The Wedding Pro CEO Podcast: Episode 168

With Brandee Gaar

On today’s show, I am answering all of your most burning questions.

A few weeks ago, I dropped a thread in our community on Facebook, the Wedding Pro CEO Community, and I asked you if we were having a cup of coffee at a cute little cafe, what would you want to ask me?

What questions do you have to help you take your business to the next level?

And today I’m answering some of those questions right here on the podcast.

Here are your questions:
1. “What is the number one thing you would do if you were trying to quit your job and go full-time?”
2. “How can we develop a strong routine where we keep ourselves accountable to get things done on a daily basis instead of getting distracted by our personal life?”
3. “How long before you actually understood all the things about a legit budget?”
4. “What has been your biggest struggle personally while building your business?”

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Question 1: “What is the number one thing you would do if you were trying to quit your job and go full-time?”

The first question is, “What is the number one thing you would do if you were trying to quit your job and go full-time?”

The very first thing I want you to do is I want you to figure out how much money you need to make from your business.

That doesn’t mean how much you need to sell. It means how much you need to pay yourself from your business in order to quit your full-time job.

The next thing I want you to think about is are there any adjustments to your lifestyle that you could make for maybe a 12 to 18 month period where you can scale back on some of your expenses.

The next thing– and don’t skip this. I want you to talk with your partner or your spouse.

It’s really, really important that your partner or your spouse have buy-in if they are part of that business decision.

Next set a date.

The reason I encourage you to set a date is because otherwise it will always be, “someday” or “one day,” and I don’t know if you guys have noticed this, but “one day” and “some day” don’t exist… they never actually seem to happen.

Question 2: “How can we develop a strong routine where we keep ourselves accountable to get things done on a daily basis instead of getting distracted by our personal life?”

Question number two is, “How can we develop a strong routine where we keep ourselves accountable to get things done on a daily basis instead of getting distracted by our personal life?”

When you’re working from home and you’re your own boss and there’s nobody telling you what to do, it can be so easy to get distracted by all of the things.

I think we all forget about that.

We forget that we’re human beings.

We forget that we have family and friends that want our attention, and we need that in our life.

And I’ll tell you from experience last year, my husband and I said we were gonna set aside this time on our calendars, but we never blocked it out. And every single week something else booked over that time. I think we met less than five times last year for “business talk.”

Make sure you block personal time in your calendar. If you don’t block that time in, first, then the business is gonna take the time.

Question 3: “How long before you actually understood all the things about a legit budget?”

Question number three is, “How long before you actually understood all the things about a legit budget?”

My husband quit his job 10 years ago to start working with me at Blush, he asked me, “How much does it cost us to do a wedding?”

And I laughed and I was like, “It doesn’t cost us anything to do a wedding because it’s just our time. Like we don’t, we don’t actually have an expense. It’s just our time.”

Knowing what I know and teach now, I can’t believe I actually said that out loud. That statement makes me want to melt into the ground.

Our time is our only non-renewable resource. It’s our most valuable resource because we only get so much of it every single day!

So here’s your punch in the gut.

If you don’t know what your break-even is every single month and you don’t know what your cash flow is, here’s your punch in the gut!

As a business owner, you should know those numbers!

And if you don’t come over to the Wedding Pro CEO community and let me know and I’ll help you.

Question 4: “What has been your biggest struggle personally while building your business?”

The last question that I’m answering today on the podcast blog is, “What has been your biggest struggle personally while building your business?”

Honestly, the answer to this question is… Success, success has been my biggest struggle in my business and how to manage and scale it.

I wanted to be the biggest business in town!

I wanted to be the best business in town, and I genuinely feel like we had accomplished that.

The challenge revealed itself on the backend.

I hated everything about my business.

My kids were young and I felt like I never saw them.

I felt like I was on a hamster wheel, all the time.

100% of the time. I felt like if I closed my eyes even for a second, that everything would come crashing down around me.

100% of my time had to be dedicated to my business because I was the only person that knew all of the processes. I was the only person that could make sure that everything was running on a daily basis.

I was still doing all of our sales myself.

I was still very, very involved with managing our venue. I had to go on site if a houseman didn’t show up along with my husband.

I was still doing all the ordering and all the scheduling.

All of it fell on me because I hadn’t built a business that was prepared for the success that we were having.

I hadn’t built a business that had any kind of structure.

I hadn’t built a business that was prepared for that kind of success.

And so every single thing had to roll up to me. There was no taking a break for my business.

And there was a point where I broke and I thought, “I don’t want this anymore. I don’t want this business. I want to be able to see my kids. I can’t do this for the next 10 years.”

And the problem with that was that our business (Blush by Brandee Gaar) was 100% of the income coming into our family.

And here I was having built a business that from the outside looked incredible, and on the inside was literally stealing my soul, every single day.

And I hated it and I wanted to throw it all away.

So instead, I shared that with my husband and he encouraged me to really focus on building, rebuilding our business from the inside out again, and to really learn about building a business and not a job.

We restructured the entire thing.

We went from having 11 contractors doing weddings to having four full-time employees. We blew up the whole thing and restructured the entire thing, but I had to learn how to build my business from the inside out in a way that was prepared for scale in a way that could do 200 events in a year, and I could pick and choose the events that I wanted to do.

And so that is why I am so passionate about it. I want to help other wedding pros to not have to go through what I went through.

I want you to build a business from the inside out the right way first.

Some of you, I guarantee, are listening to me and your like, “I’m there right now, like I hate my business. It’s sucking my life. I don’t think I can do this for much longer, and you don’t know where to go.”

And so I would encourage you, come over to the Wedding Pro CEO community.

This community was built with you in mind. Because I was you. Your challenges I experience too.

I walked your shoes. I know what it feels like to build a business that feels like it is running you instead of you running it.

And I promise you there is a better way. I promise you that you can love your business, it can pay you well, and that you can have a great team that you are so proud of.

I love these question and answer episodes and HEY!, I’m an open book!! 🙂

You can come into my dms, come into the wedding pro CEO community and ask me questions anytime. I love getting to connect with you.

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Let’s have fun over there, and, let’s level up your business together!

Thank you so much for being here, and I will see you next time!!

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