Transcript of Short 32

Hey there CEOs. I’m your host, Brandee Gaar, and I’m on a mission to help you, the wedding industry entrepreneur build a profitable business you love!! Welcome to the wedding pro CEO podcast.

Welcome back. I am thrilled to be here for another Thursday short. I’m so glad that you guys are loving these shorter Thursday episodes!! Honestly, I just sit down to the mic and I kind of tell you what’s on my heart. What’s on my mind. Something I learned that week. Something I taught that week. Something a student went through. Literally it could be anything. Hundreds of notes in my phone of just things I’ve gone through or things I wanna talk about on the podcast. Literally every day that I kind of say, “Oh, wait a second. That would make a great podcast short!”

Don’t have time to read? Jump ahead and take the QUIZ now!

So I’m really excited that you guys are loving these because we’re getting so many, DMs and, and just sweet messages about how much you’re enjoying the Thursday shorts. So I would say to you. If you are in fact loving the Thursday shorts and you’ve either sent me a DM or you’ve just been like, I love these, but you haven’t really said anything. I would love it if you would just take two seconds, literally it will just take you less than a minute to write a review about the podcast. Right here. You can do it on any platform that you’re listening, but your reviews really help me to know what content resonates with you. What episodes you like, what type of education that you’re loving so that we can continue to make those same type of episodes. And to bring those back to you, every single time we sit down to the mic. So I always wanna make sure I’m bringing you the best content.

And honestly, through your reviews is a great way for me to see what you love. And then for other people that are checking out the podcast to see what you love, what we teach, what resonates, how you’ve grown.

So if you love this podcast, if you’ve heard even one episode, that’s made a difference in your business. One, I’m so excited about that!!! And two, would you share it with the world and just take a quick second to write a review on whatever platform you’re on?

Okay guys. So I’m really excited to talk very quickly today about getting to that next level in business. And the reason that this has been on my heart is because honestly, as an educator, and I kind of wanna say a newer educator, I’ve only an educator for two years.

And when I’m talking to business owners, really that zero to two, two and a half years, I still really call the hustle stage. You’re a baby business, you’re grinding it out. You’re hustling, grassroots everything. Like you’re doing everything yourself. And, I’m in that stage as an educator. And honestly, sometimes it’s super frustrating.

I think, because in my planning businesses Blush and Eleven, I haven’t been in that stage in so long that it almost feels unfamiliar.

And sometimes on the flip side, it’s actually really, really great, because I can resonate a little bit better with my CEO mastermind members that are kind of coming out of that stage and I can be like, “OMG, I know what you’re going through. Like I’m in it right now!”

So, there’s good and bad to it. But what I’ve noticed and the reason I decided to sit down and record this podcast is how important it is to not jump stages. And I say that as somebody who desperately wants to. I desperately want to jump to the next stage of business. And it’s funny because as I’m kind of going through it as an educator, I’m like Brandee, your own advice to your own students would be slow down. Don’t jump stages. Take a second. Let’s assess what’s going really, really well in your business and let’s assess what we could improve on. Right? And then we want to move to that next level.

But every single stage of business has different tactics, different strategies, different needs to really take you to the next level.

And there’s a book, by the author. I think it’s Marshall Goldsmith. And he’s famously quoted for saying, “What got you here? Won’t get you there.” And I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but I love this quote so much because honestly being pushed out of our comfort zones is so important as we’re going through these stages in our business.

In that hustle stage that zero to two, two and a half years. There’s a lot of strategies that you’re gonna implement in your business that simply won’t help you in the next stage or they’re really going to stop having the same ROI, right? You’re outgrowing those methods and you need to learn new methods in that next stage.

In the hustle stage, you’re, like you’re grinding it out. You’re a one man show everything feels, hard. It feels overwhelming. You have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, because you haven’t quite figured out how to master them. And you don’t have history like data to tell you whether this is normal or if this is just an off year. You really don’t have any of that yet.

So you’re kind of riding these waves of up and down. Like what on earth is happening? You’re kind of just holding on for dear life and grinding it out in between. And so it’s a really exciting stage. I think it’s probably the hardest. It’s terrifying. It’s where most small businesses fail. So for those of us that make it out of that hustle stage, congratulations friend, that is a big deal!!

Then the next stage of business is that blooming onion, is what I call it, but it’s that brand awareness stage. In this blooming onion stage, you’re really less hustling, right? At this point, you’ve hired a team member or two or more. You’ve started to outsource. You have started to have some systems and processes. You’ve got a few years of data behind you because here in this blooming onion stage, you’re about three to six years in business. That’s really where this middle brand awareness stage is.

Instead of kind of having to like fight for every person to know who you are and know who your business is, now you’ve got some strategic partnerships. You can start to really create a brand. You’ve got a reputation that you’re building your business can start to stand on that reputation. It’s a really, really cool stage of business. This is the hardest stage, and I’m gonna say that in every single stage in case you guys haven’t figured that out yet, I think this is the hardest stage. A lot of times you still have a, a large amount of business of your own, and you’re just now starting to bring on a team and you’re trying to manage a team and run a full load of events and it can be extremely overwhelming until you hit that final stage of business, which I call the CEO stage.

