Unveiling Growth Opportunities in Businesses

Episode 192:  In this episode, we sit down with Tyler Martin, Vonda’s son and a seasoned flower buyer, who shares his experiences growing up in a flower shop. Tyler shares his thoughts on business locations and highlights some of the challenges and pitfalls that consumers often experience when trying to purchase flowers at a brick and mortar location.

Furthermore, Tyler emphasizes the importance of being proactive in sales to achieve growth, pointing out that simply relying on foot traffic is not enough. He brings up a secret marketing idea that has the potential to boost sales and attract customers, challenging listeners to think outside the box and tap into untapped opportunities. 

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

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

What is it that I can do to promote my flower shop then?

SPEAKER_04 0:09

The end all be-all of sales is proactivity, right?

SPEAKER_00 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. All right. So, Vonda, I am so excited because you have pulled a man off the street for today's podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

I have just kind of pulled him off the street and into my office here.

SPEAKER_03 0:42

I've never met either of you in my life, and um I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So you just pulled a random stranger, pulled him into your house. So your bravery is to be commended. Um, but he does have a name. Would you like to introduce your stranger? Yes, this is Tyler Martin. We're not gonna call him a stranger. Maybe sometimes he's strange, but he's not a stranger. No, no, I'm kidding. He's no stranger to either.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

He's not a stranger. This is my son, Tyler Martin, who has quite a bit of knowledge on the floral industry. And let's say he's amazing at sales overall. So that's why we drug him off the street, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Dragged him from the outside to come talk to us. So, anyway, Tyler, thanks for being here. I know you have a short amount of time.

SPEAKER_03 1:34

I'm very excited to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

You are also on vacation.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

That's why I got pulled off the street. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

You are here because we have some questions for you as a consumer of our industry, just a just a guy who buys flowers. I don't know. I'm gonna pretend just for kicks that you listen to our podcast and have listened to it every week for the last three years. All right. So just kind of go with this to our listeners. He's nodding his head yes and laughing all at the same time. So year ago or maybe longer, I interviewed my two sons who one is a millennial, one is a Gen Z, about their buying habits and knowledge and flowers. So I was really excited when Vana wanted to interview you. So I'm gonna kind of ask you some of the same kind of questions to see, because you are older and wiser and have more money than they do because they're younger. What your buying habits are. Number one question that we have for you what makes a consumer choose a flower shop over like Trader Joe's or just a random grocery store to purchase when it comes to purchasing flowers?

SPEAKER_04 2:54

I I'd say the number one thing is probably experience and history. Right? That's really what it is.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Okay, expand on that.

SPEAKER_04 3:03

Growing up in a flower shop makes me want to support a flower shop. That's me, that's my history. But it's also the experience. When I can call a flower shop and I know exactly or I can describe what I'm looking for, and they can give me what I'm asking for, uh, and I have a positive experience when I go to pick up my flowers or have them delivered, it keeps me coming back.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:25

And I look, I'm not gonna lie, I've used a non-flower shop for flowers before, and uh I was disappointed by those big places because they didn't they didn't translate to what I wanted.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

Right, right. So have you though, because you know, you do have a little bit of a different perspective, like my boys do, because you have a mom in the industry. Have you chosen, have you called to order flowers before in the service or the arrangement or whatever was less than what you expected?

SPEAKER_04 4:05

If you had a bad experience when it came to using a flower shop, no, I've never had a bad experience at a flower shop that's basically a standalone flower shop.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Really? Okay. So what do you think it is for the average person that wasn't raised in this, you know, in this industry? What what makes them not order flowers from a normal brick and mortar flower shop?

SPEAKER_04 4:31

They don't know about them, they don't know where to find them. Dad, honestly, we had my little town that I live in in Indiana. Uh, a set of sisters had a flower shop and it closed three years ago. It was the only flower shop in the town. And I was on my this my Facebook chatter page for the town and just about ordering flowers. And the first five comments were sorry, the flower shop closed three years ago. And then the next ten were naming the flower shop that had opened up a year ago in our town, and nobody had any idea about it, and everybody was very excited about it, and I didn't know about it. I always order flowers from uh in in the town where I work because it's easy for me to grab them on the way home. Yeah, I was I mean, I was taken aback. It's like I didn't, I didn't have no idea, and it'd been around for a year.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Wow. So you think that's a marketing issue?

