Proven Tips to Prep for the Holidays with Ralph Giordano AIFD

Episode 154: Each year the month of December brings the challenge  of how to best organize your product, staff and time to be able to meet the demands for Christmas centerpieces and florals right before the holiday.

Ralph Giordano AIFD and owner of Giordano's Floral Creations in Fort Pierce, FL is a 4th generation florist and well respected in the floral industry. Today he shares his secrets to prepping for the month of December.

Vonda mention The Real-Life Retail Florist.

For a sneak peak, watch the orientation: Real Life Retail Florist

Questions? Email lori@flowerclique.com

Sponsored by Flower Clique

Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

There's a laundry list of things that you should do for every holiday. It just changes the exact little tweaks that are appropriate for that individual holiday.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Welcome to the Business and Pleasure of Flowers. We're your hosts, Vonda LaFever and Lori Wilson.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

And we believe that business and fun are a perfect combination. Kind of like us, Vonda.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

So, Lori, what have you been up to?

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Living the dream, Vonda. Just living. That's good. Had a low-key weekend. It was nice. Um, a lot of football because you know, it's how my family rolls.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Uh, what about you? Yeah, I actually did a little shopping this weekend, believe it or not. Because I'm usually the last Christmas shopping and football. We had a lot of football in this house.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

We had a lot, the football's always on, even if it's a team that I don't even know. I it's still on because, you know, it's the season. But I need to do shopping. I'm very behind in my shopping.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

You know what? We have a special guest, Ralph Giordano, who is from Giordano's Floral Creations in Fort Pierce, Florida. And we've had Ralph on before, but we really haven't been one-on-one with you, Ralph. So we're excited to have you with.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

That's awesome. Excited to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Yeah. The last time we had you on, um, we had another member on with you, Steve. And you guys were talking about sympathy stuff. And Vonda and I were talking last week about members to have on that we can just talk through, you know, processes. What are you doing right now? Just like, you know, getting ready for the holidays. We're like, you know what? We need Ralph because you are such an intricate part of not only Flower Click as a whole, but our members' Facebook page, the private page. Like you are everyone's go-to on there when other members have questions. Like they reach out to you before they reach out to me or Vonda or Cammy or anybody else.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Funny story, I've had several members call me and say, I don't know my numbers like Ralph. I'm embarrassed. I don't know my members like Ralph. So they compare themselves to you. They want to be you, Ralph. We all want to be Ralph. Let's be honest.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Well, you know, I'm I'm always willing to share, you know, my my passion is to see other florists succeed. So um, any little thing that I can always do to help that, you know, happen is uh is easy for me.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Well, it's obvious because you're very active in the floral industry. You're very passionate and always have been. You were inducted into AIFD in 2018, and now you're already on the Southern Board. It's like, wow, right? And then you're active in the teleflora education programs as well as Florida State Florist Association. So that just speaks volumes about how much you want to help others succeed, Ralph. Is you know, you're out there, you're helping in so many different ways. So thank you for all you're doing for the industry. That's wonderful. We really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 3:10

And thank you for everything you guys do.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

Uh oh, well, did you um grow up in the floral industry, or did you just decide, hey, that'd be fun. Let's own a flower shop.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Um, yeah, it definitely wasn't that. Yeah, so technically I'm a fourth generation designer. My family has been in the industry for a little over a hundred years. Um started way back when, when, you know, pushing fruit and flowers down the streets of Manhattan, and it just progressed into brick and mortar shops, um, and it just flowed from there. So fourth generation. I am technically the last Giordano in the flower industry in my family. We have since shut our flower shop down in New York, but the other side of my family owns funeral home as well. That was kind of like the the dual thing 100 years was flowers and funerals. Um, we still have a funeral home. My cousins still own the funeral home and still operate that in the same location it's been for over 50 years.

SPEAKER_02 4:10

Wow. That's why you love doing sympathy work.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Yep. I grew up in flowers, I grew up, and this is sounds weird, but I grew up playing hide and go seek in caskets. Um, because it was just second nature to us growing up.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

That's great. I love that. I grew up with a a girl, Cindy Ryan, and her dad owned the funeral home. It was the same thing. She's like, oh yeah, we used to lay in them all the time. We used to play in the funeral home. We were all just like, ooh, you know, as a kid. But yeah, now I'm like, hey, yeah, why not? Right. Sure.

