Tips for a Successful Valentine’s Day

You cannot over-prepare for Valentine’s Day, especially a Monday holiday. Once the first wave of deliveries starts to hit the local businesses, everyone who forgot it was Valentine’s Day are going to have an “Oops” moment. At that point, they won’t have a lot of options for gifting their honey. Florists are one of the only same day gift delivery services available. That means a large portion of your orders will come in Monday morning.

If you are not ready to handle the rush and have to stop taking orders, your customers WILL FIND SOMEONE ELSE TO BUY FROM! This may translate into a lost customer!

Here are some things you can do to be prepared:

• Have lots of mixed arrangements and Dozen Rose vases ready in the cooler to “tag and bag” and send out the door. Make at least as many as you sold last year.
• Price your product so you can make a fair profit, and don’t skimp on the labor costs. Despite all your careful planning, there will probably be lots of employees getting paid overtime to meet the demand.
• Pre-pack some Dozen, Half Dozen and Single Rose packages or boxes, all wrapped up with water tubes, bows, preservative and price tags for quick cash and carry sales
• Buy or make mixed bouquets for customers to grab and go- $10, $20, $30, or whatever price points work in your store.
• Have all or most of your Valentine and Love balloons pre-inflated and on display near the front counter and ready to add to an order. When a customer sees the Mylar balloons blown up, they sell themselves.
• Have all the bows you expect to need pre-made, with long tails to tie on bouquets and rose boxes, or on picks to put in vases
• Make sure you have plenty of staff on the phones and on the floor for walk ins. Consider adding a temporary extra phone line or temporary phone stations. Everyone should be ready to start by 8:00 at the latest.
• Every phone should have lists of your arrangements, bouquets, rose vases and boxes, with prices and descriptions, so your staff can SELL WHAT YOU HAVE ALREADY MADE instead of stopping to make everything to order.
• Make sure you have plenty of DRIVERS and vehicles, stocked with sandbags, boxes or foam wrapped bricks to hold arrangements in place. Save all your vase boxes- the divided boxes can hold 3 or 4 Vase arrangements or dozen rose vases.
• Make sure you have maps (or GPS), route sheets and Good Neighbor cards for every driver and vehicle. All vehicles should be gassed up and ready to roll Monday morning.
• Make sure by Sunday night that ALL ORDERS for Monday are made and wrapped, have the cards on them and are ready to load into the delivery vehicles.
• Set up your first round of deliveries and write or print a route sheet for the drivers. Your drivers should be able to walk in, load their vehicle and hit the road.
• Clear the decks- make sure all that junk that you won’t need for the holiday is out of the way to make sure there is room for everyone to work, and there is space to put the finished arrangements and plants for deliveries and pick ups.
• Set up temporary extra shelves and tables for designers and bouquet wrappers to work on, stocked with staplers, wrapping supplies, bows, cards, etc. Set up extra shelves in the cooler if you have room.
• Have a work plan and designate each worker’s responsibilities- bouquet wrappers, delivery coordinators, phone order takers, etc. Be ready to move people who are “caught up” to areas that need help. Consider letting a few of your key employees be in charge of each area so they can keep all the part time or temporary help busy and on track.
• Plan out the flow of your printed order slips and your finished product – where do new order slips go, where do done order slips go, where do the finished items for delivery and pick up go. Keep everything organized so you don’t waste time searching for orders, or worse yet lose or forget them.
• Try to predict your “bottleneck” areas and problems based on previous holidays, and find a way to fix them.
• Make sure everyone who might be helping customers knows how to use the phones, cash registers and Point-of-Sale terminals
• Don’t be afraid to say you are sold out of a particular flower or rose color (except red). Convince them to buy something else that you already have. Don’t buy too little, especially on basic flowers and supplies- remember there’s a whole week left after Valentine’s Day is over.
• Avoid having to make special or custom orders. Everyone (including the designers) should be taking phone orders, helping in-store customers, and helping get the orders packed and out the door. Sell what you have ready, and make sure to have some “special” arrangements made that you can sell as “custom”
• Consider not making deliveries to those “far away” places you might deliver to in July. Try limiting your delivery area to your main service areas. Drivers can do 4 or 5 “local” deliveries for every “far away” delivery

Do it better next year

There is always room for improvement, and there is no excuse for not tracking sales and recording some information to make next year goes even more smoothly. Write it down. There are too many important things to keep track of for you to remember it all a year from now.

• If you use your Point of Sale correctly it should keep track of how many of each major item you sold- Dozen rose arrangements, ½ dozen arrangements, mixed arrangements, balloons, bouquets, etc. If you don’t have a computer order system, write down what you made ahead and have tally sheets by the phones, design counters and sales counter to keep track of additional items you make.
• After the holiday, take inventory and make notes. Hopefully there won’t be very much to count, but figure out how many of each key item you actually sold, and that will give you a starting point for next year.
• Sit down with your key employees (or just yourself) a day or two after the holiday and make notes: What procedures worked well and what didn’t, what sold well, what didn’t sell and why? What were the production and delivery bottlenecks and problems and how could you do it better next year?
• Make notes of what sold out too soon, or what items people asked for and you didn’t have that you might consider having next year.
• Evaluate your staffing levels and decide if everyone was effective and useful. Figure out what tasks your part time or temporary helpers could have done with little or no supervision to alleviate the workload (and overtime expenses) for your key designers and other staff.
• Keep all your holiday records and notes for several years, organized by year and by holiday so you can easily reference them each year.

Many of these tips apply to every major holiday. Develop your own system that allows you to make continuous improvements and apply the lessons you learn to each holiday going forward.