Abby Chick from Blakemore's Flowers: Leading a Successful Team: Cliquer Spotlight!
In this Cliquer Spotlight, Vonda and Lori sit down with one of their very first members: Abby Chick, owner of Blakemore's Flowers in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Abby bought a shop that had been in bankruptcy the year before and turned a profit in her first year — and nine years in, she's built the kind of self-sufficient, loyal team most owners only dream about. Here's how she leads.
From part-time job to shop owner at 26
Abby's start is a classic accidental-florist story. Home from college on a parental "timeout," she called a local flower shop hoping for a delivery-driver gig like her grandfather once had. They didn't need a driver — but a neighboring shop needed a designer to cover a maternity leave, and they offered to train her. She was bench-taught by a very old-school florist and kept the "part-time" job for seven years, sampling college majors all the while, until a light bulb went off: this was the career.
Then came kismet. A childhood friend called out of the blue — his mother, it turned out, was the bookkeeper for Blakemore's, a flower shop that had anchored its town since the 1940s but had fallen into disrepair under poor management. The owner wanted out at a low price. At 26, Abby made the leap, betting that the Blakemore's name still meant something. She was right.
The two pillars: customer care and flower math
Abby's quick audit of her new shop revealed fixable problems. Designers were throwing together pretty arrangements with no recipes, snapping any slightly bent stem and tossing it in the trash — a far cry from her first boss, who would hold up a scrap of leatherleaf and say, "This is my profit." And customers weren't being treated like the foundation of the business. Her philosophy: the customer may not always be right, but they're always the customer, and anything can be corrected if people feel you cared about them.
Her formula is disarmingly simple: "If you have those two things — good customer service and keeping your flower math in check — you're going to be okay. Without those two pillars, you cannot have a successful floral business." With Flower Clique's help she later added COGS and payroll tracking, and found that after a while the discipline becomes muscle memory: you learn your buying patterns and can feel when you've overdone it before the accountant tells you a year too late.
Cross-training builds an "even playing field"
What gets Abby out of bed (besides coffee) is orchestrating her team — deciding who does bridesmaids, who slides over to boutonnieres, who tackles the casket spray. The pandemic convinced her that cross-training isn't optional: any key person can be taken out at a moment's notice, and the owner picks up the slack. She used Sales Prep School and Flower Prep School to cross-train her staff, and paired it with a team session where everyone shared their favorite task, least favorite task, what they feel confident in, and where they want help — never framed as "what are you bad at," because everything is an opportunity for growth.
The results were immediate and practical: Tiffany hates cleaning but likes computer work; Keisha is the opposite — so they trade. Karen now knows to take sympathy-order questions to Tiffany instead of Abby. Lori adds one question to steal for your own team meeting: "If time, money, and skill were no object, what would you love to do here?" You might discover a future designer or a social media manager hiding on your own payroll.
When you can't pay more, value more
Abby is honest about floral wages: "You want to give your staff more, but you can't. So where can you give them more? When you show that you care about their happiness — that's the raise." Her love language is birthday parties, meticulously personalized: for one young employee's first shop birthday, she skipped the generic ice cream cake and served strawberry shortcake because she'd taken the time to learn it was her favorite. That investment pays back. Abby recently watched her team through the shop window while eating lunch outside — each person calmly working a role that wasn't their usual — and realized the machine ran without her. When a bad cold knocked her out for four unplanned days, there was no crisis. "If you're invested in their well-being, they're going to be invested in your well-being."
Key takeaways
- Two pillars carry a flower shop: genuine customer care and disciplined flower math (recipes, COGS, payroll tracking).
- Cross-train everyone — the pandemic proved any key player can disappear overnight.
- Ask your team what they love, what they dread, and what they'd love to learn — then let them trade tasks and lean on each other's strengths.
- When raises aren't possible, personalized appreciation is the raise. Value is a currency.
- Abby's one-sentence secret to growth: continued education. Investing in yourself and your employees is investing in your business.
Enrollment closes soon for Flower Prep School — check it out today, and learn more about Flower Clique.