SPEAKER_02 4:43

So you were raised in New York, is that right? And then you moved to Florida to start a flower shop.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Is that how um not exactly uh you know, I come from a divorced family. So, you know, when mom and dad divorced, mom moved to Florida, and I was about five years old when that happened. So technically I've been living in Florida on and off since I'm five, and I will be 50 this undercoming year. So about 45 years I've spent in Florida, but I have bounced back and forth a few years here, a couple of months there, and so on over the years in New York. Um, you know, every summer, every major holiday, and then a few years of living there in between, you know, growing up.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Wow, I never knew all that, Ralph. That's really amazing.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Kind of the best of both worlds, you know, two really kind of great places to to have to have to go back and forth to, at least.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

Yep, yeah. You get the culture of New York, and then you get the you know, the sun and the weather of the world.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Yeah, exactly. Exactly, for sure. So you purchase an existing flower shop, correct?

SPEAKER_00 5:51

I I did. It was uh '98 that I so I'll step back a tiny bit. I was working for a flower shop uh as an assistant manager for about five years, and um, they were considering putting the business up for sale. And me and the um husband were considering buying the wife out and me and him running the business together. Okay. So we went through a whole bunch of steps and led all the way up to almost sitting down with lawyers and making arrangements. And then the um the wife backed out of the sale. So the it was they were going through a divorce, so it was kind of um so since the wife backed out of the sale and uh didn't want to give up, you know, any power to the husband, the ex-husband at that moment, he knew of a small flower shop that was one person ran um doing only $150,000 a year in sales, so very, very small. Very small and he's like, Ralph, you do that here in a month. You can easily run that shop on your own. So after a little bit of debating, I decided that sure, I mean, take the leap. You know, I grew up as a as a brick and mortar entrepreneur, and I guess it was just in my blood, so that's where I ended up taking over the shop.

SPEAKER_02 7:15

How old were you when you did that?

SPEAKER_00 7:17

I was 21, 22, something like that.

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Wow. That's incredible. You were young enough to not know how scary it truly would be to be.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Exactly. Young enough to know how scary it was. At the time, my family still owned the flower shop in New York, so I did have them as a resource to help guide me. The um existing owner that I bought the business from um stayed on for three to five years afterwards, part-time, to walk, you know, to go get me through her her systems. But basically, the soon as I walked in, I changed everything. You know, added additional phone lines, got a point of sale system. I mean, she was so behind the times. She was done. You know, she had been in the industry for 30, 40 years herself, and she was done. Um, and I just uh I took it from that point.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Did you change the name immediately? Or did you wait a while?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yeah, I waited a few years. So, you know, the first year we answered the phone, it was called Flowers by Ann Smith. So the first year we answered the phone Flowers by Ann Smith. Then from that point forward, for about a year or two, we just answered the phone Flower Shop. And then we converted that once I did the legal name change to Jordanos, then we started answering the phone Jordanos. I wanted to give the customers a chance to get to know me, as opposed to just walking in and then losing the existing customer base that she had.

SPEAKER_01 8:47

So smart. That is so smart because a lot of people, when they buy something, they're like, oh, it's mine. I'm gonna change the name. Let's do it now, let's do a rebrand. And you lose a lot of those existing customers. So that was really smart for you to win them over first before you made any of those changes.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah, exactly. That was that was my thought. And it seemed to work 25 years later, I'm still here.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Exactly. And you're very successful, and you and I speak the same language, which is profitable. Like you profit-minded people.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:24

If you've been listening to Lori and I for the last three years or part of that, then you know we don't usually just jump on to endorse something. But this was the perfect time for me to interrupt Ralph's interview and let you know about something brand new that we've just launched. And it's called the Real Life Retail Florist course. It's really about having the tools to succeed in the retail florist business. I mean, it could be that you're just getting started and you want to have a successful business, or maybe you just have so many questions on how you can get yourself to the next level. The course will help you make decisions based on real numbers, not just that gut feeling. And it'll allow you to let go of that overwhelming feeling as the knowledge kicks in and you can regain control of your business. So visit realliferetailflores.com or click the link in the show notes. It'll be there. And uh, right now, I think let's get back to what Ralph is sharing on how to be successful in the flower shop for the holiday ahead. That's why he's working, right, Ralph? That's why you're working so hard, not just because you love it, but you need to make money.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

Yeah. Did you see success early on? Like, you know, you were saying you came in and you started making a few changes here and there, and then you slowly did you immediately start seeing everything click?