In this CEO stage, that’s where you’re really starting to scale. At this point you are moving into more of a mentor or a coach role. You’ve got a team of people. They have very specific roles on your team, you know exactly what each of them is doing. They know exactly what they’re doing and you are really not involved in the day to day, but you’re more mentoring and cultivating this team to run the day to day.

You’re no longer running the events, you’re running the team and that’s a really, really cool stage of business to be in because it also allows you with this newfound freedom of not necessarily being in the day to day. It allows you, some creative space to start thinking about the next steps for your business. Whether that’s an exit from your business or it’s an additional revenue source, it’s another market. It’s starting a podcast. Like there’s a million different things that you can do in that last stage of business, because you now have the creative bandwidth to be able to really take your business into the next level of growth.

What’s really interesting about every single stage is that what will work in one stage doesn’t work in the other. If you were in the hustle stage and you tried to, add another revenue stream to your business.

I work with students a lot that do this and I’m like,” I don’t think this is a good idea. I think you need to master this one and then we add.” Because you don’t just start adding a bunch of things.

Have you ever seen vendors who are like,” I do DJ and lighting and video. Oh, and by the way, if you need me to do sparkler and planning, I can also toddle a little bit in rentals and floral”, okay but are you good at any of these things? Like what? And, I am extremely passionate about being amazing at one thing, mastering that, and then adding the next thing.

Now I took 11 years to add the next thing for Blush. We had Blush, we did strictly weddings. We did nothing else. We didn’t do social events, Bar Mitzvahs, Bat Mitzvahs, nothing. For 11 years, and then we started Eleven, which is our corporate brand. And then from there we started branching out. We managed a venue, these kind of things. So from there, we started branching out because we had mastered the way Blush had run. And I was able to really focus on being that mentor.

Why do I tell you all this? Why are you listening? And you’re like, okay, Brandee, this makes sense but you said you were going to give me three tips to get to that next level in business.

I’ve worked with so many event industry CEOs at this point. I have absolutely loved it. I’ve worked with almost a hundred different business owners and the stages of business are so similar and it’s really fun to figure out, okay, like what stage are you in? Let’s figure out what your next three steps are. Let’s master those and then let’s get you to that next level. And then let’s implement a whole different strategy.

And so after working with this many businesses, I was like, you know, it’s really very similar for every business. There’s really a couple of standard things that you wanna do in each stage to take your business to the next level. So I decided to create a quiz around it. Which was a lot of fun. I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. I’ve actually had the owner of interact here on the podcast. I’m a huge fan of quizzes.

I specifically created this one because I really want to help my podcast listeners, my wedding CEO community, I want you to be able to kind of like, self diagnose.

I want you to be able to take the quiz. It will take you less than 90 seconds. It’s super fast, eight questions, and it’s gonna help you determine what stage of business that you’re in.

Then I’m actually going to give you so many free resources with three exact strategies that you need to implement today in your business, based on what stage you’re in to take you to the next level.

Now that next level is really adding about a thousand dollars a week to your business. So that’s what we’ve called the quiz: 3 Tips To Add 1 Thousand Dollars a Week To Your Business.

It’s that simple!

If you’re in that hustle stage and you’re right there around like the $50,000 $60,000 mark that next $50,000 gonna push you over the first six figures. Right? Which is really, really cool. And then if you’re in that brand awareness stage pushing you up into that higher six figures is exactly where you need to be. And then in that CEO stage, well, the sky’s the limit. You can do whatever you want.

Really adding a thousand dollars a week to your business is gonna take you to that next level. And I had so much fun creating this.

I spent an incredible amount of time really thinking about, “What are the three things you need to do in the hustle stage to get to the blooming onion? What are the three things in the blooming onion stage you need to do to get to the CEO stage?”

And in the CEO stage, I really focused on what are the three things you need to do to really figure out what your next growth plan is and how to really be that great mentor and coach in that final stage of business.

I would absolutely love it if you took just a few minutes, go take the quiz. You’re gonna get all these free resources. I’ve got downloads, templates, specific podcast episodes you can listen to. I’ve got different strategies that you can implement. It was just really a lot of fun to put together.

So I’d love for you to head over to www.brandeegaar.com/Quiz. And I would love it. If you shared your results with our group. Pop into the wedding pro CEO community on Facebook, the link is in the show notes below and, share your results with the group. I will pop in as well and answer any questions that you have right there in the wedding pro CEO, community, in Facebook.

So feel free to share your results and ask any questions that you have. I think it’ll be a lot of fun. It’ll be a lot of conversation there in the community. And I absolutely love that because I love getting to see what’s ticking in your head, what questions do you have? Where are you getting stuck in your business? Let’s get you unstuck and get you to that next level, because sometimes it just takes an outside person looking at your business and saying, here’s what you need to think about.

So anyway, all right. You guys. Do it right now. I want you to stop what you’re doing. Go over to brandeegaar.com/quiz take the quick quiz.

If you don’t have time to read your results right now, it’s totally fine. They’re gonna get emailed to you anyway. And that way you’ve got them handy right there and you can refer back to those resources anytime.

All right, you guys, that’s all I got for you this time. I will see you next time.

Thanks for being here.

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