What to Expect for Valentine's Day 2022 from Bill LaFever, President of The Bill Doran Company
If you want to know where flower prices are headed, ask the person buying them by the semi-load. This week Vonda interviews Bill LaFever, president of the Bill Doran Company, and the conversation covers a remarkable stretch of growth — three acquisitions, 220 new employees, and a brand-new operation in Mexico — before landing on the question every retailer is asking: what will Valentine's Day 2022 look like? Lori's takeaway from listening: Bill never says "it's always been that way." He keeps learning, keeps solving problems he didn't create, and gets genuinely excited telling you about it.
Three acquisitions, 220 people, and a bet on relationships
In roughly ten weeks, the Bill Doran Company brought on about 220 employees. First came Segroe Riccardi, a competitor in the Albany market, where combining routes and eliminating duplicate trucks produced what Bill calls "one plus one equals 2.2" — combined sales exceeded both companies' totals. Next, five former Greenleaf stores purchased out of bankruptcy over a single long weekend — Houston, Dallas, Reno, Portland, and Texarkana — a deal done, Bill says plainly, for the people: the managers, salespeople, drivers, packers, and stockers who were providing great service while corporate dug itself a hole. Third came a large single-store wholesale operation in Denver whose owner had reached retirement age. The through-line is people at every level. As Bill puts it, with the right manager he can compete in any city — and as Vonda adds from her own shop-owner days, never underestimate the driver, the one wholesale face a florist actually sees every single day.
How Bill pays and grows salespeople
One of the most useful stretches of the interview for any shop owner is Bill's compensation philosophy. There's no one-size-fits-all pay plan — some salespeople thrive on heavy commission, others on a fixed wage, and both can be top performers. At year's end he ranks everyone by an efficiency index of total pay against total sales. The top third get more money before someone else offers it. The middle third are right where they should be. And the bottom 10 to 15 percent? "It's 100 percent our responsibility," Bill says — the company hasn't opened up enough sales opportunity to justify the wage it agreed to pay. Only after a couple of years of that does he conclude it's a square peg in a round hole and help them blossom elsewhere.
Bill Doran, Mexico: a new source of supply
Through the Greenleaf relationships, the company has now formed a foreign entity — Bill Doran Mexico — with seven full-time employees, a 900-square-foot cooler, and packing facilities in the high-elevation growing region outside Mexico City. The advantages stack up: product that never leaves the cold chain, a supply route that doesn't bottleneck through Miami, and access to the crops California used to grow as its production shrinks. Expect lisianthus, gerberas at a friendlier price point than the beautiful-but-expensive Canadian ones, and sunflowers — a market Bill admits he underestimated, since consumers want them 52 weeks a year, not just in fall. Some family farms growing right behind their houses will produce two to three thousand sunflower stems a week from seed the company supplied.
Valentine's Day 2022: uncharted territory
Bill doesn't sugarcoat it: "we are in uncharted territory for Valentine's 2022." Demand has outpaced supply for months even as total stems imported through Miami have increased. Growers face inflation on packaging, labor, and fertilizer (up 30–40 percent), adding roughly seven to eleven cents per stem — and freight from South America, already the highest he'd ever seen last year, could run 30 to 40 percent above that record, possibly another 11 to 15 cents per stem. Roses will tighten quickly as growers pinch plants for the holiday, and Pinterest has made it worse: every bride across the country now wants the exact same Sahara and toffee roses. His advice echoes what happened with Christmas greens, where early-order customers were filled 100 percent while market-players are still waiting on back orders: pre-book 60 to 80 percent of your Valentine's needs now and lock it all the way back to the farm. The pennies you might save playing the market aren't worth the risk of empty coolers — especially in a year when Valentine's Monday follows Super Bowl Sunday.
Key takeaways
- Pre-book the bulk of your Valentine's order early — locked-in orders get priority when supply runs short, just as they did with Christmas greens.
- Expect record rose prices driven by real costs — grower inflation and tripled freight — not gouging, and price your own offerings accordingly.
- Pay people according to what motivates them individually, and treat underperformance as your responsibility to fix first.
- Weddings will be even bigger in 2022 than record-setting 2021, so plan wedding-variety availability early too.
- Borrow Bill's mindset trick: add "yet" to any negative sentence — "I don't have my reviews done... yet" — and a roadblock becomes a possibility.