SPEAKER_04 5:30

Uh yeah, I mean it's absolutely a marketing issue. I mean, for being in a small town, right? My town is about 5,000 people. So, you know, there's literally 10,000 members for a 5,000 place town, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:43

Uh every Monday, it's marketing Monday. And pretty much every Monday, a local business or multiple local businesses will post on those pages. Well, I'm I'm on there enough and I get enough notifications, but I've never seen this flower shop advertised.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 6:00

And it's so easy, right? It's so easy.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

It's so easy and so free. Free.

SPEAKER_04 6:06

It's free.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

Yep. I mean, Vonda and I talk about that all the time, especially that is an advantage in a small town. You can quickly communicate with your community in so many free ways. And and it blows my mind how many retail businesses don't take advantage of that and the cross-collaborations that you can do with other businesses that will complement your business. I don't live in a small town, but I live in a town that has a lot of boutique style businesses and the flower shop, the trendy cool one, partners with the trendy cool interior design one. Right. You know, and they're always cross-collaborating. They're both very, very high-end, but they cross-collab on every kind of social media. Everybody knows it, and everybody uses them. It's like genius. You can do that on any level. It doesn't have to be high-end. You can do that on low end, you can do it on medium end, whatever. Just do it. And it costs nothing.

SPEAKER_04 7:17

They have to be proactive, right? Otherwise, you're just making it hard for the consumer to come to you. If they don't know anything about you, never heard about you, right? Uh you're making it, you're making it hard, right? You're just making it so hard to do business with you when you stay, I call it saying internally focused.

SPEAKER_02 7:36

Right, right. You got to be easy to find. You got to be able to eat easy to find on the internet nowadays. You can't afford not to, which brings me, Vonda. I have a question for you. And Tyler, I don't know if you have come up against this, but my oldest has recently been a victim of, I guess, an order gatherer. I honestly don't know what happened. He had flowers sent to my husband and I recently. Vondi told you that last week. He was in he was in Ethiopia on a mission trip and flowers showed up. Now he had set up this whole thing prior to leaving the country, I believe, because his brother told me that he reached out and he said, Hey, what flower shop does mom like? And so Reese told him she likes this flower shop. Okay, so keep that in mind. Here's where the mystery happens.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 8:46

So he gets online. I receive these flowers, which they're pretty, but I'm like, huh, this is a flower shop I've never heard of. Never heard of in my area. And I am telling my son, thank you. You know, I'm like, it was the thought, right? I'm just and he goes, Oh, I'm so glad you love them, like them. And it's the flower shop you love. It's your favorite, right? And I'm like, no, I've never heard of this shop. And he's like, What? Reese told me it was your favorite.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

So did he order them from his local flower shop and ask them to go to that shop? No, he googled. Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 9:37

So what happened? Walk me through exactly what happened.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

That's a whole nother podcast, Laurie. But I'll tell you that he Googled it and then he picked the one at the top that said that name, but they've paid an ad to have that name in their advertising, and he clicked through that. And that's why we have so many of our Flower Clutch members saying that somebody stole their, you know, kind of their identity on it.

SPEAKER_02 10:03

That's basically what they did. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

That's what he did.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Made me sick, and I don't have the heart to tell him he's not gonna listen because you know the poor guy, he's a youth pastor, like he doesn't have a lot of money. It infuriates me yet breaks my heart because he thought he was doing the right thing. How many people, how many customers do that? And I tell you, I will also tell you within two days, 50% of those flowers were just dead, huh?

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Dead, dead. What would you suggest on that one, Tyler?

SPEAKER_04 10:40

Truthfully, the the the way to look is to actually look. When you Google something, almost everything that pops to the top is an ad, right? The first three, first five, just depends on what it is. If you know that it's going to be a certain flower shop that you're looking for in a certain area, take your time, right?

SPEAKER_02 11:01

But again, it comes back to knowing what they are and knowing who knowing that you have to look though is the key. And the average customer, you Google Lori's flower shop, you're gonna assume because you don't know anything else about this industry, you're gonna go, oh boom, there it is.

