to actually have, I'm gonna pay myself a full time wage. I'm gonna have profitability. I'm gonna have money for operations. I'm gonna have money for the tax office. I did not do any of that.

So that's what I want to talk you through today. And then I want to talk you through the math associated with increasing your order volume and talk you through exactly how to do it. So grab a pen and piece of paper because this is gonna be such a good one. So for the purposes of simplicity, we're gonna say as a human being, I want to bring home $50,000 a year.

I want that to be my after tax personal income. That's how much we want to have in our bank account, $50,000 so that I can go travel. I can go buy stuff for friends and family. I can pay for my own dinner. I can buy some new underwear. I can drive a car like we can do all the things that we want to do to live our lives. So let's say that your personal income goal is $50,000 a year. You've already paid the tax office. So that's $50,000 in your pretty little hands.

The general guide I like to follow and know that this is not financial advice. Please go talk to your financial advisor, your accountant, your lawyer, whoever you need to talk to, to do the math specifically for you in your state. But the general guide that I like to follow is to take your personal income goal.

So that's the $50,000 and then multiply it times five. And that's gonna give you a pretty good guide. And I do mean guide in terms of what to set as your revenue goal in your business. That one little bit of math is what I wish I had done before I even registered my URL before I even went in to see if my Instagram name was available. That one little bit of math. So take your personal income goal and multiply at times five.

The reason I find this so helpful twofold, one specificity, the human brain loves specificity. You are gonna show up as a very different business owner. You are going to take way more action in your business. If you have a goal like $250,000, it's going to bring up all of your fear, all of your doubt, all of your imposter syndrome, all of your unknowns, all of your, oh my God.

I don't know if I can do this. Oh my God. That's such a big number. Oh my God. Who am I to all of that internal dialogue that we have, the revenue goal of 250 K is gonna bring all of that to the surface, which is so powerful because that's the mindset work to sort through.

The other reason it is so helpful is because then we can start to work backwards and be like, okay, so functionally, operationally systems wise, sales wise, marketing wise, what does that then actually mean for my business? What does 250 K look like if we're talking about daily flower deliveries, what does that actually look like on the day to day on the week to week? What kind of business is that? So if we set that goal of 250 K as the revenue goal in our business, remember your revenue goal and your personal income are two very different numbers.

But if your revenue goal is 250 K let's do some very simple math to paint the picture of what that looks like. So let's assume you are going to set a target of $150 per order. If we take $250,000 and divide it by $150 per order, that means that your goal is to generate 1,667 orders over the course of 52 weeks.

If we break that down even further, that means that you need to have 140 orders in a month. Or, and this is on average 32 orders in a week. So you need to set up your marketing and your sales and your system so that you're generating 32 orders in a week. If I rewind the clock and think back to my first few months of little bird bloom, I was like 32 orders a week. Are you kidding me? I had like three , but this is the beautiful thing, because then we can sit in that space of thinking, okay, how can I generate 32 orders a week and 32 orders every week?

Not just 32 orders one week, but 32 orders, 52 weeks of the year. On average, your thinking and your problem solving are gonna be so much bigger and more expansive. When you're thinking at that scale, we think really small when we're trying to figure out how do I go from three orders to four orders, to five orders. We think way bigger and way more creatively when we're going, okay, 32 orders in a week, let's get to really cracking this nugget.

So you can take this math and you can adjust it based on your income goals and your revenue target. So the formula is exactly the same. If you want to bring home a hundred K in a year in personal income, then your goal for the business is around 500 K. If you want to bring home 20 K in a year for your business, then your revenue goal for your business is a hundred K whatever you want that number to be.

The math is exactly the same. And then going through and figuring out what does that mean? How many orders, how many customers do I then need to have in my business? And I'll tell you what, if you can already see if you know that you're thinking small, if you feel like you're just, you know, feeling kind of meek, if you are trying to convince yourself to just be grateful for what you have, I totally get it.

That was absolutely 100% me and this math is what has shifted my perspective. And it's one of the fastest ways to get you recognizing just how much bigger you need to be thinking giant asterisks as well. This math also assumes that you're pricing for profit and that you're not over stuffing your designs. just two small minor details that we all do, but those are the two caveats.

