Episode 061: Many times circumstances keep us from resetting at the turn of the calendar. In the Flower Shop, or Floral World, Valentine's Day keeps us distracted until now. Vonda and Lori chat about why, share an interesting study and give quick tips on how to RESET.
They also mention the new Sales Prep School that will launch on March 16, 2021!
It will join our Flower Prep School and Flower Clique in sponsoring our podcast.
Find us here: The Business and Pleasure of Flowers
Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist
Episode 061: Many times circumstances keep us from resetting at the turn of the calendar. In the Flower Shop, or Floral World, Valentine's Day keeps us distracted until now. Vonda and Lori chat about why, share an interesting study and give quick tips on how to RESET.
They also mention the new Sales Prep School that will launch on March 16, 2021!
It will join our Flower Prep School and Flower Clique in sponsoring our podcast.
Find us here: The Business and Pleasure of Flowers
Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:You. And I always joke about, we have too many tabs open at any given time, not only on our computer, but in our brains
Speaker 1:In army. Welcome to the business and pleasure of flowers. We're your hosts, Fonda, LA fever, and Lori Wilson. And we believe that business and Fen are a perfect combination. Kind of like us Vonda.[inaudible]
Speaker 2:Laurie, how's it going today? It's going better than it was last week. Yeah, I know. I know. We've had a week and kind of it's time to, I want to call this one reset after Valentine's day. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it, so Valentine's week was crazy because it's Valentine's week and then week after crazy year. Because whether mother nature, whatever you want to call, it went nuts. So I just was wondering if even the flower shops have had a minute to breathe between the last couple of weeks. It's been, it's been a little crazy. So I like, I like the word reset. I need to reset. Well, I think that with the weather, people got to stay home a day or two. Yes. So there was a little bit of time, although it can be frustrating, like at your house, you had a few problems because we had water problems. We had electricity, we had, and you know, we didn't even have it as bad as a lot of shops. Um, one of our flower click members cracked me up the other day, she posted an Instagram live and she had a microphone, like a karaoke machine. Okay. He was sitting on her couch and she was, it was Abby, Abby of Blake Morris, who is one of our favorite people. But she was like, if you think I am getting off of this couch today, you thinking wrong because I am home, my shop is closed. It is gross outside. I'm not getting up. And it was so cute. And I was like, Oh, I feel you. That's how I felt too few days prior. But Oh, she made me giggle because we get, well, she's like, I'm going to take advantage of it. Um, keeping the dramas on all day, I'm staying home with my little girl and having a ball. So love that. Yeah. It made me laugh and she she's in what Virginia area they had the industry close early on Valentine's weekend. But yeah, she said it was good because of the number one thing is you've got to keep your employees safe. You gotta keep your drivers. Yes
Speaker 3:You do. Yeah. That's the number one thing is the safety of everybody. We do. I do know that a lot of people did stay home. Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And a lot of people did close early, but I will tell you the ones that I've talked to, like, you know what, it's okay. It's the first time in 20 years that I've been home on Valentine's evening. Like it's crazy. So that was good.
Speaker 3:Not that it was welcome, but maybe somewhat
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, exactly. You know what? You can, again, glass half full glass, half empty. It depends on how you look at it. And I think most, most people, what choice do we have? We need to look at it as it's. Okay. You know, like you said, maybe it's time to reset. Maybe this gives us a minute flower shops. Don't typically get to do a reset in January. Like other companies do, or other types of businesses do. Right, right. They're going full force out of Christmas, straight into getting ready to for Valentine's day.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've made it a point that we're going to talk about. What's trending in the industry. And I think that was last week was Valentine's fatigue because of the weather and everything. Now it's reset. And I think it's reset the end of February. And when I say reset, I'm thinking even as a designer, I want to reset and not do just production arrangements. I want to go, Oh, here's some beautiful flowers. I want to make something really fun and beautiful. Take the time to do that. As an employee, who's in the front room in sales, I want to go and make some beautiful displays, taking all those parts and everything. That's kind of looking tired and reset my display. And the other one is kind of resetting your mindset.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. Resetting our mind, you know, I'm a huge advocate for the staff meeting. You know, how I love a good group meeting that I do think it would be beneficial to bring your staff in. Not only to say good job guys, we did it, you know, our day of the year, but to kind of reset with everyone and, and listen, as a business owner, listen to each one of them, what's a new goal you have, or what something new you'd like to learn, um, and really be mindful and write all of them down so that you can maybe check in with them.