SPEAKER_04 11:21

But even if you're even if you're searching and you're putting in a town with it, generally speaking, you're not gonna have the spoof, right? Because it can't you can't spoof everybody on the internet. Lori's flowers might exist in 10 places, actually. But yeah, if you're looking for Lori's flowers in Woodlands, Texas.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 11:41

You know exactly where you're going.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

Yeah, it just infuriates me because I I do think about the average customer, how many people that probably happens to.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Yeah, it could for sure, Lori. That's sad. Well, one thing when Tyler and I were talking earlier when I pulled him off the street, of course, about flower shop location is he was just saying a lot of times they make it hard to find them or to pick up flowers, right?

SPEAKER_04 12:13

Right. I mean, if you're off the beaten path, I mean, I remember growing up in our in our flower shop, it was on a main strip, right? You could put out advertisements just right there in front, stopping for a take-home bouquet, the easy things, and and uh for a person to come in and come out, you know, you somebody sees your flower shop and wants to be able to drop in, grab something and go, make it easy for the customer, right? I mean, you could be in a strip mall, but but you gotta make sure you have enough parking spots to pay there for them to be there. Yes, you have to make sure that that you're visually that that people know you're there. I mean, there are thousands upon thousands of strip malls across this country that lots of flower shops are in, and it's hard to get in and out of them, right? So you gotta yeah, think about your location and what what your location says to your customer, too.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

Right. So then that being said, what can flower shops do to increase their business? Maybe I am off the beaten pass, or maybe I'm not, but you know, we know that you know, between 80 and 90 percent of the business doesn't come in from walk-in traffic. What is it that I can do to promote my flower shop then?

SPEAKER_04 13:22

The and all be all of sales is proactivity, right? It's it's talking to other people in the industry and taking the time to focus on sales. To take the time to say, hey, what categories are successful in the flower business, and which ones do I not have? Which ones am I not participating in? Is there a reason I'm not participating in those, right? The drive-by business, the take-home bouquets, the the ones you buy for yourself to celebrate yourself. I mean, those different things that you can do. Are you in weddings? Are you in funerals? Are you advertising at schools for all the dances and proms and all those different things? Are you going into businesses and selling, having a fresh bouquet when somebody walks in because they get that smell and now it their sensory memory kicks in every time they walk into business A, B, or C. You know, those types of things that you can go out and proactively sell, they're just so many different things to be in as a flower shop. You need to take time to focus on that and be proactive.

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Tyler, I have a question based on what you just said that I would love your perspective on. Um, when you are looking at a flower shop's website, like a local flower shop's website. Let's just think about your local ones. Are you more impressed by a flower shop's website or in store if they have like a whole bunch of different tabs showing that they do all of these different things with every single type of occasion and design you could imagine, or if they have like specific things that they are really good at. Um, and there is no right or wrong answer. I'm just curious, do you lean towards one or the other? If they're more specifically niched, or do you like a whole bunch of multiple choices?

SPEAKER_04 15:33

So, Lori, it's kind of funny that you ask me about a website because generally speaking, uh because of what I've grown up with, I call and I'll call and and say this is what I want because I want to choose what flowers go in it. I want to choose the baby's breath, I want to choose the greens, I want to, you know, I want to tell them what I want. So that's that's how I do it.

SPEAKER_01 15:55

Right.

SPEAKER_04 15:55

But that's because I've grown up in it. Right. Right? You know, I I don't want them, I don't want them to pick the wrong purple flower, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 16:02

But the websites that I've been to, where where I'm ordering, where I'm gonna order out of town, those types of things, I just need it to be simple. If it's roses or whatever the occasion is, I don't need to know about for pu funerals and proms and that kind of stuff, but kind of the occasion uh makes it easy for me.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Okay, so you like multiple occasion choices?

SPEAKER_04 16:26

I I'd say yes. Is is the occasion gonna be a for yourself? Is the occasion going to be just because that kind of stuff? I think that's what would draw me to where it'd be easiest, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

Okay, good, good answers.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

So I'm gonna go back, Tyler, to a conversation we had about promoting the take home bouquets within an organization.

SPEAKER_04 16:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Kind of walk through that with Lori so she understands what we're talking about. Because I'm like, wow, if you could get into a business to have them allow you to do that, it'd be pretty cool.

