Business and Life Lessons from a Successful and Experienced Florist Battling Cancer
Some episodes are practical. Some are personal. This one is both, in a way that will stay with you. Vonda and Lori sit down with a longtime friend and shop owner they call "Faye the Florist" — a name chosen at her request, because this conversation was never about promoting herself. Faye is a second-generation florist facing stage four melanoma, and she reached out to the hosts with a simple message: I have a lot to say to this industry, and I don't know what my future holds, so let's get it done.
Born into flowers
Faye's first Valentine's Day happened before she was born — her mother, on doctor-ordered bed rest and due February 19th, spent the holiday seated at the shop's lone FTD Mercury terminal, belly barely clearing the keyboard. Faye's first memory is crawling on the design floor, feeling leaves and stems. She grew up straightening plush and boxing deliveries, made her first basket arrangement from scraps, and — despite earning a degree in a completely different field — came back to flowers. Years later, after managing and growing shop after shop for a boss who kept buying new locations, she told him she'd rather buy one than manage another. That shop became hers.
Then came the play-by-play she now shares with struggling owners: year one, the cooler broke down. Year two, cancer. Year three, COVID. "If anyone knows about challenges owning a business, it's me."
From $350K to $1.2 million
When Faye bought her shop, it had three and a half employees and about $350,000 in sales. Today it has eight-plus employees and $1.2 million. Her growth playbook is refreshingly concrete:
Fix the website first. Working in her bullet journal, she broke "double my sales" into smaller and smaller chunks until the answer was obvious: double website sales and you double sales. After years of hand-customizing her wire-service website product by product, she handed it to the professionals — and got her time back. Lori's reminder for every owner: even tasks you enjoy can be worth delegating, because only you can do the parts of the business that actually need you.
Let the website do the asking. Faye had offered flower subscriptions in-store for years, but her salespeople hesitated to pitch a $1,000 commitment. The website asks every single customer — "and the website doesn't care what you think of it." Subscriptions flooded in.
Hire for potential. Long before "driver to designer" was a program, Faye was posting entry-level floral design ads on Indeed — drive while I teach you — and the response was enormous. Many younger applicants have never bought flowers outside a grocery store; showing them a creative career is its own aha moment.
Test one thing at a time. Her admitted mistake: launching ads, email marketing, and promotions all at once. Business went up — but she couldn't tell what caused it. Change one variable per season so you know your return on investment.
Suspend the wire service — and sleep
Faye is blunt about wire services, order gatherers, and fake flower shops. Her rule for holidays: suspend the wire service a week out. You're guaranteed success on a holiday; you don't need discounted 70% orders — you need sleep. She inherited a shop doing 30–40% wire business and drove it down, ordering fewer flowers but making more profit on each one. And the fear that the phone stops ringing? The opposite happens: day-of calls from customers burned by the dot-coms, who walk out with $100–$200 arrangements and never shop online again. Her shop even stays suspended a few days after the holiday to skip what she calls "the apology tour" of late make-good orders. She also fires the occasional customer — POS customer notes make the pattern easy to see — because "the customer is always right until they are repeatedly wrong."
The lesson she paid the most for
Faye worked 50–70 hour weeks, 80 on holidays, seven days at a stretch — and she believes the stress played a part in her cancer returning three years after reaching "no evidence of disease." Her melanoma was on her scalp, caught only because her hairdresser noticed a mole had changed and insisted she get it checked. Her plea to every listener: get regular skin checks.
Her hardest-won wisdom is the simplest: at the end of your life, you won't wish you'd taken one more wedding quote. Your customers are not your family; your family and friends are the ones who show up. And the fear that kept her working — that everything would fall apart without her — proved false. Her team rallied, her husband (who knew nothing about design when they bought the shop and is "now better than I am") stepped up, and the shop kept running. She leads from home now with inspirational group texts instead of sales reminders, and half the cards on her refrigerator are from her staff.
Key takeaways
- Double your website sales and you double your sales — and delegate the website work to professionals.
- Put subscriptions and big offers on your website; it asks every customer without flinching.
- Suspend wire services the week of a holiday (and a few days after) — order less, profit more, sleep more.
- Change one marketing variable at a time so you can measure what's working.
- Faye's five personal tools: Mel Robbins' 5 Second Rule, the Fabulous app, The Miracle Morning, bullet journaling, and GTD's two-minute rule.
- Your health and your people come first. Take the time off. Get the skin check. Don't wait for a diagnosis to learn it.