SPEAKER_00 10:57

Um, yeah. Again, she had, you know, she she was so dumb with the industry that she let a lot of things kind of slip. She didn't really go after stuff. She didn't have any marketing, she had no point of sale, she had only one telephone line, she had an old-fashioned credit card machine. So, you know, just by instituting the things, this the shop that I was co-managing was a multi-million dollar a year business. So I came from an atmosphere of hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle to a very slow atmosphere here. So it was easy for me to say, well, let's get four phone lines, let's get a point of sale system. And just by doing, just by working the business, I basically doubled sales for the first three years that I was there because the business was there. She just didn't go after it.

SPEAKER_02 11:47

Right. Wow. But you learned that because you worked, had worked in a fast-paced, higher um volume flower shop, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Yeah, I think a lot um, I don't want to say a lot, but many people that go into this industry, they do it because they love flowers and because they think it might be fun or because they're required and they have not done that um work under somebody, under the leadership of a flower shop owner, and they they don't know what they don't know.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Right, exactly. And that's why we educate them, correct?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

That's why we Right, right. I mean, that's one of the first things I say to people if they talk to me, it's like, have you ever worked in a flower shop? No, but I and and maybe they are really good at designing flowers. Some people are truly just born with that natural talent, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:42

God given talent, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

God given talent. And we all know it. I I have not, God didn't give me that talent. It's not yours. Hey, it is not mine, I don't want it. Don't give me that pressure. But and but they're they don't know how to run the business side, right? And and so I always tell them, go go work for a flower shop in a town somewhere where you're not wanting to open because you don't want to be a competitor and say, Can I work here for a year? And they're like, A whole year? I'm like, I think so. You need to get through a full calendar season. You might get to February and go, holy smokes, this is not fun.

SPEAKER_00 13:23

So as a as a business owner, we put on two different hats, basically. So there's that making sure the arrangements look nice for the for the customer, making sure they look pretty, but adding that one stem here and that one stem there nips away at your profit. So there's a definitely a happy medium between making it look pretty and losing money on every arrangement that goes out the door. So you definitely have to make sure that things are priced right, make sure that you incorporate that little bit of um cushion into those designs, but still not nipping away at your profit because at the end, we we need to be profitable. You know, I say it all the time. Would you rather be a successful broke artist or a successful profitable artist?

SPEAKER_03 14:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:09

You know, we need the money. We we got bills to pay, um, and we want we have staff that we have to keep employed. So making that profit is extremely important.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

It's the balance, right? It's the balance because you have to give the customer their value, but you also have to be fair to yourself. So yeah, well said.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

So, Ralph, talking about uh going through a whole calendar year in a flower shop, we are almost at Christmas, right? And so we thought it would be fun to bring you on and just ask you flat out, what are you working on right now leading up to the holidays? Like what is a I don't want to say a day in the life, more of a month in the life of December for a shop owner.

SPEAKER_00 14:57

You know, if you're a big shop like I am, um you you definitely go from one holiday right into the other. Matter of fact, you actually even start Christmas while you're still working on fall and Thanksgiving. Um so for us right now, we you know, we just got all the fall put away. We just got all of our Christmas out. We've you know finished decorating the store, things like that. So from a fresh side, you know, we've received all of our Christmas greens. Um I personally buy Christmas greens in bales. I found that I get better quality and more product by buying the bale versus buying it in a box or even tipped already cut. So, what we'll do now is we take the time to cut up a good portion of those bales to manageable sizes and rebox them ready to go for the designers to utilize. And we'll start doing our pre-greening now, and we rebox those and store them in the cooler, label and date them so we know when we made them and what size we pre-green them to. So when the time comes for the week or two weeks before Christmas when you're super, super busy and you don't have the time to actually green something from start to finish, you just walk into the cooler, grab the appropriate size container, add a few more greens to it, and start your design. So it's a it's a big time-saving factor then to put the time and work in now.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

So, question how do you figure out, can you share with our clickers, how do you figure out how many of those really to start to pre-green or know what you're doing, you know, from year to year?

