The Art of Starting by Iona Mathieson

Author:Iona Mathieson [Romy St Clair, Iona Mathieson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2023-03-22T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Running Your Business

1. Finances: review how much you’re making and adjust

2. Product lines: selling others’ products or creating your own

3. Paying yourself/side hustles

4. Hiring staff: dos and don’ts

5. Digital tools/productivity

6. Distributing your time: admin vs creativity, taking breaks

Running a business with Missy Flynn of Rita’s

1. Finances: review how much you’re making and adjust

Financial tracking is absolutely key for making informed decisions about your business. This should start immediately, even with small jobs. How much did you earn and how much did you spend? You quickly start to build up a list of lessons for the next time. Should you price things differently? Should you have explained what the customer was getting better? Could you have got it cheaper somewhere else? Did you end up having a lot of waste? Through an iterative process you’ll start to build in good profit margins.

When looking at your outgoings on a monthly basis, make sure that you’re including absolutely everything. Include your electricity bill, your water bill, your rent, plus any staffing. Make sure to include your time, although this is the easiest to scrimp on at the start. Adding up what you’ve earned is much easier than summing up what it cost you.

Different people will have different approaches to this process. Iona is much more of a pen-and-paper type person and Romy loves a spreadsheet. There are also lots of programs that can help you do this and if you’d prefer to have it managed in a neater package, you can use accounting software to your advantage. If your software is electronically synced with your bank account, it will be tracking your outgoings and incomings and you can look at this month on month, or over a set period of time, and compare this month, quarter or year to the last. Over time you’ll get a sense of how much you’re hoping to earn each month and how much you’re likely to spend.

After the first year, most businesses realize that they’re probably under-pricing. We certainly did. This is mostly because we didn’t take into account all of our costs and weren’t confident enough with asking for more. You quickly learn that this isn’t a viable way to continue running your business, if you ever hope to be paid from it. The most common question we get from new florists is about pricing, and them feeling they’re not able to charge a fair price for their service because they’re new. DO NOT feel bad about this – imposter syndrome is real, we know – but you’ll only end up in a more difficult (potentially unprofitable) position in the long run if you undercut yourself. Believe in yourself and your product, and that if you’re putting the hard work and time into creating something amazing, you should charge accordingly!

As your business is growing, the market will change in ways you never expected. Floristry had a double whammy in our third year of business with coronavirus causing our shop to close and event work to end, just as Brexit caused the price of imported flowers to increase.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.