Clara Varga-Gonzales and Manny Gonzales will present a session at SAF Phoenix 2023 about how open book management can help manage employee wages, improve purchasing decisions and grow sales.
By turning to the playbook of common practices used by large corporations, floral businesses can find success in managing employee wages, improving purchasing decisions and growing sales.
That’s the thinking behind Forecasting Your Future, a series of courses created for the Society of American Florists by floral industry veterans and consultants Clara Varga-Gonzales and Manny Gonzales. The husband-and-wife team sold their thriving South Carolina flower shop in 2018, after fighting their way through the 2008 recession and bringing it back from the brink of bankruptcy. They are sharing the successful strategies they used to incentivize employees and grow sales at SAF Phoenix 2023, SAF’s 138th annual convention Sept. 6-9 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“We customized all of these proven practices to make it very specific to our industry and very adaptable for each small business owner,” Varga-Gonzales says. “I don’t think we invented anything, but we refined everything for our needs and the needs of the floral industry.”
The practices include everything from daily morning sales meetings and detailing the business’ monthly sales goals, to offering employees sales commissions and incentives. The two will share this and more during their convention session, “Sharing is Caring: How Open Book Management Drives Sales and Profits.”
The “open book” concept is not about posting financial statements or sharing everything with every employee, Varga-Gonzales emphasizes. Instead, it’s about sharing meaningful information with employees so that they can be effective collaborators and contributors to the business.
“We want to respect the staff and share the challenges and successes of owning a shop,” he says.
In following these methods with their own flailing business, they not only significantly improved their store’s profit margins, but it also inspired many employees to later start their own businesses — and succeed, Gonzales says.
“It’s a dual benefit of respecting the staff and improving the business,” he says. “We hire smart individuals. So, it’s about explaining in real terms what we need to succeed as a business. Our employees appreciated the responsibility.”
Often when employees learned just how well they were doing, Gonzales says, they were surprised and it helped build confidence for the individual. By encouraging staff to talk about sales, they also became more acquainted with the product and how to upsell to customers, he says.
That was most apparent when they sought to raise the average sale price of the store. Having lingered at $73 a bouquet, Gonzales says they wanted to move to $90. To do that, they offered a $5 bonus to any employee every time they sold a bouquet more than $100. Staff quickly learned to talk about the fullness of the arrangement or the other details that would convince customers to splurge for a pricier product. Within two months they reached an average sale in the $90s range.
“They were killing it,” Gonzales says of his staff at the time. “Actually, they were doing so well that we had to adjust the incentive.” At that point the wages were outpacing the company’s plan. They changed the goal to $5 for every product over $125.
“It was a learning curve, but because we were open with our staff about the goals, they had a lot of respect for that and they rose to the occasion,” he says.
For more information about SAF Phoenix 2023 and to register, click here. To register for the Forecasting Your Future series of courses on SAF’s Floral Education Hub, click here.
Sarah Sampson is a contributing writer for the Society of American Florists.
