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Nikki Tibbles
Interview Phadria Prendergast
British Luxury florist Nikki Tibbles best-known for providing services to high profile events and weddings, speaks with WOTC about building a team, advice to entrepreneurs and mentorship.
Phadria: How do you build a team? How did you build your team of core people?
Nikki: I think that for me, I think I just sort of, instantly know. I’m quite, sort of, not black and white about people but I think I know who’s a good person and I make decisions about people quite quickly as to whether or not they, I think will be an important part of my business. No business can run without a core team of people that are loyal and that you trust. I’m very fortunate to have four of those amazing people.
Especially in times like this where, you know, it’s hard for everyone. We have, we had 35 staffs and I have a team, a member of each department runs their own department so they have autonomy to make their department work and run and then I basically have my relationship with the senior people in the company but I’m not very good at managing people, so i recognise my strengths and weaknesses I’m best with clients and organising events and doing the creative, that’s what I love most and that’s what I do best. I’m not very good at managing staff and those things, I don’t enjoy it and I think the one thing I’ve learnt recently is that everyone should stay in their lane and do what they do best. That’s really what I try and do and that’s why it’s great to have such a good team that can manage and work and do the things I’m not so great at.
P: Absolutely. I love that, I love that a lot. What has this time been like, for Wild at Heart and generally for the industry?
N: I think as we really come under the industry of hospitality, it’s hit us very, very hard. Of course, every business has been hit hard, some have been able to start functioning more than others more quickly. At the moment, the events or hospitality industry does not exist and there’s no guidelines or guidance from the government, as such, as I speak, that is anything more than 30 people at a wedding. You then cannot have a reception where you can serve food or drink. You have to go off in your 6s somewhere. So, we don’t have our first event really, until next April. Everything has been cancelled or postponed or people have just gone with their family to get married- 5 people, 6 people. literally, from March we lost every single contract from every hotel, restraint, office. A very small proportion of that has come back because offices are still closed, restaurants are operating on a different level most of them have not reopened and if they have, they don’t want to spend money on followers. You’ll always find when times are hard and there’s a recession, things like flowers and cleaning in contracts, hotels, restaurants, Is the first thing that goes and offices. So that stopped, obviously, immediately. We stopped our online business immediately, for the safety and health of our staff whilst a lot of online florists continued to operate. We didn’t think it was essential.
I didn’t want my staff having to come to work in our warehouse because we had to close all our shops. So, we waited a month until we started our online business again, because we have a very successful online business. We’ve developed new products, we've updated our website; we’re working very hard on offering more online and that’s been doing very well. We have opened 2 of our shops, which unfortunately and honestly are not doing very well. Notting hill, Westbourne Grove is very empty. Most people have gone away now, it’s not a great time to open because historically [see 5:30] the rest of August is our quietest time of the year. With nobody around and nobody out, it’s even worse. So, we’re open at liberty and the west end is completely dead, so we are considering closing for August and reopening properly in September. That’s the plan, we furloughed most of our staff and unfortunately, we’ve had to make some people redundant and lay some people off. We furloughed and kept as many staff as we can for our shops and contracts, as we’ve had no events, we’ve had to tighten up our events team because we have no events until April. Obviously if the business needs to survive then we have to act accordingly.
P: Yup, I love that. What kind of advice would you give to a young entrepreneur at this time?
N: In this industry or just generally?
P: In this industry.
N: I would say possibly it’s the worst time to start in an industry like this where flowers are a luxury. It’s an already over saturated market, we have the three big massive online, well they’re not massive at all, but there’s Freddie’s flowers, Bloomin’ wild and Flower box who are just online florists. They could be selling anything from cornflakes to. I don’t know, what else? It’s just they don’t have a passion for floristry, it's all about data, data collection and customer acquisition which in my view is not the best product. So, you have that market and they have huge investment to go after an audience. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of florists that, it’s like the sort of new, I don’t know... when people left school years ago they used to want do hairdressing or whatever it is, but everyone seems to want to be a florist these days and I know there are a lot of florists out there, there’s loads of very good florists which is great. A lot of them have worked for me, which is also fine. It's great to be able to encourage people to do what they love and what they’re good at. I think it’s a very over saturated market and flowers are a luxury, certainly at the moment you would have to decide what element of floristry you would want to go into, whether you want to work in events – they are no events – so I would say stay well away from events, because when they do start people will want to, and I hope just the case, they’ll want to go with people that they know have the experience and knowledge and have been around for a while rather than a brand new company, potentially. That’s what I’d like to think anyway. It takes a long time to build relationships with production companies and the events companies we work with, and caterers and productions and venues. That’s really important and a lot of these venues aren’t even open, we don’t know when they’re going to be open. When hotels are reopening with their ballrooms and how that’s going to look. If I was thinking of setting up a new business, I wouldn’t look to this industry at this moment for sure. I think it’s going to take our industry, and the hospitality industry a while. I don’t think we’ll be back to anywhere where we were for probably at least 18 months.
