Here's the thing. I don't know if I will ever be able to wrap my head around the fact that on the opposite side of the planet is the opposite season. So here we are like in winter and you guys in the Northern hemisphere are in summer and like you learn that in school and you're like, yeah, that's cool. But in practice, it's so weird. Like it just makes me realize this whole human experience living on planet earth. It's like, guys, this is so weird. Like it's so crazy to actually think about on the opposite side of the planet. It's the exact opposite season.

So if you are going through the experience of watching your dahlias grow right now on the other side of the planet, the dahlias aren't growing at all. And in many cases, in fact, they are just in storage like that concept for me, kind of blows my mind. And I know it's a little bit weird. It's like a little bit out there, but I do just have these moments of realizing that we are in winter. And if you're in the Northern hemisphere, you're in summer and that's just kind of bizarre

Anyway, thanks for coming to today's podcast. Welcome to the show. My friends, welcome to the weirdness that is this podcast episode. But if we cut to the chase, I wanted to today talk about two very helpful perspective shifts. If you grow your own flowers, these two perspective shifts are really helpful for all business owners and all creatives. But if you are a maker and a grower of your own ingredients, I want you to pay attention because there are two very common stories.

Two very common mindset blocks that I have seen in a huge number of farmer florists. And for those of you guys who are inside of our membership and inside of our program, you will be very familiar with this. And you will recognize this within the other growers who are inside of the membership. But I also know for those of you guys who are farmer florist and you are friends with other farmer florists I want you to call each other out on this.

If you grow your own ingredients, I want you to learn to call yourself out on these two perspectives. And I want you to give your other farmer florist friends permission to call themselves out on this and to call you out on this and hold each other accountable to it, because it is so easy.

If you grow your own ingredients to completely devalue the magic and the contribution that you make to the humans, it's almost like you can give yourself permission ahead of time to offer even more of a discount than those of us who offer or feel compelled to offer a discount because we feel bad and we don't wanna be seen as greedy. And we attach our self worth to the pricing. I think there is some very real blind spots when you are so compelled and so driven and so passionate about growing ingredients that you will almost like let yourself off the hook, right?

You'll find even more reasons why you shouldn't be charging a premium. So I wanted to put this podcast episode together so that you could share it with your friends, right? Send it to all of your farmer friends, send it to all of your wholesalers and send it to all of your farmer florist friends, even if they live on the other side of the world, so that every single one of you that grow your own ingredients can feel even more compelled and more motivated to make even more money. I have talked to so many farmer florists and there are two very common things that I can see you getting stuck on.

There are two of the very similar things that us as florists who go to wholesalers to pick out ingredients or work with local growers, very similar but slightly different. And I hope that these insights land with you, and I hope that you can watch your own brain and call your own brain out on it, wanting to talk you out of charging more.

And so even if you work with local wholesalers and local growers, even if you grow a little bit of your own product, even if you don't grow anything and you source it all from a big national wholesaler, this is going to be incredibly helpful. And these two ideas are related but different.

They actually have a tremendous ripple effect on other decisions in your business. So both of them come from this concept or this idea of when you know, how the sausage is made, which is kind of a weird saying, if you think about it, but like when you know what goes on behind the scenes in a business, if you have an understanding of how you can source the right seeds and how, and where you go to get the best tall tubers and what you need to do in terms of irrigation.

However you lay out your rows and what you're doing with your seed catalogs and the decisions that you make in your off season about what you are and are not going to plants in the ground. And as you go through business, as you run your business for a longer and longer period of time, you take every single one of those decisions for granted, right? It just becomes a given that for you, maybe you don't like bright pink and you don't like red.

So you made the decision five years ago that you are not going to grow those ingredients, or you already know that your love is for English, cottage, garden flowers, and every colour of Dalia under the sun and every colour of Snapdragon. And you are just going all in on every kind of Scabiosa seed that you can find, or maybe you grow like 78 different varieties of daffodils.

