How to Maintain a Vibrant Floral Side Hustle

Did you know that you can have a floral side-hustle AND maintain your full-time job?

From a young age, I have always wanted to start my own business. I grew up with a rock-star entrepreneurial mother who, in 25 years, started and successfully ran four businesses, constantly reinventing herself to match her life stage.

I always had that drive to open my own small business, too, but instead decided to focus on a more traditional career that has given me so much over the years, and I am just not ready to give up yet.

Most entrepreneurs always preach and teach about how to turn the side hustle into a full-time gig. But what if you want it to stay part-time? Is that even okay to admit in our “always push for more” society?

I really couldn’t find any resources that taught you how to grow your business while maintaining a balance with other priorities. Over the past year, I have had to navigate that myself—here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Set Boundaries for Your Time

First, there are only so many hours in a week and, if you want to stay part-time, you need to make time boundaries. How many hours do you want to spend on your business? Is it realistic you will have 2 hours every single day? Or are you only going to be able to focus on it only on the weekends?

For me, I only have about 5 hours a week to spare beyond my current full-time job and other life responsibilities. I also have weekends, but I wanted to remain flexible with my schedule, so I focused on weddings and events and only booked them every other weekend May through November.

Learn more about how to get started in your floral side hustle, including 7 simple steps to take to get started on the right foot!

I block my time throughout the week to have 2 hours of emails and social media planning on Monday afternoon, 2 hours of consult calls with clients on Wednesdays, and 1 hour of email catch-up on Friday morning. For weeks that have events scheduled, these 5 hours are swapped for prep for that weekend’s wedding.

Setting goals is vital in any business and provides motivation for getting things done!

Create Realistic Business Goals

Limiting and blocking your time also requires you to be realistic about business goals. Before starting Wild Meadow Floral, I thought I’d focus a lot on revenue and generating as much as possible. However, I now focus much more on margin and time commitment to get to the desired hourly rate I’d like to earn.

I have said yes to many small, intimate weddings that I can fit within my 5 hour time block. And I’ve said no to a few more time-intensive events that would’ve brought in huge amounts of revenue—but would have required more effort than I can manage in 5 hours. I’ve also added on a few other offerings, including bouquet preservation and standing monthly orders, as these are high-margin products.

Use Tech and Tools for Efficiency

To use your time wisely, you also need efficient tools. How can you save a few minutes doing the tasks you must get done? Operational efficiencies really can be boiled down to how you can produce a high-quality product with as few resources as possible.

I am always thinking of how to stack tasks or use tools to get jobs done faster, both technologically or operationally. I use paid tools like Quickbooks or Squarespace, but I love free tools like Canva, Google Meet, and Google Sheets.

Do some research to discover which tools will best help you manage your time.

An example of an efficiency tool I immediately implemented is standardizing the proposals I send to brides.

I created a free template on Canva and reuse the template for every proposal I put together. It is an easy “drag and drop” method to create the template, so it takes me about 10 minutes to put together a first consult proposal. I also loaded Canva with stock images of all the flowers, foliage, and my past work, so I don’t need to go digging in files to find what I need.

There are many more operational efficiencies I would like to implement in year two, though. The first being the actual physical space I design in. Currently, I design in my unfinished basement, but I store my flowers in a guest room with an AC unit on the second floor. I am wasting a lot of energy schlepping buckets up and downstairs. My goal in year two of my business is to create a small space for a CoolBot in my basement in order to design and store flowers on the same level.

I have learned quite a bit in year one of my side-hustle business. Even though I laid out pretty strict ground rules for how much time and effort I am putting into Wild Meadow Floral, there are—inevitably—weeks I feel overwhelmed.

I’ve reflected on those weeks and realized it was always because I was planning and executing in too tight of a timeframe. To prevent this in the future, I won’t be agreeing to last-minute custom orders or events and have already said no to quite a few!

Running a business is hard, but it doesn’t always have to be stressful with the proper planning and a goal-oriented approach.