Florist News

How many shops offer any type of incentive scheme for staff? It is very popular here in the colonies and I have helped many shops to launch theirs. Let's face it, money motivates and if you give staff the chance to earn more per hour - by bringing more revenue to the shop - you will see the results.
You can start off small - maybe by offering 25p for every balloon or cuddly toy they sell - but you can go big too... offering a flat amount for an increase in their individual (or group) average sale.
Share what you are doing - or why you're not - and I can give you more ideas and pointers.
thanks,
Tim

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Tim Huckabee, AIFSE
Founder of FloralStrategies.com
CustomerCare training for Florists

Of course staff must be encouraged to 'participate' in a shop's increase in profit. I personally think my staff (consisting of 5 part-timers, 1 full-timer and myself) is motivated and smart. As far as incentives for them goes, I personally don't believe in your idea of giving them money for each rose, balloon or muscari they sell. My girls and myself are motivated by having their bqs and arragements sold!! It may sound trivial, but we (and we have discussed this at lengths!) are genuinely happy and motivated when we do what we do best, floristry, and it is bought by our customers and the word of mouth propaganda is positive. I/we stand behind all our creations and its a boost to our will and confidence when we get to hear from the neihbours' daughter that Mrs xyz got a gorgeous something from us.

As far as 'thanking' my staff for their input and ideas, I do the x-mas presents, not the standard stuff though! I arrange a 'winter-satuday', usually in January when the x-mas stuff is over, where we go for a hike, have a forest picknick and end it off with a dinner to which I treat them. In the spring we do a moss hunt...never mind me explaining...its alot of fun though. In the summer just before all the holidays start I do a bike-tour and a bbq with them and in the fall another hunt, this time for leaves...again...no explanation here! There is a vase in the back room with 'old' flowers in which when I decide we can't sell 'old' flowers anymore, the staff is welcome to them.

My point here is that my staff are just that...they work in my shop for me as a team to 'sell' our ideas and creations....but at the end of the day the money in the till pays their wages. Maybe its a bit different then in alot of shops, but most of my girls are working for me because they want to and not because they have to work! Of course everyone 'has' to work, but 4 out of my 6 are really working because of their love for this business. With out going into any detail, they don't have to work for financial reasons. I live in a small german town where literally everyone knows everyone, right down to what kind of car they drive and who's related to who! That has negative sides and positives. Its hard to keep secrets, but you also know you can count on folks to be the 'good neighbour'. I guess you could say that everything is very 'family-ish' here!

In the past 11 years I have been here, I have made a good name for myself as far as designs and creativity goes, and I have learned what folks here will accept and what not. It took years for them to accept me as an outsider coming in and trying to fit in. I conquered many personal downs and have gained many insights, my credo being: always be open to other people opinions.

As far as your program goes, the shop I worked in, b4 I had the privilege to open my own, had a 'trainer' in for us....with DISASTEROUS results!!! I was very open to many ideas she had as far as getting the customer to tell us what they really wanted, but in the end it was all about selling, selling,selling...money,money,money. Our problem with that was that we weren't aloud the time we needed to be creative.

A simple example: we were given clocks (like egg-timers) to be placed at each work table and we had to start the clock when we started working and stop it when we were done...even when serving customers! Now how stupid is that?! It resulted in shitty, thrown together bqs just because we had to please our boss with our 'time'.

Also we were instructed to not spend more than said time with a customer as far as consultation goes. Well..I'm sorry, but it sometimes just doesn't work that way!!

As for the questions one needs to ask a customer to tell them what they want, and for using time wisely (which is VERY highly rated here in germany!) it was very helpfull.

This is just my experience Tim. My opinion and my ideas! It probably wouldn't work for alot of people, but as I said in another post, I always stay true to myself... and I don't look back. If you have a way to help other shops earn TONS more money in this business...more power to you! I REALLY just hope that you don't forget the creative side of this life!! That would be too bad.

grüße from germany,
maple.

p.s. are you a trained florist?

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~success is a lousy teacher...it seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose~

Im thinking along the same lines as maple, just cant find the words to explain it, these strategy and make more money ideas sound good but i wouldnt want to put off my customers with being pushy, maybe there are some ideas that would help my business but as for giving my staff incentives, I think that is a terrible idea. If my staff werent dedicated people who loved their job then I wouldnt have them as staff in the first place. I think if I suggested incentives to them they would be highly insulted and they would think I thought they werent doing a good enough job. I dont know about anybody else but my staff are not in this game for the money, I dont think many people are, never heard or a rich florist myself

You sound like you have amazing staff Maple and treat them very fairly. Generally I find staff don't seem to link the between the business suceeding and their wages or bonuses etc, no matter how hard I've tried to explain it. Or they don't care enough about the business, who knows. I have a good team now that I'm happy with and I hope they appreciate that link. I'm not sure an incentive scheme would be realistically achievable in my shop, although I might trial it over Mothers Day week and see what happens. We definately don't sell enough add ons.
I have worked for a company that specialised in weddings, who offered an incentive scheme on converted wedding orders and paid comission. It was a very small percentage on each order but if you got a few conversions in a month or one big wedding order it soon mounted up. It was also a bit like friendly competiton with colleagues to see who had got the most weddings each month and so on.
To the cynics, you'd be surprised what the thought of a few extra £ a month can do. The wedding comission definately upped average orders...couldn't we all do with that??