There are so many decisions that you have made ahead of time that you now completely take for granted. It's kind of like if I came up to you and said, Hey, the sky is blue and that was no news to you, right? It's like, you've already done all of your homework around what seeds you want to source this year. And you've accumulated so much information and so much expertise that you just walk around and go, well, yeah, obviously this guy is blue, right? It's just something that you feel like you've known forever, but there was a time in your business that you didn't know these things.

There was a time in your business when you didn't know that this is how you on your flower farm want to manage your Pennies or this is how you want to manage. And when you want to cut back on your roses, or this is how you, and this is exactly when you go about taking up your Dalia tubers, there was a time in your business when you didn't know any of those things, but now you just take all that information for granted, right?

It's just a given. It just is. And because of that, you then discount and discredit your expertise and your knowledge. And it all feels so simple and so easy. And we are all so in love with the magic and the emotion of flowers that we take it all for granted. And because we take it for granted, we don't do our job. We don't do our work in terms of educating our customer on how the heck this whole thing works.

So then your customer comes to you and thinks that they can dictate what the bouquet should look like, what the colour palette should look like and what ingredients are used. All because we have taken for granted all of the information of sourcing the product, nurturing the product, taking care of the product, feeding the product, weeding around the product, all of the things that you do, where you over deliver in terms of how much love you shower onto your plants.

So these two mindset blocks are the most common that I have seen in farmer florists and it's true around the world, right? So don't decide that it doesn't apply to you. If you're in New Zealand or Australia or Canada or the us, or in the UK, or wherever in this beautiful world you are tuning in from, it's very common.

If you grow your own ingredients and you want to sell them at a premium pay attention. And the first concept I wanna teach you is making a very intentional shift out of farmer pricing and into floral design pricing. And it's a very intentional shift, because your brain is going to wanna stay in a pricing model as a farmer. But when you step into the identity of being a floral designer, it's new and it requires a different perspective and this might be more prevalent if you are a grower.

And maybe you're one of the many growers who shifted away from fruit and veg and you have jumped into the world of growing flowers. But it's this idea that when you know what goes into growing flowers and you have your system sorted and you have a routine and you kind of have a rhythm in terms of, this is what your winter feels like. This is the chaos of spring.

This is the hot sweaty mess of summer. And then this is what has to happen in autumn. And then you take hopefully a little bit of a reprieve in the winter, right? When you are familiar with that cycle and you feel as though you've kind of got a rhythm sorted, you are more likely to believe your own lies when it comes to thinking and it comes to believing that you can't charge more for your work and this concept of taking for granted the energy and effort of every single decision that you make in your business.

You can see clearly now the steps that you need to take, right? You know what you need to do. You know, when you're going to have, you know, Springs that are filled with like crazy windstorms or crazy showers, or you go through massive dry spills, like all of the experience and expertise that you have every single day that you've navigated being a flower farmer, all of that stuff you take for granted.

But one of the exercises that I find incredibly helpful. And I think particularly if you're a farmer florist, I will encourage you to do this, grab a pen and a piece of paper. And I want you to write down, pick one flower, literally one flower. And I want you to write down every single step it takes for you to get to the point where you can even go harvest that flower, every single step, because that flower doesn't just magically grow outta the ground on its own.

And I want you to practice taking credit for every single step. And I want you to practice taking credit for the fact that flower is even at the point of being able to cut it. Like, I love this idea. If you're a farmer florist, I want you to walk through the field and every time you snip something, I want you to go, yep. I made that happen. I'm awesome because you are, and we don't spend enough time giving ourselves credit and learning the power of taking credit for all of these decisions.

But this idea of, if you can start to show your brain every single step it takes for that one plant, right? That one seedling to then turn into, I don't even know this is the beautiful thing. I don't even know how many you can cut off of one plant. And it probably varies by variety.

But if you picked like one plant, how many stems you can create when it's in a highly productive mode, this idea of what is every single step that you go through in order to make that happen. And one of the most common stories we like to tell ourselves about not being able to charge to the industry standard is we give ourselves permission to decide, well, I can't charge full price and I don't need to charge full price because this work brings me so much joy.