So it's really worth doing this math and letting that sink in. So if the personal income goal is 50 K in a year, then the revenue goal for the business is two 50. That means if your average order value is $150. What you are aiming for is 32 orders in a week, right? 32 orders a week every week of the year.

That's the scale that we get to be thinking at. And this math, I find this math so helpful. Even if your focus right now is on your physical flower shop and you kind of think you've got your website sorted, or you don't even have a flower shop and you're gonna do the whole thing online when it comes to increasing your order volume. The first thing I'm gonna tell you to do is really refine that online catalog. The exact strategy that I would follow is start with 12 products and that's gonna be your foundation.

You're gonna have three sizes on each product. You're gonna cover off your major color palettes. You're gonna offer things in a container. You're gonna offer hand tied things. You're gonna experiment with having some really juicy price points on your website. You're gonna be really specific about what your minimum is. You're gonna have your delivery add on sorted bam.

One of the biggest and fastest ways. I think I've really learned to clean up my thoughts around sales, particularly when it comes to daily flower deliveries is to decide that on behalf of your customers, their love language is gift giving. So if you Google like love languages, this was a thing that came around a few years ago, but one of them is right. You can have like acts of service or gift giving. It's very possible that your client who is looking to order flowers, that their love language is gift giving.

And they very, very specifically are looking to show that they have a lot of love. And they see that as a very specific price point, possibly a higher price point than you think than your scarcity brain is thinking. right. Particularly for those of you and those of us who have a heart of service, right? Who are so committed to like, I want to help the people I'm doing this from love it very well could be.

I want you to decide that your customers want to spend a lot of money because gift giving is their love language. You were doing a gift for your clients by making it easy for them to spend money. It's so fun. It's so fun to think that way. And it's so much more powerful for your customers and for your business. And that idea never occurred to me.

It never occurred to me. I did not see how much I was standing in my own way of getting those bigger value orders in the door because I was so wrapped up in my own scarcity story. I thought $60 was a lot of money. I was like, oh my God, I cannot believe a customer would think about placing an online order, spending $60. The fact of the matter is we don't know.

We don't know how much a lot of money is for our customers. We have no idea. And this is why I'm such a huge advocate of having our website as the key pivot point in our marketing and sales process, because our website doesn't have a human brain so our website is very good at being a good salesperson with no judgment of your customer's ability to pay your website also has no judgment about your customer's thoughts about money.

Your website is like, Hey, do you want this arrangement? It's $320. Hey, do you want this bouquet? It's $117 plus delivery. There's no judgment. There's no fear. It just is. So I'm such a huge advocate of getting your online ordering system sorted because it's such a clean selling experience for your customers. Like there's so many benefits to having your website sorted because obviously it sorts out so many systems, it frees up so much of your time. It systematizes everything in your business.

It makes operations so much easier, but even from a making money point of view, your website is so not jaded. It has no conditioning. around like there's no little elves in your website going, that's a lot of money. Don't raise your prices. That's a lot of money. Don't raise your prices. Like your website is just a whole pile of facts and figures presented so well to your customers, that it allows your customers to make the best decisions for them.

So my friends learn from my experience, don't allow all of your scarcity thoughts to influence all of your sales, including on your website, including pricing on your website, including the price points that you feature on your website. This is really the work around cleaning up your money, thoughts and getting your online catalog sorted in a very succinct, easy to follow structure.

So once you have those 12 products sorted, and each one of them is gonna have three price points, then you have your website happening and you have your checkout process happening and you have your online process has been tested and it's all very easy and people can check out within three clicks and it's all working really well. Now back to the original question, Kathleen, what is the number one way to increase my online orders, Google ads, hands down, one of the best systems that you can get sorted in your business.

This is where the volume is going to come in because those ads can run seven days a week, way better in my experience than anything that we ever paid for on social media, way better than any post we ever put up on Instagram or Facebook, way better than anything you might be doing on TikTok way better than anything in print ads or radio ads, partnerships, or trying to build some sort of massive network or continually posting in some sort of community.

Google ads is where we cracked the volume game. Now a giant word of warning. The Google ads interface is not for the fate of heart. It has been created by a whole bunch of engineers who speak engineering. They don't speak floristry business owner. the Google ads interface is very detailed and it is intuitive. It absolutely feels like another language. And there are so many layers and so many details to consider, which is part of what makes it really easy to spend heaps of time, get super frustrated, waste so much money and get $0 from it.

