I remember Googling once kind of the history of floral design and really digging into kind of understanding how long floral design has been a thing and how long humans have been connected to flowers. And I remember reading some amazing kind of little tidbits of how the Egyptians started, kind of can be considered the pioneers of floral design.

I only vaguely remember these things from school, but the ceremony around people dying and kind of all of the PO and circumstance that the Egyptians brought to that experience and this idea that floristry has been part of human culture, like homo SAPN culture for like 5,000 years, 5,000 years. Like we're actually only in year 2022 .

So before year one, rewind the clock to the good old days of the Egyptians and really understanding that floristry as you know, a version, you know, our connection to floristry as designers and creatives and as human beings, the craft of floral design and bringing flowers into the human experience has been around for thousands of years.

And I remember when I was digging into this stuff and realizing like, oh, our industry has been that secretive for 5,000 years. Like many of you guys have heard me talk about the fact that like floral design is the last frontier on Google. literally like we've all spent so many hours trying to Google the answers and they don't exist.

But this idea of really understanding, huh? So this secrecy, it's not a new thing, right? It's not because social media has just, you know, reared its ugly head. It's not because of the rise of digital marketing. It's not because of technology. It's like for thousands of years, thousands of years Florists have been treating this experience a little bit like wizard of Oz.

We're going to keep much of the magic and much of the how to behind curtains and make it really hard. A for our, our customers B for our industry C for ourselves, all of the people let's just make it really hard for all of the people.

But that notion of, oh, this isn't something that's new, right? It's not because of the world of online marketing that now everybody's more secretive, right? Or it's not because people feel more threatened or they're more insecure or there's more new designers popping up. It's like, oh no, this is the way it's been for a really, really long time.

And the reason that I bring that up, the reason that I wanna talk about the Egyptians, even though I know nothing about them, I know the term hieroglyphs and I'm pretty sure when I was a kid, I had a book around Egyptian hieroglyphs. I'm pretty sure about that, but wouldn't wanna wager any money. However, this idea that I want you in your marketing to bust through the secrecy.

When I teach this concept and when I tell you guys this, your immediate reaction is gonna be no , I know that that's gonna be your immediate reaction, cuz that was my immediate reaction.

And that is like every floral designer that I talk to when I walk through this concept and I explain the strategy behind proactively educating, informing, and helping your customers and being really open with your expertise and your knowledge. And we talk through why it's actually a phenomenal marketing and sales strategy.

Once you start to put the pieces together and it starts to make sense, and we unpack the discomfort of being one of the few floors that will openly share their knowledge and expertise because you do feel like an outsider and it does bring up all of your fear of rejection and like fear of judgment stories, which are all completely normal for the humans.

But so much of all of that is wrapped up in this one concept, but this one concept will change your business and it will change your business for two very fundamental reasons.
One, it will make marketing so much easier. like if I could call this, like my number one marketing hack, this is my number one marketing hack, literally cut through the secrecy. And then B it is literally the fastest way to make more money in your business.

It does require a shift in perspective because our industry is so secretive. Florists love to keep their content and their information to themselves that when you are the brave and the bold florist who starts to step out of your comfort zone and you start to embrace the fact that, huh, it's really interesting.

When we start to do the opposite of what is traditionally done in this industry, you start to see results in your business and you realize, wow, you've been playing the wrong game all along. And that was exactly my thought process. When I started experimenting with this like five years ago, four years ago, starting to be really open on social media.

And as simple as it sounds, there were days when I was like, okay, I don't even know what to post on Instagram, but I'm gonna do the exact opposite to what I've been doing. Cuz clearly what I was doing. Wasn't working in my giant file of shit that doesn't work in your business but when it comes to some very functional things like, okay, I'm exhausted.

I have 900 weddings this weekend, the shop is busy. Somebody's called in sick. I know I need to post to Instagram, but I can't come up with anything creative. So what I started to do was I literally would either go through my sent emails if I was going back and forth with a bride or I would just think back to the last time I picked up the phone and the customer had a question and quite literally what I did was I would write the question down.
Then I would write the answer down and that became the caption. So this process and this strategy that I'm gonna teach you is built off the fact that I had to make this up. I went along and start to really believe in the fact that it could work, start to pay attention to how it shifted our own customer's behaviour. And then I started to see results in my business.
But once I started to understand the why behind how this approach actually works. Now, it's so much easier for me to say to you, literally, I want you to embrace the discomfort of cutting through the secrecy because it will help you make more money. It really is that simple. And when I say cut through the secrecy, I mean tell all of your customers, all of the things , but what is so fascinating, so fascinating is that some of you that are listening to this, I know will not follow this guidance and this recommendation.