I truly believe it doesn't get any more magical than if you are a floral farmer, right? If you grow your own ingredients and you have those seasons where you can cut everything from your own crops, holy fucking shit. like, I think that is as close to, I mean, maybe the Buddhist concept of enlightenment, it might be that like pure magic to be able to walk your fields, create somebody's wedding, bouquet from everything that's grown in your own production.

That is truly magical where we can get ourselves in our own way though, is then that little sneaky story that says, but I feel bad for charging full price. I don't wanna be seen as greedy. I mean, this work brings me so much joy as if we need to make the trade off between creative fulfillment, love, joy, and satisfaction and money. But when you can start to call your own brain out on that concept and go, you don't have to make the trade off between joy and money.

And in fact, because it brings so much joy because it's from your own farm, it's actually worth more because I know for every single one of you that grows ingredients, you can tell me so much about where it's been sourced, how long you've had some of these plants in your own farm, the blood, sweat, and tears, the crazy weather conditions that it's been through.

Like there are so much story involved in these plants that you completely discredit because you're living this life. Right. And you do to a degree, take it for granted, right? Because that's what humans do. We all walk around in our environments and we're like, yeah, it is totally magical. And then you kind of get on with your life, right? And you're like, oh, well I need to make sure I do this.

I need to make sure that I get my snap dragon seeds in this. And I need to make sure that I have this succession plant and what am I gonna do with these things over here? And what are we gonna like the list of things for you to do when you grow your own product is epic. right. And you're just here to get on with it. And you gotta don't have the pleasure at times of like, well, I'll just wait until mother nature, you know, decides to play with my timeline.

It's like, nah, well, yeah, that doesn't happen. and here's, what's so interesting when you come from a totally different background. Right? I know so many of you it's like you either worked in like research or you're a teachers or you come from a corporate background or you had like a totally different training before you just either fell into or dove into the world of growing your own product.

I think if that's your story, you also are telling yourself, well, I shouldn't charge that much money because I do work now that I love. But if you think about it, right, if you really start to question yourself, why would you decide that you need to trade off love and money? Like where is the rule that says you can't have both, right. I was just even thinking about somebody like lady Gaga, where it's like the performance and how much she loves performing.

And she gets paid a lot of money to do it. Like you can have both, you don't have to trade off, but you do have to make the intentional decision. And you do have to sell yourself on the fact that your product is potentially even worth more than something I would create because I only get to choose from what the local grower is offering up and what the wholesalers have to offer.

Versus you have been able to make every single decision ahead of time. You've been so intentional with it that you have added even more value to the experience because you can tell your customer and you can tell your client exactly. What's gone in to every single one of these plants. So it's potentially worth even more. And this is one thing that I will always come back to and I have found it incredibly helpful.

There have been hundreds and actually thousands, tens of thousands of florist who have come before you. And all these florist from all shapes and sizes in all different cities and small towns and big cities and big states and big countries and newbie, florists and unqualified florist and florists who have decades of experience.

They have all put the industry standard approach to pricing to the test, which is awesome because it means that you and I don't even need to have any doubt or any judgment about the formula. It's literally like you've just been given answers to the exam. You don't even need to go in there and ask, huh? Why is that? Or this doesn't apply to me but we do that. That's what we do, right? We discredit ourselves. Because it's like, no, I can't possibly I cannot possibly charge that much. But the math is the math.

The pricing formula is the pricing quarter. Here is the answer to your exam question. Stop asking questions. Now let's get to work. and this idea of like you no longer need to spin in doubt and uncertainty, and you don't need to believe your lies of your brain when it says you cannot charge that much, but you do need to call yourself out on it. And you do need to decide that the industry standard approach works.

The price is the price. If you are a farmer florist, you have to intentionally make the decision that you're going to stop thinking like a farmer. And you're gonna start thinking like a florist. So you need to decide, do you want to be a wholesaler of flowers or do you want to be a floral designer? It's a very simple decision. And the ripple effect is awesome and it is uncomfortable.

