There are 6 pillars required to build a 6+ figure wedding business WITHOUT working all the time. As you move through the Roadmap, you’ll see yourself improve in each of these areas but in order to see improvement, we have to know where you’re starting from.

Take our 6 Pillars To A 6+ Figure Wedding Business Without Working All The Time Audit to determine where you currently are with each of the 6 pillars.

After you take the audit, come share a screenshot of it with us in the Facebook group!

Take The Audit

As a wedding business owner, you wear a lot of hats. Beyond doing the work you’re paid to do by your clients you have to find time to be the CEO of your business and it can be overwhelming. Planning and networking and marketing, oh my!

Many wedding professionals I meet struggle to find the time to work on growing and marketing their businesses, and I get it, it’s a juggling act. You’re never going to magically get more than 24 hours in a day (sorry to be the bearer of bad news), but there are some really simple things you can do to make time to work on your business.

So before we get to working on your business here in The Wedding Business Collective, we need to make time in your calendar for it or you’re never going to do it. And good news, this course is just 5 short videos. You’ll get through it in an hour.

Let’s Make Time!

You can’t market to everyone so it’s important to nail down who you’re trying to attract. It may sound counterintuitive but trying to appeal to everyone attracts no one so you have to decide who you want to be the go-to person for. This is the foundation of everything else from marketing to branding to pricing.

In the first part of the Create Your Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan course, you’re going to get crystal clear on who your ideal client is using the Clone Your Best Clients process. It’s the first step to turning yourself into an absolutely irresistible magnet for your ideal client!

Complete the first lessons and come back to the Roadmap after you complete Section 3 in the Create Your Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan course.

Clone Your Best Clients

Now that you understand who you’re marketing to, what matters to them, and what you need to include in your messaging, it’s time to choose your marketing channels so you can make your marketing easier. In Section 4 of the Create Your Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan course, you’re going to make all of the decisions about “the how” of your marketing up front while you’re in CEO mode so you can simply execute your marketing plan when you’re in Worker Bee mode.

You’ll know exactly how you’re going to be market your business over the next 90 days, where you’re going to market, and what specific tasks need to get done.

Complete Sections 4 & 5 of the Create Your Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan course and come back to the Roadmap.

Clone Your Best Clients

Congratulations on creating your Overwhelm-Squashing Marketing Plan!!! You can submit your marketing plan to get my feedback and recommendations to make sure you’re not missing a single thing.

Submit Your Marketing Plan

As I’ve said before, we’re all about doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t in The Wedding Business Collective. You have the answers to these questions but they’re hiding and I’m going to show you how to uncover these precious gems.

If you haven’t already, be sure to add the next Quarterly Planning Session to your calendar. You can subscribe to your member calendar here.

Part 1 – Arm Yourself With Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that we tend to underutilize because it’s daunting. Katelin Brogan created a masterclass for you to show you exactly how to use Google Analytics and what to pay attention to so you can see what’s working and what isn’t in your marketing and sales.

Watch The Google Analytics Expert Masterclass

Part 2 – See Where Leads & Clients Come From & Find Opportunities To Optimize Your Marketing & Sales

You can’t improve your marketing and sales is you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t working. That’s why Lanie Lamarre created a masterclass to show you exactly how to create a simple Client Journey Dashboard using her template so you can see at a glance what’s working and what isn’t.

Watch The Know Your Numbers Expert Masterclass

Now that you’re marketing and starting to attract your ideal clients, let’s make sure your website makes them say “hell yes!” when they see what you have to offer. That’s the role of copywriting. Copywriting is all about communicating how you’re different and why your potential clients should work with you. It’s persuasive and attractive because it’s designed to make your ideal client want to buy from you.

Our friend and copywriting extraordinaire Ashlyn Carter created a copywriting crash course for you called How To Write Copy That Actually Converts and it’ll help you get clear on how to communicate in a way that makes people want to buy from you.

Watch How To Write Copy That Actually Converts

Now that you understand what copywriting is and how it works, you’re ready to use it to sell more of your offers to your ideal clients. This is a 2-part step that’ll make your products and services irresistible.

Part 1 – Decide If You’ll Set Yourself Apart By Crafting Your Signature Offer

Creating a Signature Offer is the best way to eliminate competition, stand out in your market, and do the work you love to do for the people you love doing for. By creating your Signature Offer, you’ll be able to book more consultation calls, clearly showcase your value, and raise your prices.