SPEAKER_04 17:05

So, Lori, the example that I gave, actually, it's an idea I came up with a year ago.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Oh, two years ago, probably. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 17:13

Take a business that has give or take 30 people to start with, something fairly small, and you're already making up take home bouquets. So go talk to the business owner and see if they would allow you to come in and sell your take home bouquets. And then after you've done it a couple of times, maybe you're dropping take home bouquets in there on Wednesday and allowing to kind of self-service, right? Or you send out the email on Wednesday morning that says, Hey, we're coming today, or how many of you want your take home bouquet today? And you deliver a set of 10 of them to a business that the folks can just grab and take home with them for the day. And how many businesses could you do that with?

SPEAKER_02 17:57

No, wait, so the business meaning like the people that work there would want a take-home bouquet?

SPEAKER_03 18:03

The people that work there.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

Okay, got it, got it, got it. Like Mark's office, for instance. Somebody got in there, got to the right person, the HR, maybe it was even HR, said, you know, we want to offer this to your employees.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

So you want to offer it to the employees. We'll come in every Wednesday or whatever day. Maybe we were talking, maybe Friday was the day because you would take it home for your family for the weekend, your wife, your significant. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:31

I would not suggest Fridays because that's always a work from home day.

SPEAKER_04 18:35

Oh, right. That's the same thing I do. I work from home on Friday, so I wouldn't be in there. Some of the most fun stories you ever hear about is my husband, my wife, my significant other brought me home flowers on a Tuesday just because. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Exactly. Take home Tuesday, you know, do a fun little yeah. No, I love that idea.

SPEAKER_04 18:54

And then what I mentioned earlier, right, with the proactive sales, right? Well, maybe part of the proactive sales is I'll give you business this arrangement here every other week, and you allow me to do this. So you're kind of trading off and you're not having to pay anybody for anything, and your cost of doing business or your cost to gain those extra sales are very low.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

Love that. I think it's a great idea. I I love the thought of doing it on a random day, like a Tuesday, because if my husband brought it home on a Tuesday, I have the whole week to enjoy them, you know, and and what a random thing to do on a Tuesday. Um, so yeah, no, Tyler, that's a great idea.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

So, Lori, let me ask you, if he did it every Tuesday, how cool would that be?

SPEAKER_02 19:47

Every Tuesday, um, it would, yes, it would be very cool. It would be dependent on, you know, the deal. I'm thinking from their level.

SPEAKER_04 19:59

Or so the expectation doesn't get to be too much. Maybe it's every other Tuesday and at business at business day and every other Tuesday at business, and every other Wednesday.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Every other Tuesday, or exactly.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

So you could you could rotate it around. Yeah. The thing that it comes back to is just being proactive, right? Don't wait for the phone to ring.

SPEAKER_02 20:20

No, and the other thing about it, Tyler, is I look at that as because I kind of like your two for Tuesdays twice a month on Tuesdays, two Tuesdays a month, right? And it's you also need to look at it as it's your marketing, your advertising. You are putting your name out there two Tuesdays a month. That is you your advertising dollars going out too, because it has your name on that bouquet. You're reminding people, look, I'm out there.

SPEAKER_04 20:50

Right. And then if you have those take-home bouquets on display at the business, as people are coming in and coming out, there's even more marketing that you're getting. And again, it's free, or they're actually you're actually getting paid to market because you're selling your product, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:04

So, yeah, no, that's a cute idea. And it creates that top-of-the-ind awareness for that's the flower shop. If I need second flowers, I need something else, that's who I'm gonna call because that's who I've been dealing with.

unknown 21:16

Right.

SPEAKER_04 21:17

To circle into one of our favorite things ever, which is flower click. That's what gives people back time to focus on their business, to focus on their sales. They need to take the time to be a proactive seller. Or learn how to be a proactive seller.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 21:34

No, that's a that's a cool idea. And then the end all be all of all of that is to have those spouses take a picture of it and post it on their social media and go, thanks, Lori's flower shop, for the beautiful bouquet, or blah, blah, blah. You think I should have a Lori's flower shop? I've mentioned it like five times.

SPEAKER_04 21:54

Let's just open it. Let's go.

SPEAKER_02 21:57

Let's do it. Well, I'd need Bonda to come run it because I don't.

SPEAKER_04 22:03

I know a designer.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

Yeah, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Well, I do too. I'd have to hire a designer.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

Well, thank you, Tyler, for jumping off the street and answering questions for us today. I think our Yes, you can now go back to the street.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

You can go back and I've been getting kicked out on the street, I think.

SPEAKER_02 22:23

Yeah. 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_00 22:47

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, and you can't get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit.