Here's the thing that has kind of just come to my attention. I have been in charge of my own business. I have been my own boss for 11 years now. I also carry around this idea. keep waiting until I'm gonna go back and get a real job. But in my brain, there are times where I also think that I'm only like 27 or 28. I don't know if you guys have ever experienced that, but like you just, your brain stops paying attention to how old you are at each of your birthdays.

I was like, oh, like, I wasn't that many years old after 28 that I started being my own boss, which is kind of crazy. if I think about it, because if I could rewind the clock to being a kid, no way, no way in heck would I have ever thought, yeah, you're gonna run your own business.

I'd be like, what crazy world are we living in? That, that is the situation. Did I get fired from every job on the planet? and this idea of really reflecting and thinking back about what do I wish I had known? What do I wish I had known on that day that I started and grabbed my ABN and went through the process. That's very simple in Australia, but the process of just starting my own business and really thinking about what does it take? Like, what is the formula that I would wanna teach you to help you fast track your results when it comes to being a business owner.

And very specifically, when it comes to being a successful flower business owner. And I was thinking back the other day to what I would have thought, like when I first started my flower business, what would I have thought about the formula for success?

And I think it was a very complicated, like definitely there would be co-signs and square roots and all of the fancy calculator functions in my formula. but it would've distilled down to thinking that three things mattered. One having lots of Instagram followers, right? Like being famous would have been really important, having a physical, pretty sexy shopfront and being a great floral designer. And I mean, literally you had to be the best, like capital T capital B.

I don't know. Who's giving out awards for the best floral designer, but you had to be the best. So you had to have all of the credentials, all of the qualifications, you had to know how to design really well with every single flower under the sun, you had to know the seasonality of every ingredient. And if you really wanted to be a good designer, you had to know the Latin names of everything and the origin country.

Like we get tested on in flower school and you had to know every mechanic and you had to be able to create every look available to us as designers. But I fast forward the clock now. And I realize like what a pile of garbage that is that thought process, that formula that I created for myself was very complex, very convoluted and sucked a huge amount of energy out of me.

And if I could go back to the beginning and tell baby Kathleen, this is what you need to know in order to make a lot of money. And in order to build a successful business, it comes down to three things. You need to get good at marketing. You need to learn how to manage your mindset. And then you will make money. That is your flower boss formula. You don't have to have the most sophisticated software solutions.

You don't need more Instagram followers. I'll let you in on a secret. You don't even need to be on TikTok. Whether you decide to go to flower school or not is 100% up to you. Whether you decide to have a cute proposal template, 100% up to you, but none of those things are required. None of those things are mandatory when it comes to being a successful, profitable flower business owner.

You also don't need to have been in business for a certain period of time for you to be able to earn your right to take up space in the world. And I have distilled down all of my mistakes and there's a lot, , there's so many, so many, but all of my mistakes and all of my not helpful assumptions about what it takes to run a successful and profitable flower business. And I am so excited to literally sit here right now and tell you guys that I have just hit launch on a brand new membership program.

And I know that there are so many of you that have wanted to work with me and get access to all of our templates and our shortcuts, and literally get my step by step guide to making money in your flower business and cut through the confusion and cut through the overwhelm. And I am so excited to tell you that as of this day, right now, when you are listening to this, you can enrol in the flower boss academy. And when you sign up for the flower boss academy, it is the most amazing corner of the internet.

The humans that you will meet inside of the private community are so incredibly awesome. These humans have been with me on this journey and I have so much love and appreciation for them. And just so admire the fact that they keep showing up. They keep putting in the work and they are all blowing their minds with what they are achieving in their business.

And for the first time in their lives, they know that they have the support that they need to get the results that they want. And I spent so long in my flower business, thinking that I was broken, that I must be doing it all wrong. I was telling myself I wasn't a good enough designer. And I was telling myself that I guess success isn't meant for me because I was following that very convoluted equation.

But this idea that you can build a successful flower business when you learn the skills you need, and you come back to a very simple formula, you learn how to get good at marketing. You learn how to manage your mindset and you will make money. And what I wanted to do in today's episode is share with you one of the new trainings that I have just hit publish on inside of the study vault inside of flower boss academy.

So this very quick training is the number one thing I wish I had known when I started my own business. If I could rewind the clock, if somebody could sit me down, if there was some sort of terms and conditions, some sort of popup on the website, when you start your flower business in Australia, this would've been super duper handy. And for those of you who are inside of the flower boss academy, this is one of the teachings inside of the new flower boss formula course. So many of you will have already seen it.

Some of you will be like, oh wow, okay, I'm gonna jump in and watch the rest of this curriculum because it is so awesome. And I will tell you for those of you guys who have wanted to work with me for those of you guys who have wanted to be part of the most amazing flower family and get access to all of the templates, tools, and coaching that you need to build and run a successful flower business.

Come join me inside a flower boss academy. When you enroll, you get access to the full study vault, which includes the flower boss formula. And I break down for you step by step, what you need to know, and I've made it super simple, super digestible so that you can just get right to work and really shortcut your success. So without further ado, my friends, I wanted to just let you come in behind the scenes in the flower boss formula and make it really easy for you to get results faster in your business.

So my friends enjoy this bonus training. One of the things that I wish was like a bigger deal. When you decide to start a business is I wish that there was some sort of like marching band like gay men, some sort of like Macy's day parade or, you know, giant extravaganza that said, Hey, news, flash, you are in charge, but nobody tells us that.

