The Tough Questions

FloristWare is a powerful tool designed to help florists save time and money while increasing sales and order values.

This is all good – less time spent on repetitive tasks means florists have more time to spend building their businesses, being with their families, or pursuing their families. Saving money and increasing sales is great – for a lot of florists that means paying off some debt and getting a little farther ahead, for others it means an already profitable operation becomes more profitable. Almost everybody in the flower business likes bigger order values – it's more fun for your designers and lets you better showcase your brand.

But – not every florist cares about these things. Some florists happy with the ways things are. They take a "more money more problems" view. They're happy paying a bookkeeper to come in and re-enter orders into QuickBooks and do monthly billing. They like spending a lot of time in their shops. They aren't interested in growing their business. Often they're marking time until they retire. Others don't care that they're paying too much for an over-priced and antiquated POS system from a wire service.

These shops generally aren't a good fit for FloristWare. They'll be happier if they stay with what they love and we focus on helping shops that want to be more efficient and more profitable achieve just that.

It's very rare for a single shop to use all of the features in FloristWare, especially in the beginning. The most important thing is that they focus on learning and using the features that will help them achieve their goals most efficiently. Once they have those mastered we encourage them to call us and say "hey – show us something cool" and we can almost always surprise and delight them by showing them a feature they didn't know existed.

Don't worry if you aren't using all (or even most) of the features in FloristWare. Even if you are using just a handful of features FloristWare is a better value than any other system. As you learn and use more features your return on investment just gets bigger and better.

Our (admittedly impossible) goal is a system where every single feature and task is "discoverable" and self explanatory. That means that the features should be there waiting for you, and you shouldn't need a manual or training to find and use them.

That's the goal. We're not there yet but we're trying. The sheer number of features is what makes it hard. Some systems can be learned inside and out in a day because, well, there isn't very much to learn – you're basically placing orders on your website for the customer and pretending it is a POS system. Our clients learn and become expert at the core features (making sales, taking orders, etc.) in FloristWare almost immediately. With most systems that's it – there is nothing more to discover. With FloristWare that is just the beginning.

We're very proud of our support department (we consider them to be the best in the industry and they will always e a key part of FloristWare) but the aim of our development and user interface efforts are to have a system where no client ever needs to call them unless it is an emergency.

Sometimes we'll hear from shops that have trouble getting employees to 'buy in'. They want to stick with pencil and paper, or the wire service system they have been using for years.

That makes sense. Much of the work of learning a new system falls to the employees that answer the phone and take orders, but they see little of the benefit. They may know – and be reluctant to leave – the wire service system they know well because they aren't the ones footing the bill. They may not care about increased sales because, when you get right down to it, more sales means more work. Anytime a new system or process is introduced some employees may resist.

But of course any employer is used to paying people to get employees to do work they would not do otherwise. Employees don't love washing the floor or scrubbing buckets but they do because it's expected of them. SO to with a new POS system – they need to get on board if they want the shop to continue to survive so they can keep getting paid.

FloristWare is easy to use and it will, after a few days, make their working lives easier to. And we're here to help them with the transition.