This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Greetings, hello and welcome. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School," every day bringing you different stories and ideas of people making money in all kinds of ways. Now, one of the ways to make money is to pay attention to how people are spending money. Whenever they spend a lot of money in particular, and perhaps when they complain about spending a lot of money. If you encounter that situation, there just might be an opportunity there.
Naturally, today's story provides an illustration of that, it's about a newlywed who creates a floral service that can't wilt. This project manager was astonished at how expensive a wedding could be, so after shelling out a lot of cash for his own, he starts a service to help engaged couples save thousands. Of course, he's not just a nice guy, even though he probably is a nice guy, I'm sure. He's also profiting from this project, and I'll tell you how he does it, how he was able to overcome a couple of challenges that came up along the way. All that is coming right up after I say a quick thank you to today's sponsor.
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While planning his own wedding in 2015, Jason Anderson realized just how expensive getting married can be. In fact, some studies report that the average person, well, I guess the average couple, spends around $30,000 on just one day of their lives. That's one expensive day, so Jason began to explore different ways he could make money on the side. He picked up a copy of the $100 startup, which he says pushed him from wanting to start a business to deciding that he would. Jason is a project manager by day, and over the next few weeks, he spent his evenings and weekends at his kitchen table.
He had a legal pad and a pen, and spent all of his time brainstorming ideas. As time went on, he found himself constantly coming back to one of those ideas, help people save money on their wedding day. Next, he looked at different ways he could help people cut down on those expenses. He thought about leasing items like signs and decorations and banners, all the things that wedding venues didn't normally provide. But the closer he looked, the more he began to notice a huge gap in the market, and it wasn't signs or banners.
You see, flowers are the third biggest expense for a lot of couples. After catering in the venue, couples can find themselves paying upwards of several thousand dollars for bouquets and centerpieces, all of which are usually thrown in the trash or left to wilt and die as soon as the service is over. So as pretty as they are, these flowers create a lot of expense and also a lot of waste, at least for the typical wedding. So Jason thought about this for a while and stumbled on a solution. What if he could use artificial flowers instead of real ones for the floral side of people's weddings?
When they're done well, they look just as good as the real thing, they can be arranged just as easily, and they create much less waste than their natural alternatives. Once the service is complete, the happy couple can send them back, then they can be used for another event somewhere else. Jason and his wife both felt this was a great way to save people thousands of dollars, as well as a profitable business idea. It could be a win-win. So Jason started the side hustle, Compass Rose Floral, and began looking for faux flowers to buy.
Alas, it wasn't a rose-scented success right away. Finding wholesalers for these flowers was much harder than anticipated. Jason found himself investing weeks, scouring the depths of the internet to try and find a supplier. Although flower wholesalers do have an internet presence of some sort, a lot of them still rely on the offline world for most of their sales. Side note, if you could solve that problem, you might have a side hustle of your own.
Somebody write that down. Eventually, Jason found four separate wholesalers who supplied national retail chains. Because these companies sell at trade prices, they only work with official businesses. So Jason had to prove his authenticity by showing a sales tax license. He figured out how to get that by Googling and then paying a small fee.
Not complicated. Jason decided to work with wholesalers because although the prices are a little higher, it simplified the buying process and allowed him to test his service without buying an unusable level of bulk items. At some point later, he might go direct to the original supplier, but right now he's happy with the wholesale system. His costs for the faux flowers range from $1 each all the way up to $20 for special and unique flowers. Most of them are in the range of $2 to $8.
Now, another major challenge that he hadn't anticipated was gauging the quality of these flowers. You see, each of those four wholesalers provided a different kind of flower and all sorts of variations and different types were better than others. There was no consistency. It took some trial and error to figure out which products were best, but by working through that process, Jason and his wife discovered which manufacturers they could best order different products from. And they learned something else at this point.
Once that first batch arrived, they discovered that neither one of them had the talent of arranging flowers. It took a few failed attempts before they realized they would need professional help to turn this into a success. Jason posted a job on the platform Indeed.com and advertised for a floral designer. He wanted a wedding specialist and over the course of a few days, he talked to five different people. He eventually ordered the freelance contract to a lead designer.
She created the initial prototypes and bouquets customers could choose from, was also able to help with custom projects. This cost the new venture, Compass Rose Floral, about $1,000. It brought their total startup costs to around $6,000, including the inventory they bought and their website. The website was cheap. Jason used a stock template from Shopify and his wife created the product images just using her iPhone.
Their service cost different amounts depending on the client, what kind of wedding they want. But Jason's aim is to always charge 50% of what a local forest would charge for the same service with real flowers. And he's found bridal shows to be the most effective way of marketing the business. At these shows, people will walk past Jason's stall, thinking he's just another florist, only to turn around and come back as soon as they realize, hey, those flowers aren't actually real. Compass Rose Floral is also registered on the knot.com and wedding wire, two popular wedding sites where Jason tries to build relationships with venues and vendors.
So far, this brings in only a small portion of their total income, but he's hoping their relationship will blossom. In just a few short months, those marketing efforts, as well as the quality of the product, helped Jason generate over $15,000 in income. He's now focused on growing his client base and getting more bookings for the upcoming wedding season. He'd also like to explore ways to package and transport the flowers to weddings even further afield. Look out, everyone.
This side hustle could become a blooming business. Well, as I said, if you pay attention to where people spend money, especially where they spend significant amounts of money, not that people are ever excited about spending a lot of money, but the wedding industry in particular is something where people will choose to spend money. Obviously, they want to invest in their big day. They might spend up to $30,000 or even more, but somewhere along the way, they're probably gonna complain about it. At least they're gonna complain about parts of it.
So over the course of the show so far, we've had a number of features about weddings. I wrote down a couple of my favorites you might wanna check out if you haven't heard them before. One is episode 357, an Atlanta duo who helps engaged couples elope and therefore save money. Number 185, wedding bells ring brighter if the bride's not broke. And number 271, writing duo makes a vow to improve wedding speeches.
This is a fun project of two friends who've created this profitable side hustle, helping people with the wedding vows as well as the toasts and other speeches that go along with ceremonies. So there are all kinds of ways to make money, as you know from listening to the show, and there's all kinds of ways to make money in the wedding industry. One thing in particular I like about Jason's project is once he's invested in the inventory, it's a service business that's nearly all profit. Like he has to spend a few thousand dollars to acquire these flowers at first, but then he rents them out, he gets them back, he rents them out again. Again, nearly all profit unlike a traditional florist, which has to account for all their costs.
And of course that's why the cost of the couple or whoever's paying for the wedding is higher. But the point is Jason doesn't have to worry about that, so he can charge less, but also make a higher profit margin. Nice work if you can get it. I hope that you are doing something to work on your side hustle today. I hope you're doing something to get closer to the freedom that's important to you to be able to make the choices in life that are important to you.
That's ultimately what this is all about. It's not just about making money, it's about doing something for yourself. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. Those episodes I mentioned again are episodes 357, 185, and 271. Or if you just want to remember one thing, the show notes for today's episode are at sidehustleschool.com/412.
That's 412. And if you come to that page, we'll link up all three of the other episodes. You can check them out. Thank you so much for listening today. You're a rockstar.
I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
