[0:05]Edible Blooms is an online gift delivery company. We're much like the traditional florist, but you get to eat our bouquets when they arrive. They're made of gourmet chocolates, fresh fruit, and lovely cookies, even champagne and beer for the blokes.
[0:22]I had always wanted to have my own business from a very young age. So for me it was a matter of finding the right idea and then getting the resources together to make it happen. So I actually spent 18 months researching different ideas. I looked at buying existing businesses, franchises or starting up. And for me, a complete startup was the best way to go.
[0:47]That's a really good question about what research led me to open Edible Blooms. And if I really think about it, at the end of the day, it was deciding on doing something that I loved and something that I was passionate about. Because I think if you're going to spend the time that you do to start up a business, you have to love what you do, otherwise it will be too much of a chore. So the best advice I'd give somebody starting up is to follow what you love.
[1:13]If I had a crystal ball, I think I would have taken a bigger holiday before I started the business. Because one of the things you quickly discover when you start up your own business is, it's very hard to take time away from the business in the early years of starting up. So the advice I always give to other people starting their own business is take a break before you get started. And the other piece of advice I think that's really worked for me is listening to my mom. My mom's been full of great advice, and I think you can never look past listening to your mother. They have great, great tips for you.
[1:46]There's lots of issues that arise when you're starting up a business. I remember when I did that very first business plan, what was really useful for me was writing, doing the SWOT analysis, which sounds very basic, but it's really looking at your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities and your threats. And before I started the business, I had never worked in retail. I had never worked in a food business. I'd never even been a waitress when I was younger. I had never ran my own online business, so there were a lot of things I identified that I needed to work on before I started. So some of the things I learned, I did an intensive, and I wasn't a florist. My background is not floristry, it's marketing and business development. So I did a personal tutor with a florist school, and I paid for one-on-one coaching to learn what it's like to be a florist. I did an MYOB business course to learn how to do the books in my business, and I learned an awful amount about online business. I tried, I first of all started designing my own website, and soon realized that that was something I needed to pay an expert for. So, and I guess the other things that I've learned along the way is that it's really important to pay for good advice. Because there are people who know so much more about you in specialist areas of the business. So the way that our business has evolved, the only administrative function we do in house is marketing. Everything else I outsource, because my background is marketing and business development, so I feel confident in that area. But my accounts outsourced, my IT's outsourced, my human resources outsourced. So we pay for good advice.
[3:14]For me, having a business plan before I started was essential. That was my background was marketing and business development, so I knew the the importance to to my business growth, and it really identified the gaps that I had before I went to market.
[3:31]Well, I think starting up the business with your own money, the biggest risk is that someone else will come in, beat you, be bigger, all those things. So, before I started the business, I was quite terrified about starting up and it not working. So I put a lot of thought into how I could make my business look more substantial than it was when it was just me starting starting up by myself. Um, so we had strategies like our own the right domain names, so edibleblooms.com, edibleblooms.com.au. Um, we had a 1-300 number, and we also had the right email address, so it wasn't kelly@yahoo.com.au, it was kelly@edibleblooms.com.au. Um, and that was a really important part of people knowing that we were here, and we were we were we're quite a substantial business.
[4:16]Managing our cash flow has been my absolutely biggest learning experience of starting my own business. Someone very wise told me that revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king, and absolutely any startup should be focusing mostly on the cash part, because that's the life blood, that's what will keep your business going. For us, um, we have a very positive cash flow cycle, so I think before you start a business, you have to really know what your cash flow cycle is. So for us, um, we don't have big data, um, we get paid before our deliveries go out. Um, but as a business has grown, we've had high stock levels, um, higher investment levels to keep growing our premise size. Um, so cash has been a very, very important part of the business to keep an eye on.
[5:04]I think if you're starting an online business, there's some great benefits. Um, the first one is that your marketing investments is totally measurable. So every dollar that you spend, you can measure that return to the business. Um, the second thing about being online, which is really important to every business today is that you're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. So suddenly you're not having to staff up, so it's lower cost and you can make your services available to your customers.
[5:32]The key things that I do to work on the business rather than in it, um, is to take a big picture look at where we're heading. So my job is to make sure the business is still growing. We're looking for new opportunities, new markets, new product lines, and to make sure that happens. So, um, and the other part of my job is to make everyone accountable for the business plan objectives we set ourselves. We start every year here at Edible Blooms, every calendar year with a planning meeting. And we have the same facilitator that runs the meeting, and my job is to make sure we keep on track with that plan that we set ourselves each year.
