As one of members of women’s golf club to which I belong recently passed away, I donated my time for making a large funeral wreath last week. According to the request, I used plenty of pink roses this time although I usually use white flowers for funeral flowers. In addition to the regular weekend classes, I was working on this unexpected project which kept me very busy during a last weekend.
Quite frankly speaking it took lots of time to make a large funeral wreath. Looking back to this special project, I spent lots of time not only for driving to and from the flower market for buying fresh ingredients and wreath materials as well as easel on which wreath is mounted and also for delivering such stuff to the classroom where I spent additional time for making fresh cut of stems with an angle to make effective hydration as well as removing unnecessary leaves and discolored petals and also soaking a round foam in water. Finally I spent time for arranging flowers by placing them onto water soaked wreath. The total amount of time spent for all above procedures was about 3.5 to 4.0 hours which was a little bit longer than I originally expected although I was a little bit helped by my husband.
Through this project, I again recognized that the reason why the price of funeral flowers is pretty expensive considering the cost of ingredients and materials. As is often the case, time spent for a project is pretty valuable. And as far as the cost of labor and reasonable margin are included in the prices in addition to the cost of ingredients, materials and also gasoline fee for the transportation of materials, it naturally becomes pretty expensive, which is quite understandable.
However people who do not understand business are apt to evaluate pricing only from the cost of materials and ingredients for floral decorations. Usually total cost for other fees than direct ingredients and materials is much higher in its amount which should be considered when setting up selling prices.
In spite of spending lots of time during the weekend, I was pretty happy because my job was fairly evaluated and people expressed appreciation for my arrangement. This particular job was done not for making money because the time spent for the project was not compensated and none of profit was included in the production cost. Usually when it comes to the project for doing pure business, all the costs not only for materials, ingredients, the fee of labor and gas as well as the reasonable rate of margin are included in the price. Therefore you do not have to worry about profitability when it comes to offering your services as a business.
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