Transcript of Short 58 – The 3 Biggest Mistakes Wedding Pros Make.

The Wedding Pro CEO SHORTS are quick, bite-sized episodes are meant to inspire you as you build the business you’re dreaming of! 

The Wedding Pro CEO Podcast

[00:00:00] Brandee Gaar: Hey, they’re CEOs. Welcome to today’s Thursday short of the Wedding Pro CEO podcast. I’m your host, Brandee Gaar, and as always, I’m here to help you, the wedding industry entrepreneur, to build a profitable wedding business that you actually love. On today’s show, I want to share three mistakes that I see happening so often in the wedding.

I work with so many wedding pros and I absolutely love getting to like, dig into their business and really figure out what is causing some of their stress, either lack of profit or a lack of time, or just overwhelm or burnout or that they’re trying to build a team. All the things, there’s so much that can go on behind the scenes that’s causing them to really not love their business or to not be profitable.

But I see the same mistakes over and over and over again. And so I thought, what better way to share them than to come onto the podcast and say, these are the three mistakes I see

[00:01:00] wedding Pros making, and I wanna help you to avoid them. So the first mistake I see is waiting to outsource. I know how difficult it is to outsource.

Trust me, I have hired some amazing contractors to work with me in my business, and I have hired some terrible contractors to work with me in my business, and I completely understand how scary it can be to. Not only have to try to find the right person, but then to take time to train them when you’re already so slammed.

But also the financial investment that comes along. Outsourcing and bringing in a VA or a social media manager, or even an additional team member. But here’s what I can tell you that I see time and time again, and so many of my accelerator students will agree with me on this, is that once you hire the first time and it’s great, it’s a great fit.

You will be addicted to growing your team. there is a little bit of like a, oh my gosh, what did I just do? Because now you’re still trying to juggle all the

[00:02:00] balls and train them. So once they’re trained, you can see immediately that you feel relief as the owner. 

 With a light at the end of the tunnel. Right? So once they’re trained, first of all, your shoulders start to release just a little, right? You also start to see the revenue really start to ramp up in your business because now you are free from so much of the backend junk work that you shouldn’t have been doing in the first place.

And now you as a CEO can really focus on selling and marketing your business well and really focusing on the growth of your business. 

So outsourcing too late is the cause of stagnant business. So often what I see is that wedding pros will say to me, Brandee, I just can’t, like, I don’t have the time, or I don’t have the resources.

And listen to me when I tell you, I know you look at this podcast, you look at me, you look at other educators, and you think we have no problems. We’ve got it all together. And I promise you,

[00:03:00] I feel this pain too. Felt it so many times. Anytime I get ready to bring on a new hire or we get ready to outsource something in our business, I freak out and I’m like, how are we gonna pay for this?

Or how am I gonna train this person? Or how are we gonna integrate them well into our business? But there’s a method to it. There is a way to do it, and it is so important for the growth of your business that you invest in people to help you to take your business to the next level. I promise you, as a one person team there is a cap on how much you can accomplish because there’s only so many hours in the day and there’s only so long before you will be completely burnt out and wanna throw it all away. Growing a team and outsourcing tasks in your business is the number one way to scale and grow your profitable business.

Okay, The number two mistake I see wedding Pros making in their business that they have no idea what their numbers are. And this is so interesting to me because I would say that

[00:04:00] 90%+ of the CEOs that come into my accelerator program are doing numbers and budgeting and reconciling their accounts every single month for the first time when they start working with me.

It’s literally the most critical piece of your business is understanding that number. Now there’s one specific number that you need to know. And if at any point in your life somebody comes up to you and says, what is this number? You should be able to rattle it off of your head in a second, and that’s your break even number.

What is the number you must make every single month cash in the bank? What is the number you must make every single month to break even, to pay yourself, to pay all of your staff, to pay all of your bills. 

“Now there’s one specific number that you need to know. And if at any point in your life somebody comes up to you and says, what is this number? You should be able to rattle it off of your head in a second, and that’s your break even number.”

