When we first started, we created a lots of SOPs or standard operating procedures mainly for our kitchen operations. We needed them for the health department. The advice I would give to entrepreneurs is um think of brickandmortar last. Make sure that you have a successful product.
you have a demographic that you're going to try to advertise to. You have all of the systems in place before you buy a brickandmortar because that's just your overhead. Um, and if you can run a business without having a retail shop, do that first and then figure out how to get like a a cornerstone of brick and mortar in in the city. For sure.
I think that's ongoing because you want to find people that are a right fit with the team that you have cuz you can have one bad egg that will ruin the whole thing. So, um I think patience is key in hiring and not feeling like cuz you can have the tendency when you first start your business to feel desperate like you got to hire every person that comes even if they aren't a right fit for your business. And I think it's important not to do that. And then sometimes when you are managing, you do have to have hard conversations.
And that that's not always fun, but it's a part of it. The more and more that you are adding different people into your business, employees, managers, all of those people need to be trained on how you want things done. And if you are not documenting your process before those people get there, it's a lot harder to document it after and then retrain everybody because you go, "Oh, we're not hitting the mark." Originally, my marketing strategy was um doortodoor basically. So, I started small.
It was my mom and I. We had this little shop in Urbandale and I just thought I'm going to hand flyers out to local businesses and I'm going to be involved in the community. Um, and I thought that that was a good idea. And then as we grew um, and we moved to Lake View, you have to always be willing to change your marketing strategy.
social media, word of mouth. That one's going to be like one of the biggest ones is making sure you're giving the customer a good experience uh the first time they come in here because they're going to walk out the door and tell people about it. Um they're going to leave reviews on Google on uh our toast app. Technology has been huge in our in our business from social media to online ordering to even AI understanding how things work and and being more efficient.
Technology is actually a really intricral part of um our flower shop which may surprise people um because flower shops in general tend to be you know handwritten not really a technologyheavy uh business. However, we are we have a really great point of sale system that's designed specifically for flower shops and we work with them um to add plugins and to custom design it for what what our needs Parks.