P: Thank you so much for that. And who do you go to for advice, in absolutely anything, business, personal. Do you have a mentor, someone that advises you?
N: In my business, I have my core team that we make decisions together. Since this has happened, we’re much closer, we talk most days, we have management meetings most days then we’ll go and get on with everything that we need to do. So that’s been a massive help. Other than that, I have a therapist I talk to which is great, about work because the two obviously are so interlinked. I think that’s been very helpful certainly over the last 4 and a half, 5 months, because my life, a lot of people’s lives changed dramatically but I’m so used to getting up in the morning and my entire day is spent at meetings, meeting people and all of those things. Of course, we’ve learned that we can have those meetings successfully on Zoom but I’m not visiting venues, I’m not doing events, I’m not running around seeing clients, I’m not installing weddings and I’m not travelling abroad to install a wedding or see a client or a site visit or any of those other things. I miss that a lot. I really do miss that. The biggest blessing is being able to spend 4 and a half months with my dogs, which has been the longest amount of time I’ve been able to spend with them for a very, very long time. Ever, probably. And of course, I have my charity the Wild at Heart foundation. We were due to fly out to Bethlehem at the end of March, we had projects in Puerto Rico, Cape Town, Bornu all over the world. We were going to Bahrain so all of those things have been put on hold, obviously because we can’t travel. So, my life has changed dramatically in the last 4 and a half months because I’m not used to just staying in one place and not really seeing people, which was sort of okay for a moment. I like being around people. I like being around people I like. I don’t like being around people I’m not that bothered about [laughs] but I miss the people that were a big part of my work life.
P: I love that. How would you say that your leadership skills are like? I know you mentioned that you don’t really like the management part of it, but how would you describe your leadership skills? Do you prefer to be very hands on about the decisions that are made, or have you put someone in place to make those decisions then maybe you’ll come in for the very key ones and so on?
N: At the moment, all the decisions are being made by our core team. I listen a lot more, I have Rosie, Sophie, Emma and Raj who are holding our business together. I listen and take a lot more advice from them than I probably have done for a while. So, we’re all working together much more closely which has been a real joy, it’s been amazing for me for everyone to become more involved and have some incredible ideas about how we do things and what we should be doing and what direction we need to be moving in. So, I guess we’re focusing on our brand and rebranding, we’re focusing on our online, developing products and trying to move all that forward. Everyone has great ideas and the direction; we’re doing a lot more shoots; we’re doing a lot more content and that’s been really enjoyable to do. It’s probably something we should have been doing for a while, but I’ve never had time because I get drawn in quite a few directions with events and also the landscaping that I did. All the landscaping, Bicester Village for example, working with in general as a consultant for their global villages was quite time consuming. Now I don’t have that I’m much more able to focus on the business and keeping it safe, getting it to a place where it needs to be for the next year before things, hopefully, will come back to a different place. I don’t ever think, at the moment, and I’m not sure I want to be honest; you know I wasn’t particularly happy with the way the world is and if I’m brutally honest I think there’s way too much waste in this world.
I think that the world is slightly crazy, if there is a new normal that Is less wasteful and people are more concerned about their purchases, sustainability and the planet, animal, agriculture and all of the things everyone has to be thinking about, something good has to come out of what’s happened. If it shifts our mind to thinking about how we spend our money, what we spend our money and how we shape our lives in future then I know, a lot of people who have said I don’t want to go back to the stress that I had with my job before, or I don’t need to go and work in an office I actually like working at home with my dogs, and all of those things. Then, something good has to come from this and I truly believe it will. It might well shape the future of my industry and maybe there are events where people are happy to spend 10s of 1000s on flowers and everything is slightly different and it’s more sustainable and we use more plants or, I don’t know, I’m not sure how that’s going to play out I have no crystal ball but I think it will change and I’m not entirely sure it will go back to where it was for a very long time and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
P: I love everything you’ve just said. Finally, I don’t know how much reading you do but I assume it’s quite a lot but what book would you recommend that every single entrepreneur must read?
N: That’s a hard one. I don’t read books about business. I probably never have; I mean the most fabulous book I read recently is about the life of trees and it’s about how trees communicate and it’s fabulous. It’s called the Hidden life of trees by Peter Wohlleben; it’s about what they feel, how they communicate and its discoveries from a secret world. To me, that sort of teaches me more about life and how we should be living. There’s another book called The Wildling which is all about land conservation. I’m more interested in nature and how the world should be than a book that tells us how we should be making billions and what to do with our staff, that’s just me. I guess I care more about our planet, if I did make billions, I would pour it back into conservation and animals. [laughs] Maybe I should read a few of those business books, I don’t know. Hidden life of trees would be my book to tell everyone to read because it’s just absolutely beautiful and fabulous.
