Staffing Valentine’s week

Valentine’s Day 2027 is a Sunday. That changes which day your corporate orders land, and it changes who you need booked by the end of January.

The buying, the pre-sell and the cut-off are a separate problem, and preparing a shop for Valentine’s week works through those. This one is about the people. Those decisions all get made in January.

The Sunday problem

Corporate and office deliveries are the part that breaks. A building with nobody in it on Sunday can’t take flowers, so those orders shift to Friday the 12th, which means your biggest commercial delivery day is now two days before the date everybody is planning around. Shops that discover this in February end up running two peaks with one crew.

The other half moves the opposite way. Retail and residential delivery get easier, because people are at home on a Sunday, and the failed-delivery rate that eats a midweek Valentine’s largely goes away. Your Saturday becomes a full trading day on top of everything else.

So the week is really Thursday to Sunday, with a commercial spike at the front and a consumer spike at the back. Two shapes, four days, and the crew you need on the Friday is not the crew you need on the Sunday.

Book in January, not February

Casual staff for this week are booked by whoever asks first, and by the second week of January the people who have worked a Valentine’s before are already spoken for.

Ask in the first half of January and confirm it in writing at the start of February. Then confirm again two days before the week starts, because a verbal yes given a month earlier isn’t a schedule.

Keep a list from last year and start with it. Somebody who has done your Valentine’s once doesn’t need showing where anything is, and that week, that is most of the value.

Work out who you are actually short of

The roles that go short are rarely the design ones. Drivers, a runner to stage and load, and somebody on the phone who isn’t also making things.

Which of those binds your week is a counting exercise, and preparing a shop for Valentine’s week works it through. What matters in January is that the count tells you who to ring first. If it comes out as drivers, start there, because somebody who already knows your delivery area is the hardest thing on the list to find in February. Send them what a floral delivery driver actually does before they say yes.

Say what the hours really are

Put the start time, the finish time and the number of days in the first message you send. Not the second one, and not on the Wednesday.

Somebody who can’t make a five in the morning start will say so in January, while you can still do something about it. The ones who agree to something vague and find out on the Friday are the ones who don’t come back on the Saturday.

Pay for the week should reflect the week. Four fifteen-hour days at your ordinary hourly rate is a rate you pay for again the following year, when the same people don’t answer.

Get the classification right before the invoices arrive

If you are engaging freelance designers instead of putting people on payroll, decide now which one it actually is. March is too late.

A peak-week casual is the arrangement owners misread most often, because four days feels too short to be employment and the length of the job isn’t what the test turns on. It is the kind of thing nobody thinks about until a peak week turns into six weeks of regular work, and then it becomes a real exposure. We take it apart in 1099 or W-2 for freelance florists.

The Wednesday briefing

Twenty minutes the day before it starts, with everybody who is working it in the room.

What each day looks like, who is doing what, where things live, and who to ask when something goes wrong. Casual staff need this far more than your own team does, because they don’t know where the buckets are and most of them will only ask once.

Then treat the week as the hiring it also is. People who work a good Valentine’s for you are people you have watched under pressure. No interview gets you that. How to hire a floral designer is the longer version of what to do with it.