How I make it work: the florist/garden consultant

Nosing around in one woman's business to steal her best advice...

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COME AND HANG OUT with me and other self-employed folk! Let’s have a post-work Zoom drink on Friday, 20th Nov, because I need something to look forward to. Free tickets here.

Hello, Colleague!

I hope you’ve had a restful weekend.

I’ve recently been reflecting on a massive perk of self-employment - escaping meaningless office jargon. I’ve enjoyed the results of a survey which found ‘touching base’ to be the most irritating phrase (with high rankings for ‘thinking outside the box’ and ‘spitballing ideas’.) Bleurgh. You don’t get this shit when it’s just you and your cat in the office. (Although he is a fan of hairballing ideas).

This week, after learning about Grace Dickinson’s work with animals, it’s time for another…

How I make it work

Out of Office delves into the nitty-gritty of one self-employed woman’s business – including money, motivation and their top tips for other freelance workers

Poppy Gardner is a florist, garden design and plant consultant. She’s been fully self-employed for around two years, having worked on her business as a side hustle for a year or so beforehand, while working part-time in marketing. Take a look at some of her work on Instagram.

My business has two distinct elements

I’m trained in horticulture so I do garden design and consultancy, as well as plant consultancy. But I’m also a florist – it was my mum’s job too – and do flowers for events, corporate clients, weddings, and also do workshops for things like hen dos.

I’ve always treated them as separate things, and thought about having different brand names for each, but my friends said I’d be mad not to use my name – Poppy Gardner – as it’s so fitting for my work!

Before lockdown my work was about 70% floristry to 30% gardening, but since then it’s been entirely gardening – people are at home more and spending more time in their gardens, while my usual big events are cancelled. Floristry work tends to be better paid, but has lower margins as the materials are expensive, whereas consultancy doesn’t require any materials.

Being self-employed has its challenges

The main one is having enough time for everything, particularly admin. I want to spend my time doing the creative side of my work, and business development or marketing. I’m terrible at things like accounting – I’ll put it off and make myself really stressed.

I’m trying to work out when to outsource things. It’s particularly difficult when I know I’ve got the capacity to do a decent job on something – it’s hard to know what to spend my precious money on. I’d been meaning to sort out my website for ages and kept being too busy with work – so I asked for help in a networking group, and it was done.

What I love about being my own boss

I’m good at managing myself – in a previous job I’ve been a PA, so I’m very organised. I like not having anyone else tell me how to manage my time, and also having the creative freedom, which I’ve never really found when I’ve been employed by someone else.

I don’t find it lonely, partly because I’m an introvert, and partly because a lot of my business is quite social anyway. I have a small number of people I’ve met through work and events who I can speak to about work things, which is helpful too.

I make less money, but I have more time, and the time that I have, I can use better. I’ve worked in a controlling environment before, where I couldn’t even get time off to go to the doctor.

Taking a break can be hard

It’s not easy to take a break – I feel guilty if I’m not doing something all the time. You have to step away for a while sometimes, but I’m always on my phone, and it’s difficult not to do that. If I miss an enquiry and a piece of work goes to someone else, that’s on me.

[Find some fail-safe techniques to help you switch off here].

Poppy’s top three tips for self-employed women

• Make a lot of lists! I use an app called Google Keep, which is like a virtual post-it note, and is very user-friendly. I use it to make all sorts of lists, which I can then access when I’m out and about.

• Join a networking group. I’m in a virtual group and it has really helped me. I didn’t have anyone for advice or resources about being self-employed before, and I’ve now met up with people from the group in real life. [Poppy is in paid group The Coven - as am I! This currently has a waiting list, so an alternate good place to start would be signing up to Out Of Office’s free hangout on Nov 20th. ]

• Outsource when you can. If something is stressing you out, just pay someone else to do it. Not only will it get it sorted, but you can also be more demanding in terms of what you want from them. [More on how to get started with outsourcing here].

I hope to see some of you at the OOO free drinks session this Friday (20th) at 5pm. Get your free ticket here. It will be great to put some faces to names, and have a bit of an offload about the strange world of being your own boss.

Don’t forget you can always hit reply if there’s something you’d like to share, suggest or recommend.

Have a great week!