Brandee Gaar

What is that number? If you cannot rattle that number off in one second, please come DM me on Instagram and I will give you some tools and resources that can help you to figure out that number right away, cuz that is the most important number

[00:05:00] in your business, is your break even number. So come DM me if you don’t know that number and let’s talk. Okay? 

All right. The last mistake that I see wedding pros make so often in their business, and this one kind of breaks my heart a little bit. Because it really has to do with your mental health, and it has to do with your physical health, and it has to just do with the longevity of your business.

And that is not understanding and not defining what success means to you. And what I mean by that is that. With social media, it can be so easy to see somebody say, I’m making a million dollars a year, or I’m making $50,000 a month, or, we do 600 weddings a year, and that can make you feel inferior.

It can make you feel like you’re not doing enough. It can make you feel like. You don’t know what you’re doing or that you’re not good enough or you haven’t reached that level of success. But success looks different for all of us, and I even still get caught up in this so often, and I

[00:06:00] teach about this and I’m, I’m really, really protective of my mental health in this area because I know how important it is and I still get caught up in it.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a coach that I follow on Tiktok I actually really like her content a lot. She’s very empowering. She’s very like woman focused. She’s like, you can do this. Just put it out into the universe. And I really enjoy her content. It’s very high energy, very high power. But I start to feel inferior sometimes because she talks about how she makes a hundred thousand dollars a month. A month, okay? And she has no kids. She has no partner. I start to think to myself, that’s amazing. And sometimes I’ll get caught up in thinking like, I want that too. And then I start to realize she is literally on TikTok every hour of the day. Like all day, every day. She talks about how you need to be on your stories and on TikTok and on Instagram and on all your social media and you need to be doing live

[00:07:00] teachings twice a day. And she talks about all these things and I’m like, that’s amazing. And I’m so, I’m so intrigued by how this works for her but that isn’t the life that I want. Like that’s not success for me. I figured that out really, really quickly at the beginning of this year when I had made a goal of being on TikTok three times a day, making three Tiktoks a day.

I don’t know about you guys, but that’s like I may go back to it, I don’t know. But I have stopped that goal for a while because it was consuming my, every thought was like, how do I make three tiktoks a day? How do I make three tiktoks a day? I always felt like it was this beast that I had to keep feeding.

Like if I didn’t feed it, it was going to eat me up. Right? And that overwhelmed me like, really genuinely was tanking my energy because I was just so much like, I have to meet this goal. I have to meet this goal. When in reality, what success is to me is a business that serves and impacts others, both couples, that are getting married and wedding pros, that are serving those couples. But I wanna do it in a way

[00:08:00] that does not consume my every thought and does not consume my every minute. I want to be able to show up and serve well in the energy that I have, and then I don’t want to feel like I have to feed a machine constantly. And sometimes it can be easy to lose track of what success means to you.

Success to me is being able to pay all of our bills and to live a comfortable lifestyle. To be able to travel a bit with my family and to spend time with my family without thinking about the 72 things I need to be doing instead. That’s success to me and I have to remind myself of that over and over. 

So this last mistake that I see wedding Pros make all the time is they fall into that pit of imposter syndrome of thinking that they’re not successful because they haven’t reached the the goals that someone else has put as their own.

So know what success is to you know what your goals are and be so proud of yourself. When you meet those, you can always extend them. You can always push yourself a

[00:09:00] little bit further, but make sure that success is defined by you and your family and not by someone else you see on the internet. So important! 

You guys, thank you so much for letting me show up here every single week and for being part of the Wedding Pro CEO community. If you’re not already part of our free community on Facebook, please come over and join us. You can drop down into the show notes below. click the link and come join us because we’d love to encourage you as you build the profitable business that you’ve always loved.

It’s such a thriving community, and I absolutely love getting to interact with all of you over there. I cannot wait to see you inside the community, and I will see you next time. 

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