Paula, Mill Pond Flower Farm
Do you need a business plan?
I’ve met flower farmers who haven’t even bought a packet of seeds but already have a comprehensive business plan and I also know experienced flower farmers with sizeable operations who laugh at the thought of creating a business plan. It all depends on your approach, who your plan is for and how you like to work. However, there are some sound reasons for having a plan. It can help you to:
State what you’re doing and where you’re going
Gain a good understanding of the market and your place in it
Prioritise and plan
Have targets to monitor your progress against
Work out financials – how much you’ll spend, earn, and how much profit you’ll make
Apply for investment or funding from external organisations
There are other ways of looking at this.
Would you go start a university course without knowing what you’d get at the end of it?
If you were investing £5,000 in someone else, would you want to know how it was going to be spent and what the return will be?
If you were buying your wedding flowers from a flower farmer, would you want to know they had a feasible plan for their operation?
Research has shown that if you make a business plan that you are more likely to succeed. You’re spending a huge amount of time, energy and probably money developing your business. Give it the best chance and write a plan!
Do you currently have a business plan?
Different ways of planning your business
If you search online, in a bookshop or a library, you’ll find lots of books, articles and helpful advice about Business Planning. You might have a Business Support network in your area where you can do a course or workshop (it’s Business Gateway in Scotland). They’ll generally teach you to create a written document that conforms to a fairly straightforward template. That’s fine if that’s the way you like to work.
However, don’t think that’s the only valid way to plan your business! Whatever works for you is good so long as it meets your own needs. ‘The Right Brain Business Plan’ by Jennifer Lee looks at alternative ways of business planning that use creative ideas and strengths to develop a visual map for your business. It can include mood boards, mind maps, photographs, animations, collage, video. It can be a fold out sheet, powerpoint presentation, annotated sculpture, any format that works for you and provides what you need.
You already have the basics of a business plan if you fully engage with and complete all the modules of this course.
Use the table below to collate the information into a file and you’ll have the essentials you need for a fairly comprehensive plan. The plan is available as a download so that you can add extra items.
Financial planning
We all have different skills and experience, accounts and financial planning may be something you’re really comfortable with, or just thinking about them might make you feel ill. However you feel about it, getting to grips with money is an essential part of making sure that the flowers you grow are actually going to make you money and not cost you money.
If you have rent to pay, a van to run and seeds to buy you need to make sure you know where the money is coming from to pay from it all. A 3 or 5 year financial plan will give you some sense of how quickly you need to get up and running and how long you have to build your market and customer base. It’s OK to make a loss (if you can afford it) so long as it’s planned and you have a strategy to balance the books.
Claire runs a comprehensive course on Prices, Costing and how to make a profit which can help you to work through this in more detail.
Budgeting
I plan my business mainly by setting budgets.
It can feel a bit like you’re making it all up, and to a certain extent that’s true. Forward planning is always a guessing game, you don’t know what is actually going to happen, you just have to be confident, flexible and adaptable. If it doesn’t work, that can tell you as much as if it does, you can regroup and try again or change direction.
Try to
Keep costs low
Spread your risks
For the past few years I’ve been planning to offer more funeral flowers and put an income from this into the budget. I’d already done some over previous few years and wanted to offer an alternative to what was currently available. I knew that Flowers from the Farm was developing a Farewell Flowers website so also produced some promotional material, contacted local funeral directors, posted on social media and on our website. I got zero orders, even fewer than in previous years. Thankfully other areas of business made up for the shortfall and my turnover wasn’t affected but it wasn’t what I planned at all. Funeral flowers remains in my plan but it needs a different promotional strategy. Maybe this year…