And some of you will, and some of you won't follow this strategy for a couple of reasons. The two biggest objections I've heard to this approach are one. I don't want my competition to find out how I do things. And two I'm afraid that somebody's gonna come along and tell me that I'm doing it wrong, right? We all have that vague notion of the flower police, right? As if somebody's gonna come knocking on our door and be like, that's not how it's done, but I will tell you in my experience, human beings are very self-centred so this is what's so good.

You could post something on Instagram and say our three step approach to setting up for a big wedding day. And you just have, you know, your three steps, somebody else, some other florist might read your caption and go, oh wow, I must be missing something.

Our process is way more complicated than that. because human beings are very self-centred. It's how we're programs. It is magical. My friends, it is so incredibly magical. And this requires you to step up your self concept and to decide that you are a leader and a trailblazer in this industry.

Even if you're brand new, if you don't have a shop, if you have no qualifications, nobody's ever given you a piece of paper to say that you are a professional or if you've been in this industry for decades, and you're still walking around, waiting for somebody to call you out, waiting for somebody to tell you that you're doing it wrong.

You also need to embrace the fact that this is about blazing a new trail. And the general concept here is what is referred to as providing results ahead of time. Right? I like to think of it.

Like you're just gonna be helpful. Afaf you're going to actually talk about the things that your customer wants to know about. And the reason that it works is because when you're a customer in their self centeredness reads your content. If they find you on social media, if they jump on your website and they see that you are sharing tips and tricks, that help them two immediate thoughts run through their minds one oh wow.

These people really know what they're talking about. Then immediately that shifts them out of the know like trust experience. And they've gone so quickly from just finding out about you, to liking you, to trusting you. So you've built a relationship with this customer and you don't even know that they exist.

This is the most beautiful marketing concept in the world because so many of us, right, I spent so long thinking that the sales process started once we got the inquiry or once the phone rang, or once they walked into the shop, when really the process of sales starts from the minute that they find out about you and this idea of you proactively sharing helpful tips, tricks, and expertise moves the relationship from them.

Just knowing about you, to them, kind of liking you to them, trusting you, falling in love with you. And you don't even know that they exist yet. This is the beautiful thing about digital marketing. My friends is you could be having an app you could literally be having an app and people are on your website. Falling in love with you.

You could be sitting down and having dinner with your family and people are flipping through your Instagram feed, falling in love with you. And that only happens when you make the shift in perspective to decide that you're going to be helpful ahead of time. And you really embrace the discomfort that because our industry is so secretive because the vast majority of florist that you follow on Instagram, don't do it this way. You're gonna be skeptical. You're gonna be like, I don't know.

I mean, this famous florist over here has a hundred thousand followers and that's not what she posts my friends. I'm here to tell you it works and it works so good, so good. And it saves you so much time and energy. Cuz could you imagine, come with me if you will. If you created for yourself a caption library for Instagram that had somewhere between 12, if you're gonna be ambitious, maybe 15, really set your sites high, but 12 to 15 captions.

And each one of those captions was just simply one of your most commonly asked questions. So that means you might have a caption library that talks about things such as how much should I budget for my wedding flowers, wood flowers are in season in September. Do I have to have white flowers for a sympathy arrangement? Do I have to have white flowers for my wedding flowers?

Where can I get the most bang for my buck at my event? How much should I budget for table flowers? Hey, if I really wanted to have like Chiam flowers on my cake, what is the cost of that? What should I prioritize in terms of florals for my daughters christening? So these questions are very specific to your customer, but when it comes to social media, it comes to the FAQ section on your website.

Those two things can be exactly the same as functional as this sounds, having a caption in your last nine to 12 posts on Instagram that literally says, how early do I need to place my order for a delivery? Or where are you guys located? Or do you guys do deliveries on a Sunday? Do you guys do deliveries on the weekend? I know it sounds incredibly boring and unsexy and you might be thinking, well, I want my captions to be more interesting than that.

Throw some emojis into the mix and call it a day. because we could save our creativity for other areas of our business. Now, if you love writing, if you love crafting a good caption, feel free to go in there and make your answers like a Haku. Or you could do a Limerick if you really wanted to like challenge yourself, but your captions don't have to be the most creative things on the planet because you know what your customers are like. I'm so overwhelmed. I don't understand how this whole thing works.