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah, absolutely. It's all about the point of sale system. So is if you have a good point of sale system and like I break up my categories in my point of sale system. I do not utilize the individual line of item, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. My item, blah, blah, blah, gets converted to a Christmas centerpiece with candles or without candles at a certain price point. So at the end of the holiday, next year, whenever I can run a report and it can tell me exactly how many $50 centerpieces, $60 centerpieces, $70 centerpieces, and so on. How many of them were coated with candles or without candles? How many cubes at every price point, every Christmas vase at every price point, every rose sale at every, you know, a mixture, half a dozen, dozen, $18, $2 dozen, so on. So utilizing those reports is what you sit back and you go, okay, what are we doing right now? Are we up? Are we doing more business? Are we down? And maybe we back down a tiny bit. But you find that medium of what you've done in years past, and you set a goal to get that number of things pre-greened. As long as you have the cooler space, you get that number of things pre-greened ahead of time. So that way you're not dedicating that valuable design time to that greening aspect. A lot of new shop owners out there, or a lot of people new in the industry, don't realize that Christmas greens last months in the proper storage. So whether you leave them in the box or leave them in the bale and leave them in the cooler and grab out a stem every time you go to make something, or you take it now and pre-green and store them correctly, it's it's the same thing, if not better, for them to be in that water, in the box, you know, hydrating and staying nice and cold to ready to go when you need it.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

So you've said a couple times store them correctly. So you're saying to store them correctly, what am I doing? I'm am I using floral foam to create my centerpiece, correct?

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Yes. So what we do is we, you know, use fluoro foam. It is wet, so it stays wet the entire time. Um, we do not add water to the container when we store it just to eliminate that excess water that may be in there. What I personally do is here in Florida, we get a lot of our greens in wax boxes. So what I do is I have a note on my calendar in September to start saving those wax boxes. Oh, smart. So I save them, I store them off to the side. So we basically we get about three dozen wax boxes saved from September.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

I'm gonna interrupt you for the for the uh, I don't want to use the word stupid like myself, but the people not what's a wax box?

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Sure. So a lot of greenery that comes from California, for example, will come in a regular cardboard box with a bag inside of it that supposedly traps in the moisture and keeps the the foliage fresher. A lot of boxes here in Florida because of the heat are wax boxes. So the it's not just a plain cardboard, it's a waxy type of film that keeps the moisture locked in better. Think of it almost like an inexpensive cheap styrofoam cooler.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

Because the wax helps to insulate, insulate a little bit and keep the temperature a little bit cooler and keep the moisture in better. Um, and we plastic line that as well. So what we do is we'll line up, depending on the size of the arrangement. Usually the mid-size is six. We'll do three at the bottom of the box and then three at the second layer, mist it with crown, cover it in the plastic, slide it in the cooler, and date it. Now, the other thing that we do to help with the storing aspect is we do not green the top layer of the foam. Everything is on the sides. That leaves the entire top open for any type of additional item you may need. Pillar candles, tapered candles, hurricane globe, anything really. Um so we green it to about 75-80%, right? Leaving it very airy around the sides, so that leaves room for your non-floral items like your pine cones, your glass balls, your ribbons, things like that. Um but it but that little bit of of prep that we do saves a dramatic amount of time during that busy two weeks before.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Oh, absolutely. So you're saying 36 boxes, six in a box. So you're doing about over 200, 215 arrangements that you're pre-graining and have in the cooler ready to pull out and make your center pieces.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

Correct. Yeah. And those are primarily just the centerpieces. We start with those first because we box those, and then we'll move on like the two weeks before cubes and some vases and so on, like traditional holiday prep. Um, but the center pieces, since it's pretty much all Christmas greens, that's what we do. We start that now. We've already started.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

So, Ralph, does that allow you to keep your labor charge like even? You keep your normal, everyday designers and not have any overtime because now. Now you're prepping for this and keeping it even and getting all that done. And then when it comes closer to the holiday, the time to complete that is so much faster.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