And that's okay. Particularly for those of you guys who have been growers for a long time, and you have a very strong self concept of being a grower. The idea of stepping in to the unknown of becoming a florist is going to bring up all of the self doubt, but don't let that stop you. And one of the examples that I love to use when I'm teaching these concepts is there is a very like premium restaurant.

That's kind of in the heart of one of Sydney's suburbs in Australia. And it was created by a chef. Who's a very strong agricultural background, right? He grew up in a farming family and he then took the plunge and moved to the big city and learned how to cook and actually started a restaurant whose literal promise is enjoy the simplicity of great produce grown in our kitchen garden and driven by the changing seasons.

So essentially the backyard of this restaurant is where they get a good amount of produce. And then he does bring it in from different places and still buys it from other growers and local wholesalers and all that stuff. And if you look at his menu, so the restaurant is called, Chisik here in Sydney, Australia, you can Google it. You can look at the menu, you can get inspired. But if you look at his menu, one of the items on his menu is roast baby beetroot Macadamia and Pearl onions. And he is charging $28, $28 for a beautiful plate of roast, baby Beetroot Macadamia and Pearl onions. Now, of course, I'm sure I could go to the grocery store. I could pay maybe a quarter of the price, but Matt Moran knows exactly what he's selling. He knows where the value is because he's not just selling veggies from his farm.

He's not just selling veggies from his backyard. He is selling the experience. He is selling the connection. He's selling the Providence. He is selling the fanciness. He is selling the fact that his team has intentionally sat down and figured out, okay, what are the best Beetroot seedlings I can source? What's the best variety? How many should I plant? How do I nurture these? How often should I feed them? When do I pick them? How do I prepare them? And then how do I present them? And people are lining up out the door on a Sunday afternoon to pay him $28 a plate for this beautiful collection of curated vegetables.

Like it's such a helpful perspective. So if there is a successful restaurant in your state, in your country, that does a very similar thing, go in and check it out. Otherwise, Google Chiswik Sydney, Matt Moran, and go to his website and get inspired because you could look at these vegetables and be like, yeah, well, I mean, he just picked some things from his backyard and he went to the, you know, grocery store and slice these things up and presented them on the plate.

But no, he has literally sold himself onto the experience and he knows the value of what he's offering his customers. So this is shift. Number one is I want you to focus on selling the experience and I want you to focus on selling the emotion. And I want you to sit down and sell yourself on this specialness of your flowers. I want you to decide that you are the head chef in your flower restaurant, and you have custom curated the products that are in your farm. And they are handpicked. They are nurtured. They are the best of the best of the best. And they are professionally designed and it's all grown right here.

That my friends is absolute magic. The minute you can sell yourself on that offer selling to your customers become so much easier because the more you fall in love with your offer, the easier it is for you to sell anything to your customers.

So this really is one of the best mindset changes you can make in your business. The second thing, and you will have heard me talk about this before, but I want you to sit down and I want you to really map out and understand the value chain of what you're offering your customers.

This is really about understanding, about getting out of your own head and getting into the perspective, get into the shoes of your client and this idea, this concept of you, literally, the moment you get that seed catalog in the moment you sit down and you start deciding and planning, what is it that I'm going to plant every single decision that you make about when you're going to and how you're going to run your irrigation? What are you feeding your plants? How often are you feeding them? What kind of mulch are you using?

What kind of special systems, secrets and shortcuts have you created for yourself? Every single one of those decisions adds to the value chain. So if you think about the process of either looking through a seed catalog or going onto somebody's website or sourcing new products, or if you are creating, I don't even know how it all works, but if you are actually propagating your own Dalias, if you are running your own tests, if you are experimenting with new varieties of tulips, if you are growing something that isn't usually grown that way in your area.

Every single one of those decisions is actually adding to the value chain. But when you dismiss and you downplay every single one of those decisions, you are not adding to the value chain. We have to sit down and we have to do this work very intentionally, because it is so easy, right?

