Presenting

Extra Features and Video Online FloristsReview.com R E A D O N L I N E 55 Smart Staffing Holidays are crucial times when you must find the balance between hiring enough additional staff members to help your shop function smoothly and breaking the bank with a fat holiday payroll. Proper staffing involves two primary tasks. First, you must determine the correct number of employees that you will need to get the work done efficiently and correctly. Second, you must organize your current employees and establish responsibility and clear lines of authority. Within these two tasks, there are important considerations that will help you in your planning. Design Labor To determine the number of designers you will need for a holiday (not including staffing requirements for home and/or commercial decorating; that's a different ballgame), you need to project your sales volume for each day or each week during the holiday period (based on previous years' sales, current economic conditions and other factors). Once you have done this, you can mathematically determine the number of employees you will need, by day or by week, to produce items that will generate those sales. Here is one method (the following example calculates design labor needs by day). Typically, design labor should be about 12 percent of sales during holiday periods. However, production design techniques can increase efficiency, reducing design labor to around 10 percent of sales. For this example, let's say you determined that your daily holiday arrangement sales average is $2,000 and that your average wage for a designer is $15 per hour. Let's also assume that you spend an additional $4 per hour—approximately 25 percent of the average hourly rate—for taxes, insurance and other benefits, for a total cost of $19 per hour per designer. is figure means that wages and benefits for an 8-hour workday cost you $152 per designer. To hit the 10 percent design labor target, each designer will have to produce arrangements totaling per day. Considering that a designer might actually work only 7.5 hours per day (subtracting two 15-minute breaks), that means that the designer needs to produce around $203 worth of designs per hour. at's the equivalent of five $40 arrangements per hour. To handle your average projected arrangement sales volume of $2,000 per day, you will need the equivalent of one and one-third designers per day, meaning one designer working an 8-hour day and another designer working 2.5 hours a day. Designer Troy Villager, T. Villager Designs Photographer Rebecca Renee Photography

• Cover