So even if you have your online catalog sorted and you followed that 12 product strategy, then you get your Google ADSD sorted. It's very easy to just kind of flush all of this money down the toilet. So I wanted to pass along four super helpful lessons to implement for super helpful tactics, to make sure that your Google ads are delivering and making sure that you're actually getting your money back from that investment.

Even if you've got a team helping you with your Google ads, make a note of these things, because sometimes even if you're working with professional Google ads, people, there are some subtleties within the floral industry within the way that our customers use Google, that will make your ads even more effective. So my four super simple considerations for Google ads, when you are mapping out your ad strategy in your ads, literally in your ad search key phrases, make sure that it is including the destination, the area and the city.

Here's what Google will naturally do. And here's what many Google ads people will naturally do when they're setting up their ads. They'll just include kind of generic keywords, like flower delivery or people who are looking for flowers. People who are looking for a florist. One of the biggest strategic advantages that you have is that you only deliver flowers within a very specific footprint.

So it might be that you are based in Chicago. You want your key phrases, your keywords to literally be set up. So it says flower delivery, Chicago, because if you don't put that destination filter in there, Google is going to send all of your ads out to anybody who is just looking for a florist. And if they're looking for a florist in London, there is no point that your ad is served up to that customer. So making sure that your destination and your area, your city, whatever the language is that is used to describe your delivery area, making sure that that's included in your search so incredibly powerful.

And don't be surprised if the people who originally set up your ads, if you have somebody helping you with it, if they've overlooked that piece of the puzzle, get them to fix it. It's super common that that one detail is missed because it's one of the most important strategic differences between selling flowers and selling everything else online. So number two is make it a habit of going in every seven to 14 days and investigate the negative keywords. So these negative keywords you'll be able to start to see over time.

There'll be some kind of weird searches that Google will put your ad in front of. And it's doing that cuz it's trying to learn, right? It's trying to learn the behavior of your customer. And that's part of the frustrating experience of the Google ads program is that this isn't like something you set up on a Saturday and by Monday you've got a hundred orders in.

This is something you start setting up on a Saturday and over 6, 12, 18 weeks it's optimized and it's running efficiently. So we're in this for the long term. But what is really important is within the Google ads framework, there is the option for you to go in and actually be able to identify specific words that you definitely don't want your a to be served against. So you'll start to notice some really common ones are, if you don't do dried flowers or you don't do silk flowers, you don't do faux flowers.

You'll start to see those words coming up in search phrases. So you put that in your negative keywords. It's also possible you live in an area where that town name is also in either a different state or a different country. You can start to see that as a negative keyword. It might also be in one of the subtleties for us is like there was a massive flower festival in our area.

So we actually had to go in the negative keywords and make sure that the phrases around that flower festival were not used. Those were not key terms that our ad was ever served up for. And that negative keyword experience is something that you need to go in and do every seven to 14 days because that's really gonna help optimize your ads.

Number three is making sure that your online catalog is following the right strategy. You could have the perfect Google ads campaign and then your customer lands on your online catalog. And if you're not following that 12 product strategy, they're gonna be completely lost and they're gonna run away. So it could very well be that your Google ads are set up properly and what's letting you down where you're not getting the volume from is because your online catalog isn't set up in the right way.

So it's not necessarily true. That more is better. And that was absolutely. I thought that our customers wanted to have like 30 to 40 different products. I was wrong you can absolutely have 12 products in your online catalog. You have 12 products. Each of them has three different price points and you cover so many bases. I've actually found that number of 12 to be such a perfect combination.

It covers off so many price points that you can get such a great volume from that offering. And it doesn't need to be complicated. The other thing, and I know that this was particularly true for us. And I had to really do my shifting around money to get outta this behaviour. But my thought was, all my customers want is cheap flowers. So all the products we had on our website were super cheap, but here's the thing.

If we go back to the idea that for your customer, their love language might be gift giving and they want to spend money. It could be that your customers are leaving your website because they don't see things that are expensive enough. Yeah. It's very possible that that story that we're telling ourselves around, like my customers only want cheap flowers. It's like, maybe that's not true.

Maybe the clients whose love language are gift giving. Maybe they want to spend money and maybe they're not ordering through your website because they don't see enough premium products. They can guarantee you, my dad, like he landed on your website and everything was under 150 bucks. He'd be like next I'd be like, Nope, clearly mm-hmm I gotta go find somebody who has more for me to be able to spend, like he wants to be able to spend money.