Absolutely. Um, you know, a lot of us experience a low after a major holiday. So typically after Thanksgiving, it's a little bit slower. People have Christmas, you know, shopping on their mind, so they're not really buying flowers too often. So we we take advantage, we exploit that time frame. I already have staff here, they're already being paid from X amount of time till X amount of time. When we're slow, we jump on the Christmas greening and get it out of the way during normal operations of the day.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Love that. Do you have any other tips that you could share with um the clickers that really help you save time at the holiday? I mean, these are huge. I mean, just the prep time that you're saying here. But I didn't know if there was any like really secret that you wanted to share.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Well, it goes across the board for everything. So, you know, if you're gonna get glass, if you're gonna get ornaments in and you're gonna use them for an arrangement, we put a wood stick in them. So we start that immediately. We've got boxes and boxes and boxes of ornaments that we bought from Amazon, Sam's, Hobby Lobby, wherever. And we start putting wood sticks on all of them and reboxing them ready to go. Um, just across the board, make sure you have all your pine cones in, make sure any anything that you're gonna be utilizing that's non-refrigerated, non-fresh, that's hard good, bring it in around Thanksgiving or you know, just before or just after, depending on your space, and start getting that stuff organized and cut and taped and picked and so on. Because when it comes time for that two weeks before, that week before, when you're busy, busy, busy, who's got time to twist up ornaments instead of put them on the stick? Who's got time to pick all these things? You do it now when you've got the time doing your normal business.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Yeah. I think we actually used to do some even in the fall when we'd have high school kids in and like, here, why are these pine cones? And they're like, roll their eyes and go, what? Exactly. Yeah, whenever you can get something done like that, yeah, ahead of time. So that's great tips.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

It's the busy work, it's the simple stuff. Put that, you know, Ad Water Daily tag on your cardets, put them in a vase, put them in the corner. You know, anything that you could, if you if you do bows or plunkers, you know, that we call them in the industry, get them ready to go, get them prepped, put them on a sheet of styrofoam, stick them in a garbage bag so they don't get dirty, stick them off in the corner, and forget about it. They're there when you need it.

SPEAKER_02 24:38

Love that. Do you have a list, um, like a written out list typed up somewhere in your design room with all of these things that could actually be done year-round for staff members? Because I'm sitting here listening from a standpoint of you don't have a big turnover rate as far as attrition when it comes to your staff. And just from talking to you, it sounds like your staff is always on board and they're always busy. There's not a lot of just standing around twiddling their thumbs. How do you do that? Like, how do they know? Oh, I'm gonna go make bows right now because I don't have anything else to do. Might as well make bows and tack them up on the corkboard or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Because I'm a I'm a tyrant. I cracked my whip. No, I'm just joking.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

You are not a tyrant. I know that. You do have high expectations, but you are not a tyrant.

SPEAKER_00 25:32

Well, you know what it is? It's it's you uh I've always lived the rule by you empower your staff. You you give them the opportunity to improve, you give them the opportunity to make mistakes and you improve those mistakes, you correct those mistakes. So, yes, over the years, my staff has learned it's just natural. Sometimes they're even on me going, Ralph, we got to get the Christmas down, we gotta, we gotta open up the Christmas, you know, it's it's it's getting to that time. Um, as far as lists, I don't technically have a list of of the things that we do for the holidays. We have a busy list that we do for the store, especially when we have newer staff members that come in, drivers, things like that, fill water cubes, Edward Daily, blah, blah, blah. Um, but I do have like a price list of all of the things that we add in. So, you know, looking back at the price list, then you you basically can. You can look at it and go, okay, well, the pine cones cost this much, glass balls cost this much. And you know, looking at that price list, you can go, oh, I gotta get the pine cones ready, I gotta get the glass balls ready, I gotta get order the candles. So it is a list, but not necessarily a I need to do this by such and such date. Um that is all done in my head. Um a lot of us that have been in the industry for a while, it just comes second nature to us. It's just, it's just you wake up the morning and you're like, boom, I need to get this done today because you just know instantly.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

And it sounds like your staff too haven't gone through this for so long. They the all of you together um are collaborating to make sure that everything's done, ready for the holiday.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