I want pennies so you could, it's so fun to think about this. You could have a caption about when pennies are in season and you could post it once a week, every week for 52 weeks, I can guarantee you you're still gonna get customers who come to you and say, Hey, I want P E in my bouquet, but even better.

Now you can just point them to that caption and already give them the answer. like talk about efficiency, my friends, but it does require a different way of thinking. And I know for a fact, most Florists won't do this, but that's why it's gonna be so incredibly powerful for you because most Florists are afraid of being called out by the flower police or they're afraid of letting their competition in on their secrets or for most of us it's because it feels uncomfortable to step outside of the cave, to be the floral designer that openly talks about budgets to be the floral designer that gives tips and tricks about table styling, to be the floral designer that says colour is amazing at your wedding.

It is uncomfortable because it's not the norm within our industry, but that secrecy and that perpetual cycle of secrecy is what creates so much of our frustration.
Cuz we all walk around, wishing our customers knew better. And at the same time we're not sharing information with them. So how are they supposed to know? like, it's such a fun thing to actually think about, right? We are so quick to blame our customers to blame their ignorance, but quite literally like how are they supposed to know, how are they supposed to know that pennies are not in season 52 weeks of the year, if every blogger on the planet and every wedding planner and wedding magazine.

I don't even know what the hell's happening anymore, but like every image that a bride finds that's inspirational about a wedding has pennies in it. And nobody's talking about seasonal availability, like quite literally, how is she supposed to know the poor humans? Like our poor customers so we can come to their rescue and we can come to their rescue ahead of time.

And if we think about the clients and the customer's purchase process, right? And we go, okay, the, they need to move through three key phases before they even spend money with us. And this is true, no matter what you sell. And you also, as a consumer operate this way, no matter what you're buying. So everybody in the context of shopping for flowers has to go through the search process of finding a florist.

So your first job is to make sure that they find out about you. So that's step number one is they need to know about you. The minute that they find out about you, then you need to get them to the process of them actually liking you. And this isn't about being liked by everybody. The reason I love advocating for talking about budgets and pricing proactively is because it very quickly, very, very quickly eliminates the people who don't wanna spend the money for your services.

It's actually incredibly helpful. If we think about even like the car dealerships, it's so helpful to know that at the car dealership, the price is just listed on the window and in some cultures, yes, you can negotiate. And other cultures you don't, but it's like, oh, okay, well at least I have a vague idea that that car is $30,000. It's so helpful for you as a customer. Right? But instead what we do in our industry is like, oh no, no, no.

We're not gonna tell you instead. We're gonna give you an answer of it. Depends. And that's lucky if we actually give you the answer, because sometimes it's gonna take us like seven days to even get back to you. And we're gonna ask you 15,000 questions and then we're gonna be like, well it still depends. and I laugh. Cause I was like, that was totally how I used to do this.

Right? Like it depends is a really unhelpful answer when you're confused, overwhelm human. like you think about it. You think about your customers, right? They're in confusion and overwhelm and we're gonna meet them with a more confusing and overwhelming answer.

When an actual fact, even just starting somewhere is so helpful. Like if your customer is in confusion and overwhelm and you said to them, oh, that kind of our choice starts at $10,000. That is so helpful for them because then they might have been like, oh, I only wanted to spend a thousand dollars on my wedding flowers. So helpful. Like it is so efficient. It's so time saving. And they're like, oh my God, that's amazing.

If you want to still have them as a customer, you can still have them as a customer and just do their personals and do their bouquet in a button hole and delivery for a thousand bucks and call it a day.

But it creates such a better relationship when you are the one who steps out of the comfort zone and bus through the secrecy. And this is what really got me thinking about this idea is when I started to sit down and really think about who my ideal customer is. So from a daily flower delivery for me, my ideal customer is my dad. And from a wedding perspective, I created this persona of Ashley.

When I think about Ashley planning, her wedding, she has a full-time job and her and her partner to be are planning the big day. And they're not necessarily having a massive wedding, but they are spending a lot of money on the things that matter to them, food venue, photography, flowers. So while she is trying to work full time, she's trying to navigate her mother and her mother-in-law it's Monday night at 11:00 PM.