Creating your seamless, branded Signature Offer allows you to build trust with your potential clients, close more sales, grow a team more effectively, and take more time off. Imagine how much simpler your business would be if you took every client through the same, amazing, well-thought-out process!

I invited Amanda Shuman to teach this workshop because her Signature Experience is a well-oiled machine that commands a premium price, puts clients at ease, and delivers an incredible client experience. She has absolutely mastered creating a premium Signature Offer that keeps her booked out for months.

As soon as I experienced that as a client of hers, I knew you’d want to learn how to do this in your own business.

And yes, this workshop is for you even if you do highly customized work and send out custom proposals to each client.

You’ll develop a Signature Process that shows your potential clients what working with you is like. This builds trust, sets you apart, and gives them peace of mind knowing you have everything under control.

Watch this workshop with Amanda Shuman and decide if you want to offer a signature service, a signature process, or stick with offering multiple services/products.

Watch Set Yourself Apart By Crafting Your Signature Offer

Part 2 – Create A Service Page That Sells For You

Now that you know exactly what you’re selling, you’re going to use the power of copywriting to create a service page that does most of your selling for you. Most wedding pros don’t do this and it’s a way to get a huge leg up on your competition!

I invited Ashlyn Carter to walk you through the parts of a service page that sells for you. By the time someone gets to the end of this kind of service page, they are DYING to work with you. It also allows you to present your prices in a way that doesn’t attract price shoppers. If you want more people who visit your service page to actually buy from you, this is a can’t-miss step.

Watch Service Pages That Sells

As you book more clients, you’re going to have more work to do, so it’s important to plan and manage your work so that you can work efficiently without feeling stressed out. When you plan and manage your work well you’ll get better at getting everything done and things won’t fall through the cracks so you’ll be able to provide a better client experience that your clients will rave about.

Our short Planning Your Work course is incredibly actionable and it will show you exactly what steps to take to manage your workload and get things done without feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

Watch Planning Your Work & Cut Down On Stress

You’ve got a lot on your plate so it’s time to create systems so you can automate and outsource and free up some of your time. Even if you’re not ready to outsource yet, systems can help keep you on track so you don’t miss a thing.

Creating a system is as simple as recording your screen while you do a task and walking through it step by step so someone can take that video and do the task for you. One of our long-term members, Ashleigh Pritchard has become a master at creating and documenting systems so she can outsource more. She’ll walk you through exactly what systems are, how they work, and the simple steps to creating systems for your business.

Watch the Systems For Your Business Case Study

Now that you know what your processes are, you can look for ways to automate parts of them or automate them entirely. In order to do this, there are a few things to consider.

Where are you spending your time?

What repetitive tasks are you doing?

Where are things falling through the cracks?

Almost every wedding professional can save time and stress by using a CRM to manage their clients. There are countless numbers of these including Aisle Planner, Dubsado, Honeybook, Rock Paper Coin, Studio Ninja, etc. The right one for you has the features you need and works in such a way that makes sense to you so you’ll actually use it. You can set a CRM up yourself or you can hire someone to do it for you if you’re short on time.

Not sure what CRM you should use? Come over to the Facebook group and ask the community for their opinion! Let us know what you need it to be able to do. For highly custom services that require a lot of automation and forms like custom stationery or custom wedding dress design, I usually recommend Dubsado.

Another easy place to save some time is with social media scheduling. I personally use Plann for Instagram & Facebook and I love it!

If you’re a wedding planner and you create wedding day timelines, I highly recommend using Timeline Genius so you can create timelines in 65% less time.

The things you can automate differ from business to business so take some time to brainstorm what you could automate in your business. Chances are, the tools are out there to make it possible!

Whether you’re busy with weddings, family commitments, your day job, or something else, you can still make serious progress. Instead of throwing in the towel and feeling like you just can’t make progress toward your goals in your current situation, you can use some simple frameworks to get more done than you ever thought possible in a limited amount of time.

Remember, it’s not the number of random things you can get done that matters, it’s the number of important, needle-moving, intentional actions you can take that really matters and doing that doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time.

In the short, 29 minute Making Progress Even When You’re Busy course you’ll learn the crucial mindset shifts you’ll need to make progress even when you feel too busy and specific frameworks you can use to make progress even if you only have a few hours per week.