For those of us who don't necessarily grow a huge amount of product, I couldn't even make an arrangement. with stuff from my own little garden collection. It's so easy for us to dismiss either because of the joy or how much we take these things for granted with our own expertise. So easy to dismiss the process of sourcing our product, collecting the product, processing the product. But if you actually think right, if we go back to like the beginner experience of being a florist and how overwhelming it is, like the fact that you and I could stand there and we could tell you, this is a good rose and that's a bad rose.

You wanna pick your pennies at this point, you wanna leave them at this point, you know, all this information, you know, when you need to cut your Dalias, you know, when you need to get them out of the ground, but you've lost sight of the fact that you know, all that information, you've literally lost sight of the fact that you are an expert, right?

Because we're so wrapped up in like our insufficiency in, what's not working and I'm not good enough when an actual fact where we need to spend our time and energy is selling ourselves on the fact that we are experts. And we know these things, the fact that you already know that you're gonna sit down in the sea catalog and next year you wanna order in either more of those two lips or you wanna try growing this kind of daffodil or you wanna source that kind of or I don't even know what kind of magic and goodness you've got going on over there.

The fact that you know that already and that you get to build on your expertise year after year after year. And I often think about this as such a good example, because I do believe for those of you guys who are able to go into your farm and pull together a wedding bouquet I'm like that is as close to priceless as you could possibly imagine.

It's pure magic as a florist and such a magic moment in time for the client because they literally get like a bundle of love that has been so well looked after. So well considered so well taken care of perfectly presented for them on the day. And I love thinking about this idea of if you are doing a wedding in late summer, early autumn, and you know that you want to have cafe la dahlias as your focal. If you're doing orders earlier in the week, you are already going to have scouted out in your fields, which dahlias you're going to reserve for that wedding that is of value the not cutting down those dahlias. So you can cut them at the absolute point of perfection so that they can be the focal flower in her. Bouquet is the definition of expertise. It's such a better way to look at it.

And if you ever hear that little voice in your head ever start a sentence off with, oh, but it's just a, I want you to call your brain out on it because nothing in our industry is just right? You think about even something as simple as making a buttonhole, that is definitely not a right. Even the idea of pulling together five perfectly open sunflowers, wrapping them up, having a little card message, tying them up and gifting them to somebody mm-hmm to your customer.

That is not just a, and this, my friends is this idea of listen to your brain and watch your brain when it wants to try and convince you that it's just a, oh, but it's just a, it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is of tremendous value. The more you can believe, and the more you can sell yourself on how valuable your product is, the more you can sell yourself on the energy and effort.

It takes to make that one stem happen. The easier it is for you to make more money in your business because it all starts because it all starts with the value chain and that starts with you. So if you're skeptical in terms of being able to charge full price, if you can see that you're in the farmer mentality and you wanna be in the florist mentality, I wanna offer this up to you.

Is it possible that your flowers are more valuable than the ones available at the big wholesalers? Is it possible because you only have to start there and you just have to begin with the possibility and the possibility that maybe up until this very moment in time, maybe you had the formula backwards. What if, because you're a farmer florist, you are actually supposed to be able to charge more. Every time you walk that field and you talk to your flowers and you cares your flowers and you Marvel at the magic of all of the butterflies and the bees and the pollinators buzzing around doing their thing.

Because mother nature is fucking incredible. Every time you have cried, lying in that field from physical exhaustion, from the magic of the works that you do from the fact that none of your staff members understand how hard this is, that mother nature is a pain in the ass and that nothing is going as planned. What if all of that is actually adding to the magic and the value of what you offer your customers.

I wanna leave you with this one question. If you believed that your flowers were more valuable than anything else on offer in your area, who would you get to become? What kind of ripple effect would you get to have on the people in your community? If you showed up with the confidence and the true belief and the understanding that your product is the most valuable product in the area, all you have to do is believe in the possibility.

Start to believe in the possibility that your product is more valuable, that anything else anybody has to offer in your area, start there and just see what happens. Okay. My friends have the most amazing week as always. Please take care of yourself, get some sleep, drink your water, eat your vegetables and drive safe. And I'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now.