Work Smarter, Not Harder, in 2007
By the time you read this article, you will still have
about 8,000 hours remaining in 2007… plenty of time to consider new
directions, implement changes and motivate your staff into action.
Floral business is tough. Profits are slim in the best of times and
rising oil costs, wages, health care, purchasing power and currency
exchange rates have floral businesses struggling to maintain decent
margins. Ontario is facing increasing water costs of 11 per cent in ’07
and additional 9 per cent increases per year are expected for the next
five years. Organic, sustainable and environmentally sound are good
things (reducing water use, for example). Smart business owners are
investigating (all) ideas that help reduce costs.
Get Smart!
When analyzing cost efficiencies of everyday activities, flower processing is the logical starting point. First question: are you using the correct solution for the job? Is it dosed correctly? What about treatment time? And finally, do you maximize the efficacy of solutions by using them for the entire period they are “active”? Money is saved every time solutions are mixed in sanitized buckets, dosed correctly and used for their entire “active” time period.
There are three basic categories of flower solutions: hydration solutions which contain no sugar at all and two flower foods, one with the minimum percentage of sugar and one with the maximum amount of sugar. It’s easy to remember what to use if you consider the flower’s needs. By the time blooms are on their way to your customer’s house, they have depleted their internal reserves of sugars and carbohydrates and need full-load flower food to continue opening and holding in the vase.
Whether you receive flowers (dry or wet-packed), the most effective solution is a hydration product. Hydration solutions are all about getting the flow going, dissolving air bubbles in stems and keeping things clean. The dosage for these solution types is the leanest of all solutions your flowers drink. That means a ready-to-use (RTU) gallon of hydration solution is the least expensive solution used. For example: your hydration solution costs about five cents per gallon. If you place 15-20 bunches per bucket, it costs you about .0025 cent per bunch to treat. If you can process a second load of flowers in the same hydration solution, you save water and reduce costs even more.
You could also simplify processing by using only two, rather than three solutions. In this case, process flowers in a low-sugar flower food upon arrival, then fill vases and soak foam in full-load food.
Maximize the use of your solutions
Use one colour of buckets for hydrating (hydration solution) and a different colour for sales display (flower food solution). This system makes rotation goof proof. Flowers need to hydrate for at least four hours up to three days after which time it’s important to transfer blooms from a hydration solution into flower food. Here you have two choices: low sugar flower food for display or full-sugar food for vase filling and soaking foam.
Both hydration and flower food solutions are active for five to seven days, so start on Monday with fresh solutions and use through Saturday to process or display flowers. Skim out the green bits between loads and make sure all stems get a sharp, clean cut going in. Avoid mixing old and new solutions and always start with clean buckets since bacteria, fungi and algae are the culprits causing stems to droop and fail.
What about bulb flowers that don’t really benefit from sugar?
With bulb flowers, the depth you fill the buckets can work in your (cost-saving) favor, too. If it takes three to four days to sell through your bulb blooms, prep pails with the amount of bulb solution that will be almost completely sucked dry within that time window. Tests have shown that bulb flowers don’t really respond negatively or positively to sugar. Tests also show bulb flowers respond VERY positively to clean (bacteria-free) solutions for good flow in stems and plant growth regulators (hormone replacement) to prevent quality problems. You know the symptoms: premature yellow sepals and foliage (alstroe and stars of Bethlehem), bloom stagnation (iris, freesia, tuberoses), loss of colour vibrancy (anemones, lilies, nerines) and tulip foliage that turns from green to grey then finally, yellow.
These negative symptoms are easily avoided when flowers drink food formulated with the needed hormones, which corrects the imbalance. Ask your wholesaler for bulb t-bags when processing bulbous flowers to appreciate the difference first hand.
Don’t have time…?
Explain the various solutions to your staff. Train them to follow the procedures of different-coloured buckets so it is simple to keep the solutions and rotation straight. Everyone needs to be behind the new procedures 100 per cent. It won’t be long before employees and customers start noticing appreciable quality benefits of specific handling protocols. Establish an easy-to-use system where everyone understands the flow and stick with it until it becomes habit. 2007 is the year to embrace environmentally and fiscally sound work habits. Smarter, not harder! is this year’s mantra.
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