Week 5

Entrepreneurial Journal – Week 5

After my return from Hyannis, I was needed to jump right in to my own weddings.  This wedding was a smaller wedding (under 100 guests) at the country club where I am the in house florist.  This wedding was not complicated, I have done them many times at the Club, as well as at the historic Mead Chapel.  The flowers were to be delivered, set up, then taken down and moved to the reception venue.  I was able to visit the bride in her suite (one of my personal pleasures is to see the bride look at her bouquet for the first time) and she cried she was so happy.  It was the start of a very good day. 

The biggest mistake I made with this wedding, and it is easy for a smallish mistake to have a huge effect when the budget is not really big.  There isn’t any room for error.  However, when I ordered the garden roses (they are extremely expensive – they retail between $12 and $15 each), I didn’t realize I double ordered from two different wholesalers.  When I spoke to the first wholesaler, I wasn’t sure if he could get what I wanted, so I ordered from another.  Well, the first one got everything I needed, so I had double the amount of garden roses I needed.  It equated to a $300 loss for me.  That isn’t a lot of money in the scheme of things, but It was a painful hit.  Because I am an event florist and I have a few weekly clients, it is very difficult for me to sell the extras I have.  The lesson I learned is that from now on, I must keep an Excel spreadsheet with my complete order on it, creating each sheet for each event and categorized by wholesaler.  That would have saved this loss, lesson learned.