Wedding Planner Earns Passive Income with DIY Flowers

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome to a brand new week. What's up friends, listeners, community. At the time this episode is coming out, we have only three weeks until 100 Side Hustles. My brand new book is out in the world. I'm so excited, I'm gonna be on a tour to about 14 cities.

Come to sidehustleschool.com/tour to see those dates and cities and be sure to pre-order. It's gonna be a lot of fun, and I look forward to sharing the whole process with you. So even if you're living in a city where I'm not gonna come for the tour, you can still check out the book and be involved in the whole process. I'll be sharing more on the show and of course, on Instagram, 193 countries, and you know, wherever else I am, wherever else you are, who knows. All right, so let's talk about today's story.

What if you could work yourself out of a job by transitioning to more passive income? This is a really good story, a really great business. Fantastic, doing very, very well, making tens of thousands of dollars a month. And this story is a multi-phase transition story that highlights the road of career change, side hustling, and now e-commerce and full-time entrepreneurship. This corporate employee turned wedding planner hated seeing young couples struggle with her floral design fee for their weddings.

So she created an alternative option. This alternative option is affordable DIY wedding bouquets. It's really fun how this works. She has learned a lot along the way. And as I said, it is highly profitable.

Now, she's also got some advice for you. Here's the advice, real quick, three sentences. The critics only criticize and never put themselves out there. The people you wanna listen to are your customers. Their opinions are the only ones that matter.

All right, there is a lot to learn from this story. So here's a quick thank you to our sponsor. I really appreciate them keeping the lights on, allowing us to bring all this content to you every single day for free. And then I'll tell you all about it. Wedding planner earns passive income with DIY flowers.

[Music]

Amy McCord Jones studied biochemistry and forensics in college. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but once she had to start working with dead bodies and upper level classes, she realized it wasn't her life's calling. So after graduation, she tried out a corporate job installing bank security software. That wasn't the best fit either, but it was tolerable and had the perk of not working with the dead. So she stuck with it.

One day, Amy and her mom were out walking her dog in her hometown of Oklahoma City. Her mom mentioned a nearby chapel that was up for sale. It was beautiful. It was old. It was historical, having been moved all the way from Nova Scotia decades ago.

The financial crisis had lowered real estate costs dramatically and the entire chapel, located right in the up and coming Paseo Arts District, was only $125,000. Amy did the math. The mortgage would come in right at $900 a month. She figured if she could book just one wedding each month, her bills would be covered. So she and her sister wrote up a business plan, asked their mom for help with the down payment and went to the bank.

Couple weeks later, they were owners of the oldest chapel in the city. And that's how the wedding planning business got started. It took a couple of years, but Amy was eventually able to quit her corporate job and work with soon to be married couples full time. But she noticed a problem. Many of her clients were struggling to keep costs low on their wedding.

She'd become quite the floral designer, but she wasn't using those skills as much as she would have liked. Because $3,000 for a simple set of arrangements was just too expensive for most people. That's when she came up with her next idea, which would turn out to be the big idea. A website that made it super simple for brides to order DIY flower bouquets that they could then put together on their own to save money. After some research, Amy confirmed that there weren't any businesses like that already.

At least none that were in pursuit of quality flowers instead of B grade flowers like what you'd get from Costco or other grocery stores. She just knew the idea would work. She'd already met her target audience dozens of times. Now she just had to build it. She started by reaching out to wholesalers she'd bought from in the past.

They were always complaining about not being allowed to sell directly to the public. And Amy knew her business could act as an easy workaround for them. She had to convince them to sell at lower quantities, like 10 stems for a minimum purchase instead of 50, which wasn't easy, but most ended up agreeing because they wanted the business. She priced the flowers by color theme and package size, ready to be made into bouquets and corsages. She offered three packages from $250 to $1,000 to give brides flexibility on how elaborate they wanted their DIY arrangements to be.

She then spent about $5,000. She paid a local company $2,500 to build out a custom e-commerce store, got her new LLC filed and accounting set up, bought a few dozen boxes of flowers from one of her wholesalers and spent the last $1,000 on a photographer. She then shot about 20 instructional videos in her living room on how to actually make the bouquets, corsages and table toppers once the brides received their flowers. Finally, in March 2015, which was seven years into her wedding planning and floral design business, Flower Moxie went live. Amy's pay-per-click ads on Facebook started running and within a few days she had her first sale.

Her heart nearly jumped out of her chest when she saw the notification and then she opened the email. It was from her mother. Thanks, mom. But the ads did work, slowly. She got her next few customers, the real ones, then a couple of months, breaking $1,000 in revenue in May.

From there, word of Flower Moxie spread from happy bride to bride-to-be organically. One year later, Flower Moxie had its first $10,000 month, a huge milestone, but not all was well with Amy. Collecting and shipping flowers overnight was stressful. And as the business continued to grow, Amy got more and more burned out. She did a few things to streamline operations, like hiring a couple of friends to help, switching over to Shopify, and allowing customers to pick up their flowers directly from local wholesalers.

But the burden of running Flower Moxie and still doing wedding planning on the weekends was wearing her down. So finally, in January 2018, Amy left the wedding planning business to her sister to work on Flower Moxie full-time. She's since increased the number of products, improved her website, and made more instructional videos. Not only is she less stressed and tired now, but sales have grown dramatically and all by word of mouth. After spending a few thousand dollars on ads her first year, she turned off the tap and currently spends $0 per month.

Simply doing everything she can to help brides-to-be save money on gorgeous flowers has been her most successful growth strategy. And she's not finished growing yet. At $60,000 a month in revenue, which approximately 40% of that is profit, Flower Moxie is now well-positioned to expand into additional markets. She's also currently exploring some new partnerships. But however that pans out, the core of Amy's success isn't going to change, helping people enjoy A-grade flowers at prices they can feel good about.

[Music]

Well, I just love everything about this project. What a great idea, well-executed, which is ultimately what these things come down to. Like when you hear a story on the program or elsewhere of a side hustle turn business that's grown really big. I mean, $60,000 a month, it seems like it's gonna continue growing. And of course, with something like flowers, there is a good profit margin on it, even when you're passing on so much of the savings to customers.

So again, great idea, well-executed. Somebody else could have had this idea, but then to go and create this beautiful website, which by the way, I went to take a look at, I would encourage you to do the same thing if you're interested in any similar field, or if you just wanna see an example of an e-commerce store that's really well done, with copy that speaks directly to its intended audience, it's just a very warm approachable style, frequently asked questions page is really well done. I always liked that. One of the biggest questions I think people have, and it's addressed a few different ways throughout the site, is, can I really do this? Okay, this looks great, I would love to save money, but I don't wanna scrimp too much on my wedding.

Like I wanna make sure that the DIY floral arrangements don't look too DIY, basically. And so, again, she addresses that really well. You can see videos where you meet different brides that have used the service. You can meet Amy and see all kinds of fun facts about her, as well as the team that she has now built. So congratulations, Amy.

Thank you so much for letting us share this story with our audience. It is inspiring to me, and hopefully to our listeners as well. I would also encourage them to do something about it. Inspiration with action is better than just saying, "Oh, it's cool, inspiring." I want our listeners to go and do something for themselves. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/863.

Episode 863, much more is on the way, gonna be a big month as we ramp up to June, and beyond. Thanks so much for listening. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.