(Small Business Superstar) Stepping out of your comfort zone and creating content your audience wants to see

This week’s Small Business Superstars is Jan Park from Blue Florist.A little bit about Jan’s amazing business…Blue Florist is a flower shop based in Shifnal who sell beautiful bouquets and house plants.What one marketing thing made a difference to their business? Jan did two things! Firstly, a competition and secondly, a video! The video was “How to look after your house plants”. Jan showed her face to her audience who were missing her in lockdown!What difference did it make to them and their business? Jan has such a great response and then made more! The video was really relatable to people at the time as everyone was in their house and couldn’t really do anything. It kept Jan in front of her audience even when she couldn’t open her physical shop and meant she could keep putting content out during lockdown.Where you can find JanWebsite: http://www.blue-shifnal.co.uk/Facebook: @janparkblueInstagram: @bluefloristTranscript below Hello and a very warm welcome to this Thursday’s episode of the Small Business Superstar. As always I am here with another amazing small business owner and this one is awesome. You’re going to love it. So welcome to the podcast, Jan Park. How are you doing Jan? Jan: Oh, I’m great. Thank you. Teresa: Good. Good. I am so excited to have Jan here. Jan is actually a member of the Academy, but Jan’s story is so good. You’re going to love it and such great results. Honestly, Jan was like my poster girl throughout the whole of the summer. So where, so this is brilliant. I’m so glad that you’re on still got as, but Jan explained to my lovely audience who you are and how you got to do what you’re doing today? Jan: Well goes back quite a long way. Um, so when I was at school, I wanted to study art. I was told art can’t possibly make your living. So go away and be a nurse or go in the army or Teresa: Something more sensible.Jan: Yeah. Typical careers advice. Um, I very fortunately got married when I was 18 and I’m still married to the same person. Um, so that kind of changed my direction a bit. So I had my children and then I had a huge operation that went very wrong and they told my husband I wouldn’t leave. And, um, obviously I did, but that really was a huge wake up call for me. Um, I was 28. I had two little children and I came out of that and I thought, “Cool. That was a bit close.” Um, I’m going to follow my dreams. Teresa: Wow. Jan: So I started my training then having left school at 15 and gone into retail, which I absolutely loved. Um, but I was always making, I was making my own clothes from the age of 11, um, and creating pieces of artwork and people were buying them when I was a kid, you know? Teresa: Amazing! Jan: Um, yeah. So it’s been an arty sort of life, which has taken me in various directions, but ultimately I did a textile, um, design qualification, which took four years. And then I did my art degree. So anything, although I’m now a florist, mainly anything that’s kind of art based or design based or style based, I find relatively easy to achieve good result. Teresa: Yeah. Yeah. Lovely. And how, like, imagine. If you hadn’t have had that operation and it had gone wrong, like, there’s this, there’s this saying that I hear a lot and sometimes I totally am on board it. And sometimes I think, well, it’s not always that clear cut, but it’s, it talks about you are 100% responsible of what happens to you and everything happens for a reason. And if you hadn’t have gone through that though, at the time that was looking scary. You wouldn’t be where you are today, if that hadn’t have happened. So that was a really good thing that that happened. Jan: Also since then, I’ve really taken responsibility for what has happened to me in my working life and my career. Um, so I I’ve made some tough decisions. I’ve turned down some really big money-making opportunities to be able to do the things that I love. Because the money actually doesn’t matter. As long as you’ve got enough to put food on the table, what’s more important is that you, you know, you’re seeing from your heart and you can be happy in yourself. Teresa: Yeah, absolutely. And, and the truth is Jan, you and I are both very similar. The fact that we do do things we love and it’s evident, it’s evident that we can see it. Like, you know, when people see you and hear you talk about what you do. It’s evident that, that isn’t just something you’re doing to earn money. That isn’t just something you’re doing to keep yourself busy. That’s that’s in you. It’s built in you. Jan: Yeah. And believe me, you don’t go into risk to out money, you know, you can make a living, but you’re not going to make mega bucks. Teresa: Yeah. Yeah.Jan: But I just love, I do love retail and I love the combination of art and design and retail and although I’m technically a florist now, um, my art comes into everything that I do. Teresa: Yeah, and it’s still, that’s a very creative thing to do. Isn’t it? Very creative. Yeah. So, Jan, obviously you have a florist and COVID hits. And you joined the Academy. Was it just before? Jan: No, it was during COVID. Teresa: Which surprised me that so many people had been joined at that point, because that would be the point where everybody go, “Oh no, we need to start pulling in a bit.” Well go on. Jan: Well, I, I think, um, so COVID hit and not for the first time in my life. I wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t going out every day. So I was just at home and I was thinking “Oh, this is a bit weird.” Because I’m so used to, you know, my day starts at half past four in the morning when I’m ordering flowers from Holland on the market. Um, and then I start my day. I do a full day, then I’ll go home, you know, so I have very, very full days, but of course I always do a business plan each year. And, um, so I thought, well, this is a good time to review that and have a look where I’m going, what I’m going to do next. I was thinking that lockdown would last maybe a month, you know naively. Um, So I started looking at what my business was doing, where I was going to go with it, what I wanted it to do, because I think you have to know what you wanted to do to make it happen. And I just thought, where am I failings? And my failings are marketing. And obviously I knew you from years ago. And I just thought, I just looked you up and found the Academy. And I just thought, well, I’m going to say, “Now’s the time to invest in this.” Teresa: Which is amazing. Jan: And is the main thing it’s been a really worthwhile investment already. Teresa: And, and what’s so amazing is one of those first calls you came onto. I remember you saying to me, well, one in those early calls, we did, we did extra calls at that time because it was like, “How, can I help everybody at this point?” And it was very much about, “How, can you tweak? How, can you change? What can you do?” And from your point of view, Jan, at that point, they literally, from the florist point of view, there was nothing you could do. There was you, you couldn’t get the flowers, you couldn’t sell the flowers, you couldn’t open sell the flowers. So, you know, we were limited. As to your moneymaking opportunities at that point with the florist. So then, and I remember you saying to me, like, “Do you think anybody’s going to want to have flowers again? Do you think this is ever going to come back?” Because literally at that point we had no idea and everything was falling apart. Uh, so we talked about what you could do. So tell people what you did during that time and what happens. Jan: So I did two things. One, I did a competition for people to win some, um, a box full of nice houseplants.Teresa: Yeah. Jan: That went down really well. But the best thing that I did was a video. Um, I’ve never done a live. I don’t do TikTok or any of that. I mean, who wants to see me leaping around, you know. Teresa: I think we’d pay good money for that Jan. Jan: Oh, I hadn’t ever done a video. I don’t like having my photograph taken. I used to lecture in the university and I was absolutely fine with that because I knew my subject. I could stand and talk to a two or 300 people without a problem. But in terms of being videoed and recording that, nothing like that, I had it done before. And so I thought, what can I do? And I decided that I would do how to look after your house plants. And I did the first one just straight off. I didn’t faff about, I just thought I’m just going to do it and put it out there. I’ve just got to bite the bullet. And, um, it was amazing. I mean, I had such a great response to it and so I kept those up. Yeah. And that was, that was really the biggest thing that I did. Teresa: So could I tell you, there’s a couple of things that really interesting about Jan story. One, we talked about where are your customers right now and what do they need help with? So that was why we looked at the house planting. Wasn’t it? Because I said to you, I think that I just bought some house plants and how everyone was doing stuff in their houses, because we couldn’t go anywhere and do anything. So, you know, Jan obviously knows exactly what she’s talking about. And then, so that was brilliant because it was like something that people could relate to that point. But the other thing was like, considering you hadn’t...