Speaker 3:One thing that I learned from Dan Fischer from Fitz designs, after every holiday, we would go, what did we do? Right. And what could we have done better? Yeah. And what can we do moving ahead? And those are three questions I think are really good to ask after a Valentine's day, what did we do? Right. Don't over critique yourself, right? What are the really wins? We had this holiday and then just take a minute and say, okay, we could have done this a little bit better because we're going to learn from that next time. And then, you know, moving forward.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I used to do that when I was a youth group leader, we would be, you know, spend months planning a retreat for high school students. And the minute it was over another friend of mine who was there too, we would meet like the following Monday for coffee. And just both of us have spiral notebooks and just write down the good and the bad and the ugly is what we call it, you know? And then just so we could go back next year and look, Oh no, we tried that it didn't work. Trust us. And you just get better and better and better. And I think that's what good business owners do too. They do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they do. But it's nice to include your employees. You might have somebody new this year that wasn't there and hadn't experienced that. And to get their input, I think is so important.
Speaker 2:Right? So I was reading, you know, as I do a lot, and I was reading about the concept of you were talking about resetting your mind and it's resetting your brain. And one of the exercises they talked about was doing a mind dump. If you ever heard of a mind, I have heard of a mine. Okay. So it sounds a little strange, but I was reading through it and I'm like, gosh, that is true because you and I always joke about, we have too many tabs open at any given time, not only on our computer, but in our brains and our right way too many and so many, I'm not even sure why I had some open and I'm like, but do I close them or do I keep them open? This is how my minute, this is how I feel. What's on my head. And so I save them, but that doesn't help me because it just gets you more and more confused. So it's just a lot of noise. A lot of tabs open too many notifications, all of these things. So to reset your brain, the, what they say to do is set a timer for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever works for you, set a timer, get a blank piece of paper or a blank computer. Whatever is your go-to when you're typing out. Thanks for me. You know, me, it's my pen and paper. It's not necessarily a blank. Google doc, um, set the timer and start writing everything. That's in your head, put down on paper. You can do this in different ways. You can do bullet points, which I could see. That'd be something you might like a little more organized for me. I just write, I don't even worry about grammar. I don't worry about commas. And you just write and write and write everything that pops in your head. And then when your timer goes off, if you need more time, of course, you're in control of it. You can do it, but it's almost like you write until your sauce. That you've exhausted everything in your brain. You can't think of anything else. Then you go back and you start looking through it and you look at, okay, what here? Can I like check off really quick? What's going to just take like, if it's, Oh yeah. And I have to unload the dishwasher. Maybe if that's on my thing, I can do that. It takes me five minutes. Go do that, check it off and start prioritizing. Not necessarily like what's most important, but what takes less time? What are things you can easily delete from the slip?
Speaker 3:And sometimes it's not a list. Sometimes it's like something I want to do later. Right? So I was looking at two and I know that a lot of people do this and I've started to do it is I have a notebook with little tabs. And one of them is like this, our projects to do later, this is something I need to do now. And so, as my mind is dumping these things, then I put it in the right place. It's like, this is something I really want to do later for development. So it's in this spot. Something that we need to do in the next 24 to 48 hours. Right? That's in a different place. Like you said, I can do the dishwasher. I can send this email. And then it's out of your mind. And it clears your mind. Isn't that the whole idea? Yes.
Speaker 2:They really said you can even divide it up between actionable items and non actionable items. Meaning more of our feelings. Like I want to be more in tune with, I'm just making this up in tune with my husband's feelings. Not that I don't want to, but I'm just, that's, that's something I would put over here as, yeah. I'll deal with that later, but, and actionable something tangible. I can actually do, like go back to unload the dishwasher or create a proposal about a new product for flower click. I want to pitch to Vonda. That's an actionable Island, maybe something I'm not going to do today, but like you said, in a different tabs. So if you start with just actionable non-actionable and then you start going with what only takes two minutes, what's something that's time sensitive. Like, I don't know if you needed to fill out a schedule, your employee schedules, what's tied to a specific date. We're going to launch prep school date. We need to get, you know, all of our ducks in a row to start doing those kinds of. So I really liked it. It helped me kind of figure out how you can safely start closing those tabs.
Speaker 3:And this is the time to do it because our minds or our tabs have all been open during the month of January. Well, really, since Thanksgiving, it's been like one thing after another, after another, now we've gotten Valentine's day. Mother's day is a ways away. So we can start to close those tabs and kind of do a mind. What are you calling this? Resetting a mind-opening you're going to do your mind dump and then get ready for the next thing. I agree. So I'm going to go back a minute to what you just said about our launch of sales, prep school. If a specific date, we do have a specific date and that will be on March 16th.