It's so fun. It's such a fun game. So that's number three is making sure your online catalog is following the right strategy. Number four is setting up conversions. So this is where your Google ads really start to pay off because a conversion is in its simplest non-technical form. You pay Google only upon a successful purchase.

Hypothetically, when we do this math, when we do this ratio, the goal is if a client, if a customer has, you know, spent a hundred dollars on an order, you'll be willing to spend $10 on that ad, right? So a 10% allocation to your Google ads of the total online order value. So if your average order value is $150, then your kind of sweet spot is to get to the point where you are paying on average $15 to get that order in the door. The best way to make that happen is to get conversions set up on your website.

And it's super simple. You just go over to fiver, find some guy who can help you set up Google ads, conversions, give him a little bit of technical info. He goes onto your website and he makes it happen. It is beyond my technical capacity and understanding to appreciate how it happens.

But we paid like $20 to get a guy to help us do that job. So, so powerful because what it does is Google starts to pay attention to the successes. It starts to pay attention to when a conversion happens and through all of it's like big data, all of the details and understanding and obsession over, you know, how much it knows about our own behavior. It's gonna continue to behind the scenes, optimize your ads and who it's sent to even more, which is so helpful. Remember though, here's the thing. When it comes to Google ads, this is not a quick fix.

This is you've got your website sorted, you've got your online catalog sorted. You're gonna start working on your Google AdWords programming now. And in 12, 18 weeks, it's gonna be humming along. So you've really gotta be in it for the long term. And I will say, particularly at this junction in the year, this is the time to get your Google ads sorted because you do the work now and it pays off for you. Valentine's day mother's day.

So if you can get your Google AdWord set up now, then you've got six months, seven months to really refine it. So that by the time Valentine's day, 2023 rolls around all of the kinks are worked out all of the technical, oh my God, it's not working. What are my negative keywords? And what about this? And the destination's not in there. And I need to test out this ad and I've gotta get my conversion sorted.

All of that. Clunky has been like massaged out and you've got the whole thing running so that you are getting to the point where you're seeing that 32 orders a week and you're getting that order volume up. So through this next season in your business, prioritize, getting your online catalog, sorted, prioritize, getting your Google ads sorted so that the money can come in through this year, but also through Valentine's day and mother's day 2023 for those first six weeks, six to eight to 10 to 12 weeks, Google ads is incredibly frustrating.

It's going to feel like you're spending this money and you're not seeing a result because Google has to go through a learning phase, but keep iterating, keep tweaking. And once you then have it set up, once you get it to the point where you're seeing an average payment of 10% to Google for the total order volume, there you go.

You've really cracked the code. I will also tell you guys that we've just published inside of the flower boss, study vaults, a brand new training, a brand new step by step tutorial that walks you through every single step in order to get your online catalog sorted in order to get your website optimized for SEO and literally step by step. What to do in terms of getting your Google ads set app, it's all highly visual. It's all highly point and click.

So you can just follow along and really start to cut through and make that real difference in your business. So it's all pictures. It's all illustration. It's all look for this button here. Find this here, write this here. We've literally written example, ad copy. We talk you through how to find the guy on five . We talk you through exactly how to set up your online catalog, how to take pictures, the description to use the price points to follow the categories to have on your website.

We've created a brand new replica website so that you can see the whole thing in action. It's fucking awesome. it's so, so good. So that's inside of the study. Vaults, come join us. There is so much goodness that I've got scheduled inside of that program for the rest of 2022 and into 2023. And I'm so incredibly excited. So come join us inside of flower, boss bootcamp, get access to the Google AdWord step by step tutorial, get access to the exact strategy to follow to your online catalog sorted and get weekly live coaching.

You get to be part of this private community and it's so fucking amazing. It's so fun. We've got some really good goodies planned for the rest of 2022. Okay. My friends, I hope that that's been helpful. Do the math to set your revenue target, get your online catalog, sorted, get your Google ads sorted. If it's all too confusing and you need help. Come join us inside the flower boss bootcamp, because it's all laid out for you. Step by step, have the most amazing week. My friends eat your vegetables, drink your water, get some sleep. And we'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now