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Sarah Creating Bespoke Wedding Flowers Cheshire

what happened to all the rest of what I wrote in reply to this post?????????? beyond explaining what i do i offered some feedback and ideas that any reader would really benefit from - like the one about capturing email addresses as well as the smart thing they did at the shop where i worked!!?!? if someone is shooting down the idea of an on-site trainer it has to be my job to defend the concept - as i did.
i don't understand the random editing policy - who decides what???
thanks - T

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Tim Huckabee, AIFSE
Founder of FloralStrategies.com
CustomerCare training for Florists

Mapletree, whilst i agree with a couple of things in your reply ie. florists cant be creative with an egg timer sat next to them, some of your techniques would be laughed at by my staff !! All i can say is, that you are lucky your staff dont have to work for the money, because i have 5 full timers and 3 part time and although they all love floristry, they all have bills to pay. Unless you are a volunteer, everyone works for the pay packet, regardless of how much you love your job !! If i offered my staff a walk in the woods and a picnic for "all their hard work", and a pick of flowers from the DEAD bucket... please, you cant be serious !! they would take that as an insult... after they stopped laughing !!!

I have every reason to believe that what you say you truly believe in Tim,and im sure it's worked in the colonies(iv'e heard you are in great demand stateside)alas you may find the general malaise within the staff in the shops in the UK hard to stomach,in my experience the UK workforce is a tougher nut to crack than the US workforce,dont ask me why,lets call it a cultural thing.
Iv'e offered all sorts of incentives from pamper days to half days off/early finishes(if thats not a big enough carrot,then what is?)and what was i asking them to do for this?just sell an add on ,ask one maybe two simple questions and sound interested in the caller/customer......NAH!!not a chance they where totally "diss"interested,it would appear its hard to motivate a person/persons that are quite comfortable doing just enough to get by.

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seldom rong!!!!

Sorry Tim, that was me. There have been suggestions recently to cut down length of posts and at first glance it appeared that you had just quoted Mapletree and put your response at the bottom of the post.

I realise now that you may have added comments within the quoted section but this wasn't clear at the time. I will double check in future and edit the formatting instead to make the post read more clearly.

Goodie,I did say I was fortunate!!!!! I don't take for granted that my girls who 'don't have to work' are just there to do me a favour!!! I demand alot from them and I rely on them...hell, without them I'd have a HUGE problem as far as getting the work done! I have bills to pay and am not just doing this for fun! If I don't make a profit, then I can't pay them(bills AND staff!). But it is a heck of alot of fun too though!!
My picnics, dinners, hikes AND x-mas bonuses aren't the incentives for them to do a good job! Its a way of me saying thank you! It also increases our team spirit and is a way for us to get together outside of the shop and TALK to each other!! We've had some fun times and we've had times where the some of the staff are at each others throats for some reason or other, but these away-from-the-shop times have given them an opportunity to talk to each other freely...maybe its the alcohol!!!!
Don't you think that a team that gets along well with each other and can let off steam instead of bottling it up and affecting their work does a better job?
Of course we have 'incidents'...we're a bunch of women after all!!!!!

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~success is a lousy teacher...it seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose~

I have to disagree; money is not a motivating factor. It is what Herzberg describes as a hygiene factor. This means, if it is not satisfactory, staff will leave. Other hygiene factors include working conditions, job security, status and relationships. True motivators are things such as achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and personal growth.

Offering training days for staff is more motivating than a 25p per balloon incentive. Feeling your work is recognised for being excellent is motivating.

The Hawthorn experiments classically show how other factors affect motivation. A factory decided to turn up the lights on the production line, production increased. They decided to turn the lights down, production also increased. STAFF MOTIVATION INCREASED BEACAUSE THEY FELT MANAGEMENT WERE TAKING AN INTEREST I.


Not to turn into teacher but another school of thought is to identify individuals’ personal motivations. McClelland believes these to be either achievement motivation, authority/power motivation (watch out for these ones!) or affiliation motivation.

I think you've got it right Maple. Staff like to feel valued and that their work and contributions are important.

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