Speaker 2:Ooh. Okay.
Speaker 3:Which is a great day. March 16th is going to be a great day to launch flour prep school today before St. Patrick's day. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. It was also a day. You were probably in a little bit of pain maybe.
Speaker 3:Yes. I was having a child missing on the 16th of March. A lot of great things happening on March 16. So we'll talk a little bit more about that in the weeks to come some of the action to happen.
Speaker 2:Yep. We've been filming all of it. We've finished. Gosh, we've been working this week too. With as long as I have power, we've been working on more tutorials for that. You know what though, going back to this brain dump that part of our brain has been in our brains for over a year, right? Yes. It's this. And it's going to free up a lot of space.
Speaker 3:That's a really good point, Lori, because it has been taking up a lot of our space. It really, yeah.
Speaker 2:That's as far as which way we were going to go, was it going to be more leader, you know, for owners or was it going to be for employee? What were the dynamics? We had a lot of different ways tabs in just that one topic
Speaker 3:We did and trying to narrow it to what we believe, especially from the feedback of all of our members and all the experience we've had in the past that this is really the right direction to go. So some tabs got closed. Other tabs got opened.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting too. And I think it took, you know, you Ellie and I are our whole team, but really you Ellie and I have such different brains, all great, but we think so differently. It's so interesting to see all of the fruit of all of the labor and everything we put in and it didn't start out what we thought a year ago and what it's become. I'm like, man, that is amazing.
Speaker 3:It really is. So all that transpired.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very I'm very excited. Um, I wanted to talk also, I think the word reset is really good, but I also want to challenge people when you reset and you start through everything recent doesn't mean that you have to always find a new and better way. Sometimes the good thing is you're going to look and evaluate, you know, like the youth group retreat. I talk about coming back that Monday, I'm going to go, ah, we, we did it right. I don't know that I'd change anything. It worked
Speaker 3:Exactly because you think about, and when I pulled this up, um, as far as reset, being a verb, it's like resetting a broken bone. It can't get any better. You just got to get it put back together.
Speaker 2:Right. And it takes time, right
Speaker 3:Time. And that's what we have to do is we have to reset and give ourselves time to get to an another level, whatever that level will be or back to where you were six months ago or whatever your goal is resetting and taking a mental inventory, you know, on your priorities and everything that you're doing in the shop.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I agree. You know, there was a study that I read about, you know, my, my daughter is in the health science field. So she reads a lot of medical journals and sometimes she sends me things that I think are interesting. So trust me, this has to do with mind mindset. And so there was a study in the new England journal of medicine. It was back in 2004 and there were nine hospitals in the state of Michigan that implemented a new procedure in their intensive care units, their ICU, and almost overnight, like usually when you implement something, you know, you give it a couple of minutes, almost overnight. The healthcare professionals that were monitoring this new system were absolutely stunned at the success of it. Yes. And here's did, have I told you about this? No, no. I pull it up here because I of course thought of flower shops and I was actually thinking of our prep school, our design prep school and our sales prep school, because we talk a lot about steps, like step one, step two, or tips, and you know, things that you want to remit, processes, processes, and procedures. You talk about with flowers when you get them and you have to process so many certain steps. So what they implemented was there was a checklist strategy that was implemented and it was named the Keystone ICU project. It was led by a physician named Peter Pronovost and it was later popularized and repeated by a lot of other people. So here's the bottom line on a sheet of paper. They plotted out steps to take in order to avoid infections when putting a line in a central line and selling a central line in a patient. Okay. Okay. They applied out steps to take in order to avoid infections when they are putting in a line, doctors are supposed to number one, wash hands with soap. Number two, claim the patient's skin with some type of antiseptic, number three, put sterile drapes over entire patient. Number four, wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves, and number five, put a sterile dressing over the catheter site. Once the line is in all they did, they had these lists printed out. And so every time the doctor or the nurse came in to do the procedure, they had to check off every like physically check, check, check as they did it. Right. This is, this is the only thing they implemented. Right. Sounds kind of like a no-brainer like, yeah, it does. Right. Doctors should already know to do that. They've been taught this for years. Here's the thing. It seemed silly to a lot of people too, a lot of the doctors, but they did it anyway. They asked the nurses in the ICU to observe the doctors for months, as they put lines into patients and record how often they completed each step. So half of them, they had the nurses record it. The other half they had the doctors have to do the step by step. So the five step checklist was a simple solution that Michigan hospitals used that saved an additional 1500 lives. Wow. So think about that for a sec. So think about that. Um, there were no technological innovations. There was no new machine that they pulled in. There was no a consultant that they hired to come in and, and monitor and try to simplify. They just incorporated a checklist reminder of what they already knew. They were gonna be doing interesting. Isn't that crazy? So the whole thing is we have a tendency to overvalue newness like, Oh, it's time to revamp this system. Let's use that. Sometimes you're not even doing the old system correctly because you're forgetting steps.