Watch Making Progress Even When You’re Busy

Whether you identify with the title or not, you are the CEO of your wedding business. That means you need to think and act like a CEO so you can better leverage your time and effort. The CEO shouldn’t be spending their time on $10/hour tasks that a virtual assistant or employee could be doing. You should spend as much time as possible on CEO-level tasks and as little time as possible on those low-value tasks that just need to get done.

Before we get into outsourcing, I want you to take a few steps to put yourself into a CEO mindset.

1. Calculate your current Effective Hourly Rate (EHR)

Your Effective Hourly Rate is a key metric to working less and making more. We don’t get paid hourly like we do when we work as an employee. We do a lot of unpaid work behind the scenes to make the business work as well as work that is paid for directly by a client so it can be difficult to know how much an hour of our time is currently worth. When this metric goes up it means you’re earning more for the hours you’re working which is the goal.

2. Assign values to the tasks you’re doing

Every task in your business has a return on investment associated with it. Some tasks are worth $10/hr and others are worth $10,000/hr. Take stock of the tasks you’re currently spending your time on and assign values to them. This will show you where you can easily start outsourcing and get more of an ROI on your time.

3. Shift your mindset on outsourcing

Everything you do has an opportunity cost. Spending your time on a $10/hr task means not spending time on a $10,000/hr task. Shifting your mindset on outsourcing from an expense to an opportunity to generate more income or freedom is going to help you outsource things easier and faster.

You do a lot of things in your business but which of those things should you outsource? What order should you outsource them in? What do you need in place to be able to outsource?

The Outsourcing & Delegating For Wedding Business Owners course will show you how to find those answers. In the last step, you went through Module 1 so continue through the course until you complete it. Once you determine what you’d like to outsource or what you’d like help with, move on to the next step where you’ll find out exactly how to get that help.

Watch Outsourcing & Delegating For Wedding Business Owners

There are multiple different ways to get help in your business and it’s important to determine what you need right now.

1. If you need help with behind-the-scenes work of running the business like scheduling social media posts, setting up clients in your CRM, managing email, etc you may want to look at hiring a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants are contractors that own their own businesses and sell packages of time where they will work on tasks for you. With many virtual assistants, you can get started with as little as 5-10 hours per week.

We cover virtual assistants in the Outsourcing & Delegating For Wedding Business Owners course. This work could also be done by an employee but working with a virtual assistant can be a great way to dip your toe into the water and start delegating.

2. If you want to hire an expert in a specific area to handle a part of your business, you’re going to want to look for someone who owns their own business and specializes in a specific skill. Some examples of this type of hire could be an accountant, a bookkeeper, a social media strategist, a Facebook ads manager, or a lawyer.

These people take you through their process instead of you hiring a virtual assistant or employee and having them follow your systems because you’re hiring them for their expertise. These people are part of your team but aren’t under your control the way an employee or virtual assistant is because you are their client.

3. If you want to bring on someone who can work under your brand as another planner, DJ, officiant, etc, you should consider hiring an associate. This is a great way to grow your business beyond yourself so you can take on more work but you don’t personally have to be the one to do it.

Our Building a Team: Structure and Afford a Thriving Team with Ashley Ebert course walks through exactly how to do this and how to make sure you’re ready to start building your team.

If you’re considering going the associate route, I’d also highly suggest watching Growing Your Business with Associates With Gabby Pinkerton where Gabby shares how she started to bring on associate planners to build her planning business beyond herself.

Which of these paths will you take for your first hire? Come share that with us in the Facebook community!

Aside from doing the work you love or providing an income, what do you want your business to be able to do for you? The answer to this question will likely change over time as your priorities shift but you can adjust your business to create the perfect business for you.

Want to just handle the CEO work and leave the rest to associates? You can do that! Want to shift to a more location-independent stream of revenue? You can do that! The sky’s the limit for the number of ways you can adjust your business to suit you.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

What do you want your business to be able to do for you right now? (I say right now because life changes and your business can change with it.)

What do you want more of in your business? What do you want less of?

Do you need to make any shifts to what you offer to suit your lifestyle?

We have a member who transitioned to destination weddings and virtual planning sessions to support the lifestyle she wanted and she broke down that process for you here.

Remember, there is no one right business model!