Business lessons learnt from Young Apprentice Season 2 Episode 3 – Floristry

Task: To run a market stall florist, and pitch to provide flower arrangements to pre-arranged clients
Objective: Profit (takings – costs)

Florists are able to charge double or triple the raw costs.

All flower arrangements are generally based around two main flowers, one of which being variegated pittosporum. These are generally cheap flowers that help to bulk up a display and provide body, but which don’t look cheap to customers.

The two teams sales people both knew their own strengths and weaknesses. Atomic’s team correctly identified that pitching arrangements would be easiest when talking about positive attributes of the end result – flower arrangements are about “luxury” and showing “class”.

Kinetic’s sales team, on the other hand, were the worst kind of sales people – those that have no interest in the product at all to quote James “I hate flowers, and nature and animals”. They at least had self-awareness, noting “if they see a pretty girls face talking about flowers and they see a guys face talking about prices, then they are going to want the flowers”

The first of the clients we saw was the five-star hotel, hosting a ruby wedding anniversary. They wanted five posies down the table, and a larger arrangement for the mantelpiece. The celebrating guests had requested a preference for red flowers, with a particular preference for red roses.

The sales team from Kinetic asked if they wanted the mantelpiece arrangement to really stand out. This was a foolish question on a number of levels. Firstly, the whole point of a mantelpiece flower arrangement is to act as a focal point for the room. Secondly, however, is that the arrangements of the room should serve to highlight the celebrating couple, not to stand out in their own right – as the staff said, they want their guests to walk in and say “gosh doesn’t the room look lovely?!”.

Atomic’s sales team alternatively

The second of the clients was a west-end musical, with it’s producers looking to arrange four bouquets, two for male leads and two for female leads.

Atomic’s sales team was told that as the cost was £40, so to go in at £80, and once again they went in at a higher bid (£100) than requested by the project manager. Kinetic’s sales team, however, decided to forgo talking to the design team when it came to the pitch, but at least this made them sound like they were in control. However this did not make up for their complete lack of design abilities, which ultimately lost them the bid more than the raw price.

The third and final pre-arranged client was an exclusive women’s hair salon that wanted four window displays. They were given a very clearly defined brief – “colour is my pasion, but when it comes to flowers they have to be simple, chic and done with the upmost of taste”. The hair dressers also seemed the most understanding of the needs of a newly started long term business, encouraging the candidates – “treat these windows as your postcard to the world, really” and “its your opportunity to show us how artistic and clever you can be”

One major business mistake we were reminded of in this episode was letting your phone ring during an important meeting. This gives whoever you are meeting with the impression that you are more concerned about your other contacts than them. Whilst Lewis claimed to not know how to turn the phone’s sound off, this doesn’t help – you are expected as a business person to know how to use your own tools!

Something we saw with all the pitches was that you should always research before a meeting about your client, their needs, and what you can offer them. At the least you should know their names, their business, what they are likely to want, and what hence you can offer them.

Atomic decided to price their spare stock at £3, £5 and £10, going from the start of the trading day with a margin of just double the cost. It is no surprise then that we actually saw customers proclaiming how cheap the flowers were. There’s a further mistake to these prices, however. By not having a £20 offering, they failed to have anything for the higher end of the impluse market, and had no standard higher end offering to make their midrange items look more appealing.

In the end the hotel were not happy with Kinetic’s flower arrangements for them. By trying to cut costs massively, they just ended up insulting the client and providing a sub-standard service. What is most notable is that they didn’t even have to – florists base their business around knowing how to cheaply bulk out displays.

Kinetic sending Harry M and Gbembi to sell to local businesses was a sensible idea. Businesses are more likely than consumers to be able to order larger quantities of higher quality flowers, and use of this strategy or lack thereof has made or failed teams on The Apprentice in the past. And we saw a perfect example of the effectiveness of this strategy when Harry M managed to sell the heliconias, finding the perfect location for them, and securing the sale by appealing to a business’s existing customers for social approval for the pitch.

Team atomic: total sales £858.25, costs £407.29 profit £450.96
Team kinetic: total sales £912.10 costs £448.58 profit £463.52

Atomic surprisingly lost, by only £12.56, however. As their failure was by such a close margin, it is hard to really say what cost them the win, however failure to secure the hotel pitch and failure to price stall sales high enough were their only faults. I think the only practical thing they could have done would have been to price their stall offerings a little bit higher, perhaps if just to have had the £20 price bracket offering.

Things to ask about when it comes to decorative sales:
colour
size
how much of a statement you need to make
What do the flowers need to say
Existing theming to fit in with
budget