And I'm like, I really wish that there was a popup box that said, please agree to the following terms and conditions. Because the thing is, when you make the decision to start a business, you are actually signing up to be the CEO. You are signing up to be the creative director and you are signing up to be a leader. And nobody tells us that nobody tells us what it's actually like when you sign on the dotted line with your business registration, or you book in that URL, or you reserve that Instagram handle, or you come up with your business's name, like nobody tells us that small little itty bitty detail. I.

t's a very new and unfamiliar place for us to be in. Because if you think back to even just being a little kid, right? When we are young, we have adults, you know, some sort of parental supervision that is telling us what to do and whatever the rules are that they would like us to follow.

And then we go off to school and we're students and we have teachers and we have principals and we have all of these rules that we need to follow. And we're looking for permission and everybody else is grading us. And then we continue to go to school for a long time.

Then even if you go off to university, you go to college, this idea that we still have professors, and we still have people who are grading us and telling us what the rules are and how many classes do you need to take in order to graduate. And what is this diploma? And here are the expectations of what you need to do in order to take the next step. And even if you didn't go to college or you didn't go to university and you started out and you got your first job, there are lots of rules to follow.

You have a manager, you have a boss. We are not used to being the authority in our own life. And we are not used to being the authority in our own business. So that is the biggest lesson for you to take in terms of how to show up in your business is this idea of when you run the business, when you own the business, you are putting yourself in the driver's seat, you get to decide where you're going, how fast, what the end result is and what this whole thing looks like. No doubt.

We have so much fear and uncertainty and self doubt that comes up because we're not used to being in the driver's seat. And I know for me, I actually kind of abdicated responsibility and pushed it onto my customers. And that's super common in the floral design industry, right? Like we look to our customers to tell us what to create.

We look to our customers to tell us what flowers to put into a design. We look to our customers to tell us how much money they wanna spend. And that's a totally normal behaviour to have because we, as the human being, aren't used to being in charge. And in actual fact, most of us didn't necessarily sign up to be a leader or really thinking about like, when I grow up, I wanna be a CEO. No, I was like, when I grow up, I wanna be a ballet dancer. like, that's literally not at all like a CEO.

So many of us are like that. Right? And we've fallen in love with flowers and we've kind of stumbled into this. And it's like, what, what? So here's the thing, giant, giant, giant announcement for you. Like one of those airplanes with the banners that's floating at the back, this is your business.

You are the CEO and you are in charge. And from that place, I really want to encourage you. And I want to give you permission to explore what you want success to look like. I hit burnout so fast because I was setting my business up in a way that was completely out of alignment without what I wanted.

Because I didn't realize that this is my business and I get to set the rules and I get to be in charge of what's going on here. So we had a flower shop. I thought our team had to have like a certain number of people on it. I thought I had to say yes to every opportunity that came my way. I thought I needed to be able to do big weddings and small weddings and put on workshops and have a great relationship with the funeral directors and make sure that our shop was super busy and do this and do that.

I literally thought like that's what I was supposed to do as a business owner, without even realizing when you own the business. Part of the process is you sitting down and deciding, this is what I want success to look like. And even as human beings, we never are told that we get to decide what we want.

So through this first module, through this whole process of really learning, to build a CEO mindset, I want you to explore what you want success to look like. And in the workbook that goes with these videos, you will see that question of, if you could wave a magic wand, if you could hit complete reset on your business, regardless of whether you're a brand new designer you've been in business for decades, if you could just wipe the slate clean, I want you to really explore the idea of what success looks like for you and what success feels like for you.

And one of the things to remember is it doesn't matter what you've done in the last 12 months. It doesn't even matter what you've done in the last 12 days. This truly is embracing the authority of being in charge of your business and it can feel uncomfortable and that's okay. Right. We are gonna be confronted with self doubt, uncertainty and overwhelmed so often, right? And that is the real work.

When it comes to building a successful business is navigating the human factor of the human experience, but also knowing really embracing the fact that you get to decide. And so many of us have so many stories that we're telling ourselves about what our business is supposed to look like. We like to sit down and define success by other people's terms. And it's so common, right? It's so common to be like, well, I need to take on as many weddings as possible and I need to make as much money as possible.

And I need to cater to as many clients as possible. And I just need to say yes to everything that's happening. And that's okay if that's how you want to define success in your business. But if you've never asked yourself what success looks like, this exercise is so powerful and it's okay if it feels uncomfortable, right? But I really want you to explore the idea of, if you could wave a magic wand, what would your dream business look like? Again? I want you to forget everything that you've done up until this moment in time.

I just want you to give yourself permission to be really, really selfish. It could be that you don't want anything to do with weddings. It could be that you only want to do weddings. It could be that you wanna launch that flower school. It could be that you want us grow way more of your own ingredients.

It could be that you open a flower shop. It could be that you close your flower shop. Really give yourself permission to ignore all of this supposed tos. All of the, this is what I've always done and just really embrace the power of being selfish. And I firmly believe that the dream that you have was given to you for a reason, you were the perfect person to make that happen. T.

he humans need flowers now more than ever. So really understanding that like cut through all of that overwhelm, cut through all of that, supposed to cut through all of the conditioning that our industry and our cultures really push on us and really start to decide, okay, if I am the CEO of this business, what do I wanna create with this business? Have fun with it, explore it, give yourself permission to dream up as crazy and awesome as you want it to be. And then we will work through the next steps in terms of turning that into a reality.