The challenge: Labor costs that could get away fast.
Amy Marella built The Hidden Garden one hire at a time: a designer, someone to answer the phones, another production person. She learned how to run a flower shop business as she went — through a lot of sleepless nights. “The problems [of running a business] never go away,” she says. “I always say they just have another zero added onto them.”
Running the flower shop involves a ton of moving parts. Each week’s staffing depends on a detailed production schedule that shows how many hours every job will take. The team fills it with full-timers, then adds freelancers or an extra production crew.
Schedules go out one week at a time, because anything further out won’t hold. Then the week happens. A last-minute order comes in, and the team is suddenly two or three hours into overtime. Without someone watching, those hours could get out of control quickly.
Coordination added its own load. The next day’s production plan went out by text every night. Drivers texted Amy photos from hotel properties at five in the morning. And Amy isn’t in the office all the time.
She’s run The Hidden Garden like a family since the apartment days. But she knows it’s also a business that can’t run on emotion alone. She needed to see the numbers while there was still time to change them and keep the business profitable and thriving.
“For us in the flower business, we only have two levers to pull for making a profit: labor costs and cost of goods and flowers.”
— Amy Marella, owner of The Hidden Garden
The solution: Building every week around a labor number.
Downstairs at The Hidden Garden, designers build arrangements while the production crew processes flowers, preps containers, and loads trucks for the week’s hotel work. Every flower that comes in gets checked off, so designers have what they need.
Getting the right people on each shift is where they started using Homebase. Scheduling begins with a projected labor number. Claudia, the floor manager, builds the schedule in Homebase and checks it against that target. If it’s over, she and Amy adjust before the schedule goes out.
Every night, the team gets the next day’s plan through Homebase team messaging. The message is built from the production schedule. Read receipts show who opened it, and Amy can ask everyone for a thumbs-up. It’s not all logistics, either. Someone might reply “Early morning,” or crack a joke, and the chat keeps going through the day. “We used to do text messages with all the information, and then when we started utilizing the Homebase message thing, that was a lifesaver,” she says.
Over the past year, the team brought even more of the business into Homebase. Amy had run payroll through Paychex for 25 years, and her bookkeeper wasn’t sure about switching. The thinking was, “This is how we always did it.” Amy saw it differently: “But this is how we could do it.”
Today, her bookkeeper submits payroll through Homebase, and the hours come straight from the time clock. Everyone, freelancers included, clocks in and out with their own PIN on the shop’s iPad.
They added Task Manager, too. Claudia loaded in every property’s checklist, which took a while because there were so many layers to enter. Now, a driver at the Beverly Hills Hotel sees everything Amy wants checked and uploads a photo. If an arrangement is dying or missing a piece, the note goes into Task Manager instead of Amy’s texts.
That record matters, because every client gets the same care at The Hidden Garden, whether it’s a bride, a customer who’s ordered for 20 years, or a hotel account.
“If a client calls about something, I can go in there and be like, ‘Oh, it’s right here. This is what we did.’ So that’s been really a huge game changer for us.”
— Amy Marella, owner of The Hidden Garden
The results: Catching overtime on a Tuesday, not on payday.
Amy doesn’t wait for payday to find out where labor landed. She checks the Homebase app on her phone during the week. “I did it yesterday even though it was only Tuesday,” she says. “I just wanted to see: how far over were we? Where are we going to land?”
The number shows up right away, with a graph. When overtime runs high, she doesn’t have to dig. Claudia can immediately tell her who’s going over and why, like an extra order that just came in. Amy can even spot when someone tips into double time. She gets the breakdown, not one bulk number.
Last-minute orders still happen. That’s the flower business. The difference is that Amy sees their impact the same week, while there’s still time to adjust. “Before payday comes to us, I can gauge,” she says.
That matters, because small overruns add up fast week after week. Most of the time, Amy says, they can be fixed quickly, as long as someone spots them early. Now she can.
The same view shows her late clock-ins and missed breaks, along with anyone who forgot to clock out. That helps her catch the small time gaps that add up, even when she’s not in the office.
It also means Amy isn’t the only one keeping watch. Claudia owns the schedule and the overtime answers, Jen runs payroll on the same approved hours, and Amy can check in from anywhere.
The text message chains slowed down, too. Drivers log property visits in Task Manager instead of Amy’s phone, which has cut out a lot of the back-and-forth. They’ve been good about it, uploading photos and notes from every property.
“Homebase [gives me a place to see labor costs in real time] because I can see what we projected to be, and then I can see where we’re headed, and I’m like, ‘Whoa, what just happened?’”
— Amy Marella, owner of The Hidden Garden
Still a family, now with the numbers to back it up.
Amy could have kept running The Hidden Garden the way she always had: Paychex for payroll, texts for the next day’s plan, and a labor number she’d only see after the fact. That’s how a lot of owners run, and it’s how small overruns turn into big ones.
She chose another way. Her labor target is set before the schedule posts. Her team gets the plan the night before. And she can check where the week is headed from her phone, wherever she is.
She still thinks of her team as family. Now she has the numbers to run it like the business it’s become.
She’s not done, either. Amy figures there are a couple more layers of Homebase her team could use. “I like it because it does pull everything together,” she says.