Speaker 3:Interesting. That what just popped into my mind literally popped into my mind is as a pilot, I would do that. I used to fly a small single crafted engine. And you would have a checklist that you truly had to go over before you would take off. And it was just like, that was five steps, but they find that any accident there's a problem. Cause they didn't do one of those things in a checklist. It's all about the checklist. It's like, you know, did you check this? Did you do your run-up? Did you do that? And it's so simple, but you're talking, both of them are[inaudible]
Speaker 2:LifeNet. Yeah. So they said, here's the problem with our world? Or, you know, a lot of things saying, well, everybody already knows that is very different than everybody already does that. So your pilot thing, every pilot I'm assuming in their training is taught these five steps. Right? You do, you know, you do them so they know them, right. But I guarantee you, the more you kind of start skipping and going, Oh, I don't need to do that anymore. And I can see doing that in processing flowers. I can see wanting to do that when it's the end of the day and the phone is ringing again and we're closing in two minutes and somebody wants to order flowers and maybe I'm not going to go through these steps. I can see easily doing that, even though we know it, not wanting to do it. So you're so bleeding, something as simple as step one. Did you ask if they've ordered before, you know, step two, all of the little things, just reminders.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Even that a checklist on processing flowers. I mean, as simple as that, because you take a shortcut and they're not going to last as long and the end consumer has not an exciting part.
Speaker 2:Yup. I like they ended this article and it, the bottom line was it was called using what you already have, like make use of what you already have. Then it says progress often hides behind boring solutions and underused insights. You don't need more information. Sometimes you don't need a better strategy. You just need to do more of what already works.
Speaker 3:Love that, especially for reset. Right. I
Speaker 2:Know. Isn't that crazy that when you brought up the word reset, I'm like, Oh my gosh, I was just reading that. And no matter what type of industry you're in medical or retail, or even teaching school, like whatever you are, this article makes sense. It's just remembering the steps that you were taught. Do them, every one of them are there for a reason.
Speaker 3:They certainly are. But I love to go back when I talk about reset, when we were discussing that, as you saying, just like a computer, everything works better when it's reset. Yup. Yup. I'll take,
Speaker 2:Plug it back and plug it back in. We humans have to unplug and plug ourselves back in for a while. And that's what I loved about having with our microphones sitting on the couch. I'm like the sister is unplugging today and she loves every right. And she is happy. And I was just so happy for her. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So go back to doing what you love and make a difference in people's lives with flowers and gratitude.
Speaker 2:Exactly. You got it. So speaking of what is inspiring you Ms. Monda this week, it's the sun today. It's been so rainy, which, you know, we all need rain. Yes. But the sun today was absolutely gorgeous. And I'm actually looking at a sunset, which is fabulous. And sunsets really do inspire me. Yeah, no, I know they do. You've sent many a picture and it makes me smile because it, they never get old. Right. They don't, they never get old. And what about you, Lori? Well, I honestly, what is inspiring me right now and you know this earlier, I've my husband said you got a package in the mail and I'm like Amazon and I'm thinking I didn't order anything. Anyway, my sweet friend from fourth grade who we're still friends sent me a little, just a little package of fun, cute little things. And just a little note. And she made me this little lavender, uh, one of those little beanie bags that you put on your eyes to kind of pull your eyes. Um, and um, my whole room smells like lavender right now. I don't know. It was just sweet. I just love my lobe, Denise. And that I'll never forget. I met her. She was walking in, she tracked, she came in to the Y MCA. I was in basketball practice. She walked in and they introduced her and said she was a sweet little girl from Norway. Her parents had been relocated. They lived over there and she moved over and we ended up being in the same sorority. We still talk every, I mean, it's just one of those people in my life. So that's beautiful to me. It's reminding me, it's the little things that we do for one another. It is truly, truly are heartfelt. So that's all I got today, VI.
Speaker 1:All right, we'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We hope you enjoyed spending time with us because we enjoy spending time with you. If you did make sure you hit that subscribe button or add the business and pleasure of flowers to your Google morning routine or your flash briefing on Alexa, you look forward to seeing you next week. So please come back and join us and discover how a bit of knowledge one small change in your mindset can take you to new levels in your life and business.[inaudible].