And she's going to try and figure out this whole flowering thing. Monday night at 11:00 PM. I want her to be able to find some helpful resources to help her feel like she can make a semi informed decision at 11 o'clock on a Monday night. I don't want her to be sitting there at 11 o'clock on a Monday night in total frustration and overwhelm, then sending an inquiry, then waiting seven days to hear back from me and then trying to set up a consultation and then actually waiting basically like a month before she's gonna get the information that she's after.

When in actual fact, what she's trying to figure out is how much should I budget for my wedding flowers? So when I started to think through that, and I wrote that blog post, that said, how much should I budget for my wedding flowers? that literal my friends.
I made some assumptions, kept it real simple realizing, huh? This is like so incredibly helpful. The thing that I started to immediately see that was very different was a, when customers came to us with questions about budgets, it became so simple to respond back to them and point them to that blog post B, you can repurpose that blog post, uh, like 10 times into different captions on Instagram.

Because you could be super repetitive on Instagram, that means that's like a half a year's content. right there from one blog, post copy paste, copy paste. But what I started to see over time was the budgets that our customers started coming to us. We're way more in alignment with what we're outlining on that blog post. So the idea being like we have to embrace the discomfort. First, we have to lead by example, and then your customers will fall into line.

When I come up with that concept of your customers are perfect. When we can stop blaming our customers and start feeling like we can take control of the narrative and take control of this relationship, then all of a sudden I realized, huh, I can see how generally speaking the marketing within this industry is really unhelpful for this industry. And it's really unhelpful for your customers.

So when you take the position of being the industry leader, when you take the position of being a trailblazer and you step into the discomfort of being open with your expertise and your knowledge, the game changes. And then over a while, I had that thought of, well, if I tell them all the information, then they're just gonna go do it themselves. right now. And the exact opposite happens. And I remember like this woman came into the shop and she wanted to do her daughter's Archway.

And once I explained to her, cause I was like, I'm gonna experiment with this customer. I wanted to tell her everything that she needs to know, including the timing, cuz that's kind of one of the important pieces of information, but the idea of going, huh? She had no idea that the timing needed to be so close to the ceremony time.

She thought she could do it in the morning and then she could have like a leisurely little lunch and then she could get her hair done and then go be at her daughter's wedding. And I was like, mm, no . So because of that, we then landed another Archway for a wedding. So it's really counterintuitive. And it, it really goes against our like default scarcity thinking. Cause we think, well, if I'm gonna be open with my knowledge, then they're just gonna take this information and run with it.

When an actual fact, it shows them the value of what floristry is all about at the end of the day, there's really only one shift to make and simply said, just do the exact opposite of how you see other floral designers showing up in our industry. it's as simple as that and embrace the discomfort. But in actual fact, I want you to rethink where you get to add value to your customer's experience. And I want you to think about adding value ahead of time. And I promise you like this doesn't need to be the most creative exercise that you've ever imagined.

You don't need to be the most original. You just need to be the most helpful. And a lot of times that's a lot of copy and paste, particularly when it comes to blog content and social media content. So when you're stuck on what to post on Instagram, all you have to do is come back to your last customer's question.

Answer that question in a post on Instagram, wham. Bam. Thank you. Ma'am so it might be things that are as obvious as do you do deliveries on a Sunday. What flowers are appropriate to send for a sympathy arrangement? What blue flowers actually exist? How do I care for my flowers to get them to last longer? Do I have to have white wedding flowers at my wedding? Where are you located? Can I come and collect from you? Do you do deliveries too? Insert suburb what's in season.

It really is that simple. You could do a summary of what is my wedding day actually look like, what time do you drop the flowers off? What are the additional fees associated with doing installations? Like the most bare bones? Basic questions is an awesome place to start. So if you're at a total loss and you're wondering what to do, just go back to the last questions that your customer asked.

You will also start to notice that over time you will see some recurring questions that many, many, many customers ask, and it might be the most basic, like absolute, basic questions ever. And we all think that we need to be the most sophisticated, fancy, intelligent marketing people on the planet. while our customers are like, when are P and E available? so fun. It's so fun.

How incredibly simple this can be. So my friends, I want you to bust through the secrecy and I want you to just watch the magic unfold and see how your customers show up differently because you show up differently. It can be so fun and it's an absolute game changer in your business. And it's okay if it feels uncomfortable because you are the exception to what is happening within this industry.

So go out there, bust through the secrecy, my friends give away all of your goodness and then your customers will shower you with love abundance and credit cards. And as always my friends, I hope that this has been helpful. Please report back on your own experiments. Let me know how you go and have the most amazing week drive safe. And we'll talk to you again next week. Bye for now.