Renato Cruz Sogueco AAF, PFCI

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What a career at a trade association taught me about members

When people ask what I learned at the Society of American Florists, the first thing I tell them is how much members care. Not in a general, mission-statement way, but in the specific way of someone who flies across the country for a meeting, sits through a long agenda and stays afterward to keep talking because there is still something they want fixed.

I spent the better part of my career working alongside those people. As staff liaison to the Retailers Council, the Wholesalers Council, the Technology Committee and the Board, I sat in rooms where every part of the flower business was represented. Retail florists talked about what their customers were asking for and what was squeezing their margins. Wholesalers talked about supply, logistics and the pressures that never reach the front counter. Growers and suppliers brought a view from even further up the chain.

Each group saw the industry from where they stood, and each of them was right about their part of it. Working across all of them is what let me see the whole thing. I learned how a decision at one end of the supply chain lands at the other, and why something that looks simple from a florist's counter can be complicated for the wholesaler behind it. That full picture has shaped every job I've had since.

What made it work was the people. Members brought a level of passion and drive that I still find remarkable. When a group of them got behind an idea, it moved.

The SAF 1-Day Profit Blast is a good example. It started as an idea raised in a council meeting. SAF's annual Convention is the heart of the organization, but plenty of florists couldn't take several days away from their shops or afford the trip. The 1-Day was built to bring a sampling of the Convention to them, one region at a time: a single day of the same kind of practical, profit-focused education, close enough to drive to. Many florists who came to a 1-Day went on to attend the Convention itself. The events still run today, and SAF staff still trace Convention attendees back to them.

The biggest lesson took me a while to fully appreciate. Every member at that table had a business to run. Every hour they spent in a meeting, on a call or reviewing a proposal was an hour away from their shop, their warehouse or their farm. So when a member raised an idea or a concern, it was never small talk. They had paid for that comment with their own time.

I learned to treat that feedback as some of the most valuable information an organization can get. It came from people with no reason to say it except that they cared about the industry, and it was usually right about something, even when the details needed work.

I've carried that with me into every role since, whether I was building programs for florists or leading a customer service team. When someone who doesn't have to speak up takes the time to tell you something, take it seriously. In my experience, that's where the best ideas come from.

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Where AI earns its keep in a flower business, and where it does not

There is a lot of noise about AI right now, and very little of it is written for someone running a flower shop. Having worked with florists on putting it to use, I've come to a fairly simple view of where it helps.

AI is good at the words around the flowers. It isn't good at the flowers.

Start with the website. Search engines, and now AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI answers, reward shops that answer real customer questions: what you deliver, where, by when, and what's right for a given occasion. That means city pages for every town you deliver to, clear product descriptions, a current Google Business Profile and a solid FAQ. Most shops know they need these and never have time to write them. AI can produce a solid first draft of all of it in an afternoon. Even Teleflora now coaches its florists to use AI for exactly this work.

Paid search is the next place it pays off. Writing ads that match each city page, testing a few versions and keeping them fresh used to take more hours than most owners had. Google's own tools now use AI to build and adjust campaigns, and Google has published the story of Karen's Flower Shop, a fourth-generation shop that used them to reach new customers without raising its budget. Once a Google campaign works, Microsoft Ads can import it for Bing, where clicks often cost less.

The place I've seen AI make the biggest difference is planning. When we were building BloomNet's digital marketing agency for florists, we needed a steady stream of fresh content to support the SEO work on our clients' websites. So we built a year-long content calendar around the floral holidays: Valentine's Day, Administrative Professionals Day, Mother's Day, the slower summer months, the holidays at year's end. With that calendar in hand, AI turned each month into a blog post and each week into a handful of social post ideas. Shops that used to post whenever someone had a spare minute had a steady rhythm planned a month ahead, and every post tied back to what was coming in the next few weeks.

Customer conversations are starting to change too. Some shops now encourage customers to use AI to put a sympathy message or a wedding vision into words before they call. That gives the designer a clearer starting point, not a substitute.

Here's where AI doesn't earn its keep. It can't choose flowers, build an arrangement or read a customer standing at the counter. Left unchecked, it produces pages that sound like everyone else's, and those pages neither rank nor sell. Every word it writes needs someone who knows the business to read it, fix it and make it sound like the shop.

So my advice is simple. Let AI take the writing and planning that keeps getting pushed to tomorrow, and keep the craft and the judgment where they belong, with the people who know flowers.

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Building a marketing agency for florists, and what to expect from one

When BloomNet asked me to build a digital marketing service for our member florists, there was nothing to start from. No clients, no team, no playbook. What we did have was a network of shops that knew flowers far better than they knew Google Ads, and that most were stretched too thin to learn.

So we built the service around what a busy shop owner actually needs: someone to run their Google and social media advertising, keep their business profiles current, and produce content worth posting. We worked directly with people at Google to design campaigns built for how flower shops really sell, around holidays, sympathy orders and same-day delivery. An agency that doesn't understand floral seasonality will spend a florist's money in the wrong weeks.

One decision shaped everything else. From day one, every florist owned their accounts outright: their Google Business Profile, their social media pages, their ad accounts and the data in them. We set those accounts up and ran them on the shop's behalf, but the keys belonged to the owner. If a florist decided to leave, they left with everything they had built.

I've since moved to the other side of the table, advising florists on how to choose and work with an agency, and I've come to believe that ownership principle matters even more than I thought. At SAF's Amelia Island convention this year, I moderated a session called “Are You Getting What You Pay For?” with Chris Drummond of Penny's by Plaza Flowers in Philadelphia, who works with an agency, and Charles Ingrum of Dr. Delphinium in Dallas, who handles his own digital marketing. As I said there, florists go into a lot of these contracts truly blind, not knowing what to expect or what the deliverables are.

A few things go a long way toward fixing that.

Own your accounts. Your Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft Advertising accounts, your Google Analytics and your Google Business Profile should be in your name. Give the agency access; don't hand over ownership. And make sure there's a clear way out of the contract.

Hire for industry knowledge. Ask for referrals from other florists, and make sure the agency understands that Mother's Day and a slow week in August call for very different spending.

Define success in business terms. Clicks and impressions aren't the goal. Orders, cost per order and revenue are. Consider a pilot period before signing a long-term contract.

Treat it as a team effort. The owner, or one designated person, should be responsible for marketing spend and its return. Know the scope of work, know which responsibilities are yours, and hold regular check-ins.

For Chris, the agency works because it already knows the business. They work with other florists his size, so he doesn't have to explain how a flower shop runs every time they talk. That shared understanding saves time on both sides, and it shows up in the work.

Charles takes the other route. He has the technical skills and the knowledge of his own business to run Dr. Delphinium's digital marketing himself. But he's careful never to assume he's getting it right, because paid advertising changes constantly. Doing it yourself means keeping up and checking the results, not setting it and forgetting it.

Whether a shop hires an agency or does it themselves, the question is the same one we asked when building the agency at BloomNet: does this owner understand what they're paying for, and do they control what they've built? If the answer to both is yes, the shop is in a strong position either way.

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