We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Rachel Bridgwood and Lauren Anderson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Rachel Bridgwood and Lauren Anderson, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.
As a person in a creative field, we get the feeling that imposter syndrome is something we will never fully conquer. There is a certainly a level of keeping our heads down, working hard, learning, growing, and adapting that gives us the experience needed to sift through the basic levels of imposter syndrome. This is certainly what we’d recommend for someone newer in the industry – focusing on yourself and your own growth to avoid having any time to even worry about if you are legitimate in your field or deserving of your successes.
Creative people are always going to feel the itch to do more and do better. We are almost always dissatisfied with our work and climbing towards that next goal or that next success. This is such a natural response and feels more appropriate than becoming stagnant and satisfied. There is ALWAYS room for growth and learning and there will ALWAYS be someone who is more experienced or more talented. Therefore, the possibility that we’ll continue to experience imposter syndrome in some way, shape, or form feels like a given. Knowing that it’s something almost everyone feels is an easy way to let the feelings pass through us instead of holding too tight and giving them power to affect how we progress.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
We are a floral design company that focuses mainly on events! We produce fairly large scale design work for upwards of 80-100 events in the DC and surrounding areas each year. We get to work with a talented group of full-time team members in our studio each day that keep us loving our job as well as spending time with other professionals in the events industry on site at events or during networking events throughout the year. And lastly, we get to work with incredible clients every year that support our small business and come to us with amazing ideas and dreams that we get to implement! Floral has been a fantastic medium of art to embrace for many reasons – we are able to work with something tangible and tactile that has ever changing color, shape, and style which provides so much variety in our work that it’s basically impossible to get bored. It’s also a living product that requires us to work in a time sensitive manner and build out systems and efficiencies that keep the math and systems side of our brains constantly going.
As we’ve grown to love the business side of what we do just as much as the artistic side – we’ve slowly grown an educational branch of our business, allowing us to help other floral designers across the globe better manage their business.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Being excited about logistics and solving challenges has absolutely been a quality that was required of us during every stage of starting and growing and running this business. It’s something we look for in new employees and something we encourage in small business owners that we mentor.
Growing our skills in floral design has been vital and a lot of that that has come through physical practice and experience building alongside building a community of friend who share knowledge with each other.
Growing our business in a financially savvy way was also very important to us and we worked hard to stay debt free which was doable in our specific field. Learning to keep a close eye on our own finances as things shifted helped us make really smart growth choices AND avoid some major pitfalls that would have set us back. We also recommend knowing your numbers and keeping your finger on the pulse of your business.
Any advice for folks feeling overwhelmed?
We are a seasonal business and our schedule drastically shifts usually depending on good weather months for Weddings and Holiday seasons for events! There are sections of time where we feel easily overwhelmed with the amount of things that need to be done seemingly all at the same time. We do our best to learn from these seasons to better allocate tasks within our team, outsource what we can, and build new systems and checks and balances to help us get through those challenging seasons with more ease. Immediate ways we tackle being overwhelmed starts with communicating that to our team and our own families. Typically we have self-imposed far too many tasks on our own plate so once a few things are off-loaded in business and in our personal life, we are careful to push the biggest problems to the front of our to do list and to let some of the less important things wait. Sometimes that means picking up some late fees or paying extra to bring in more hands to assist, but usually worth it for peace of mind!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.sweetrootvillage.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/sweetrootvillage
Image Credits
Elisa Bricker, Abby Jiu, Adam Barnes, Liz Fogarty, Kir2ben, Accent Decor
