Ian On The Red Dot

I spent Valentine’s day delivering bouquets of roses which had been ordered from my girlfriend. It was our first time trying to fulfill orders for Valentine’s day and the experience was one choke full of lessons. I’ll share three things I learned.

1. Valentine’s day isn’t just about the girl receiving flowers.

Valentine’s day is an unstated competition between the ladies. Receiving flowers isn’t enough. Receiving a beautiful bouquet also isn’t enough. What is important is that the lady has to receive the bouquet early and before everyone else. Everyone else has to know your girl has received flowers.

The more people who receives bouquets before a lady, the greater the lady’s anticipation of receiving flowers will be converted to disappointment.

The flowers have to be received before 12 pm or roughly before lunch time. The ladies will gossip about who has received and not received flowers during the lunch break. Ensure the delivery man sends the flowers early so that your girl will be an object of envy and not of derision.

2. Always try to give the flowers personally.

If you are the delivery person, always make sure you give the flowers to the girl personally. Never ever, if you can, leave the flowers on her desk and let her colleague sign for it.

I had to leave the flowers for two ladies with their colleagues. The behavior of the colleagues disgusted me. I’m thinking it isn’t a coincidence that both instances, the colleagues were older women who hadn’t received any flowers - there weren’t any on their desks.

These older women manhandled the flowers. One even raised the bouquet of flowers over her head like a trophy just to get the attention of the other ladies and shook it about, announcing that someone has just received flowers.

Never ever doubt a minute the vitriol of older women threatened by younger ones.

3. It is better to deliver flowers to the girl and not pass it to her boyfriend or husband

For some orders, I delivered the flowers to the guy so that he could give the flowers personally to his gal.

On average, the reaction of the guys were worse than that of the ladies although the bouquets were of the same design.

The reason is because the guys are always questioning themselves if their gal would like the bouquet, so that when they receive it, their satisfaction as a customer is below that of the ladies because their primary objective of ordering the flowers (which is to impress their girl) has not been met.

Once a lady has received the flower, her expectations are met if the bouquet is nice or even just decent. She is satisfied because her expectations of receiving flowers have been met.

I’ll tried to elaborate more on some of these points with regards to what I have learned about starting a service business once I have time to write something for SG Entrepreneurs.