It's absolutely a teamwork. Once you get past a few employees, um, you know, if you're if you're a small shop and you're just you a design, an owner, designer, and a driver, you know, it's a little bit tighter knit. Um once you get, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, twelve employees, you have to keep them all moving and you you find those people that are self-motivated. Um, and if they're not self-motivated, you try to train them to become self-motivated. So yeah, over the years, they they they learn to do that type of stuff on their own. Love that. A couple of the other things that I'll throw in really quick for the holiday prep is you know, plan your holiday designs as early as you possibly can, get them out of the way if you're doing anything custom, you know, figure out a tracking system, whether you use the dots like I do, or whether you have another uh, you know, system that you use. Make sure all of those things are implemented, they're ready to go. Um, make sure your websites are updated if you don't already have somebody doing that. So there's a there's a laundry list of things that you should do for every holiday. It just changes the exact little tweaks that are appropriate for that individual holiday. Um, but basically they're the same half a dozen to a dozen steps that you need to do way in advance to free up that time when you need it the most at the peak of the holiday.

SPEAKER_01 28:31

Yeah, well said. So the question is do you have all your Valentine's Day flowers ordered, Ralph?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Um, I do not personally, only because I am lucky enough to be able to buy direct out of Miami. And I have uh a large Miami vendor that supplies me a good portion of my product these days that come directly to me, and they're their own grower. Um I'm lucky enough, I'm fortunate enough to be one of their top shops, and I kind of get special pricing and I get special privileges that they put aside X number of roses for their top clients, and I get to pick from that pool.

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Wow. It's nice to be at the top.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

It's nice sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 29:18

There's definitely some benefits to being at the top of your game. So that's cool. Yeah, no, this has been really, really enlightening. I can't imagine um how excited our listeners are gonna feel that are you know running their own flower shop thinking with all these little tricks that you just shared with them. Do you do installs very much anymore?

SPEAKER_00 29:40

We used to several years back. We used to pre-COVID. Um slightly before that, we would do multiple retail car dealerships, their trees, and so on. Um, and it really came down to timing, came down to when they wanted it, and we were too busy to do it. We experienced the same as a lot of shops where we lost some staff members during COVID, um, changing careers, things like that. And it's been a struggle to regain those number of people, those bot, those warm bodies have. So now a lot of us are doing a lot more every day than we normally would do. Um, I'm pretty much in my shop seven days a week for the most part. So, you know, I can only ask my staff to do so much. We don't want to push much overtime on a consistent basis. So you have to make that, you have to make that decision. What's more profitable? Is it more profitable for me to run my retail side, or is it more profitable for me to do a dozen installations this week? And for me personally, it's more profitable on the retail side than to worry about the installations.

SPEAKER_02 30:43

Right. I don't think you're alone in that. I mean, I think COVID, you know, when it pandemic hit, everything shut down, all of those things stopped. And then the shops that I've spoken with that are around the same size as you, maybe a slightly smaller, but used to do a lot of them. They said they just really don't have the time.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

They don't have a staff, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

They don't have a staff and the time, and you know, the looking through one thing that Vonda and I talked about so much on this podcast during the pandemic, it gives you that time to sit back and go, okay, what where where is the best use of my time? You know, where am I gonna be the most productive and make the most money? Because that's at the end of the day, gotta make money to survive.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

If you don't make money, you can't stay open.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

No, you cannot. Well said, Ralph. And thank you for joining us today and sharing all your great ideas. I know that shops are going to be going, oh my gosh, I didn't know I could pre-green now and it would be fine for the holiday. I didn't know because that's like a question you answer all the time on Facebook. Like, how soon can I start? And you're like, hey, you can do this, we're doing this. And that just kind of puts other people's minds at ease, knowing, oh my gosh, I really can do it that way. Because, you know, there's other big shops who are doing that and are very successful. And so me as somebody who's smaller, I can do the same thing.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

So it's yeah, I mean, it all comes down to you know, cooler space and you know, time management. So there is a balance there as well. But if you can find the cooler space and you can find the time to do it, it's gonna save you more time by doing it now than waiting.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

Well, have a wonderful holiday season, Ralph. And we will talk to you again soon, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

I will definitely, and I'll do my best to post some stuff to the members' page as well to kind of uh light a fire on everybody and get them moving.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Exactly. That's that's why we need you. So thanks, Ralph.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

No problem. Thank you, ladies.

SPEAKER_02 32:45

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. We look forward to seeing you next week.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

So please come back and join us and discover how a bit of knowledge and one small change in your mindset can take you to new levels in your life and business.