A business plan for a floral studio, minus the template

What you sell, and to whom

This sounds like the easy question and it is where most plans stay vague. Weddings, events, retail, subscriptions, and funeral work are different businesses that happen to buy from the same wholesaler. They differ in lead time, in how predictable demand is, in how much of the price is labor, and in how much cold storage they need.

• Weddings: long lead time, high value per job, concentrated seasons, heavy installation and logistics, and a client who buys once.
• Recurring or contract work: predictable volume, lower value per delivery, and demand that does not disappear in the off season.
• Retail: constant low value transactions, high shrink exposure, and a shop presence to pay for.
• Funeral work: short lead time, hard deadlines, and steady rather than seasonal demand.

A plan that names one of these as the core and treats the rest as secondary makes every subsequent decision easier. A plan that says all of them is describing capacity you probably do not have.

The season is the plan's hardest problem

Wedding demand is concentrated, and costs are not. The cooler runs in February, insurance renews whether or not there is work, and rent does not care about the calendar. Any plan that projects an annual figure and divides it by twelve has hidden its worst month.

Capacity, stated honestly

Capacity in this trade is not a single number, because the binding constraint moves. It is bench space some weeks, cold storage most weeks, transport on the big jobs, and people on the weekends where two weddings collide.

A plan that states capacity as a number of weddings per year without saying which constraint produced that number has not done the work. State the constraint, and state what it would take to move it.

The numbers a plan has to carry

Whatever format the plan takes, a small number of figures do the work, and every one of them is yours rather than an industry figure somebody else can supply.

• What a representative job costs you and what you charge for it, with the arithmetic behind both.
• Your cost of goods as a share of price, measured rather than assumed.
• Fixed costs per month, including the quiet months.
• Your capacity, and the constraint that produces it.
• How many jobs of your representative size it takes to cover a year, which falls out of the four above.

The parts of a plan we are not going to answer

A business plan usually has a section on structure, registration, licensing, insurance, and tax. Those answers depend on where you are, and in this trade they can differ by state and sometimes by city.

We are not going to tell you which entity type to choose, which registrations apply to you, whether your sales are taxable, how delivery or labor is treated, or what insurance to carry. Anything you read that gives one national answer to those questions is describing one place and not necessarily yours. Take them to somebody licensed where you work.