Wedding Pro CEO | Building Profitable Wedding Businesses
Dive deep into the wedding industry and learn actionable tips from host Brandee Gaar and guest wedding pro CEOs that will enable you take your wedding business to new heights!
Uncover the proven strategies, insights, and stories of successful wedding professionals who have built thriving businesses in this dynamic and competitive market.
Each week, Brandee Gaar, a seasoned wedding industry expert and CEO of Blush by Brandee Gaar, brings you exclusive interviews with top wedding industry pros!
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Wedding Pro CEO | Building Profitable Wedding Businesses
284. The 3 Numbers That Will Make or Break Your Wedding Business This Year
Start running your wedding business like a legit business. Head over to https://weddingproceo.com/application and apply to work with us.
Q1 is officially behind us, and if you're running a real wedding business (not a hobby), it's time to assess the numbers that actually matter.
In this episode, I’m sharing the 3 key metrics every wedding pro needs to review right now—so you can re-forecast, realign, and make 2025 your most profitable year yet.
No fluff—just strategy to help you ditch the overwhelm and run your business like a true CEO.
The Assume Sales Training. 2x your wedding bookings in 30 days—step by step. Thousands of wedding pros have already used it to land more clients immediately! http://weddingproceo.com/freetrainingorg
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FREE TRAINING for Wedding Business Owners
All right, CEOs, quarter one is officially in the books and because we are running our businesses like legit wedding businesses and not some solopreneur hobby, it's time to check in on the numbers. Hey there, CEO. You're listening to the Wedding Pro CEO Podcast, the podcast to help you grow and scale your profitable wedding business. I'm your host Brandee Gaar. And over the last 17 years, I've grown one of the largest planning firms in Orlando, Florida, grossing over $6 million in revenue. Today I'm breaking down the three key metrics you should be measuring right now to make sure that 2025 is the most profitable year you've had yet. Forget the fluff. We're talking actual sales numbers. Revenue numbers, and staffing levels. Because if you don't know where you stand, how can you grow? Okay, so let's get into it. the first metric that we are gonna be looking at is your actual sales per month versus what you had projected in sales each of those months. Now, what happens a lot in quarter one, because it's engagement season and everybody's. So excited. It's booking season. We're writing contracts so fast, right? That's the goal. I have a lot of wedding pros that will drop into my dms, and maybe just a couple weeks into the month they'll be like, oh my gosh, Brandee. February's been so challenging. I've only gotten two leads. I haven't closed any sales. I'm freaking out. And I'm like, well, how was January? And they're like, January was fine, but February is terrible. And I'm like, okay. But that's like a snapshot of such a short period of time. so what I want you to remember is that while you should be checking your metrics every single month, what's most important is to kind of see a pattern. Because often what happens is we'll freak out after maybe like two or three weeks of down sales and we think we need to fix so many things. In reality, it's just a blip in the system, right? So why it's so important that we assess this after quarter one is because now we have three months of metrics to help us to understand whether we need to make a change. What went right, what went wrong. What do we really need to edit about our system? Or even just make a little bit better. Maybe you hit all your goals. But we need to just make things a little bit more refined so we keep scaling. so that's why now, instead of just having those panic moments after two or three weeks, now we have three full months of metrics that we can look at, and we're gonna really dig into those numbers. So this first one, actual sales versus what you projected in sales is gonna be the value of the packages that you booked. Now in the wedding industry, we might book a service for, let's say, $5,000. That isn't happening for many months or even a year, and so we only take in the retainer when we book that client, but your sales goals are based on the actual value of the package booked. So that full $5,000 is what we're looking at. So we wanna make sure that we understand that. Sales goals is the full package value, so not what you took in for the retainer, but the entire amount. So we wanna look at how much did you say that you were gonna book for January? What did you think you were gonna book for February and the same for March? we wanna see, did we meet those sales goals? Were they under, were they over? What does that look like? So what are the metrics that I'm actually looking at when I'm looking at our sales goals? I wanna look at the entire quarter, but I also wanna see by month. did we maybe budget 50,000 for January, but only hit. 30. But for February we made up that difference. Right. So now we're even, and then March we were even, or maybe a little over. Right. So that's what I wanna look at is was it just mixed? Like maybe we had a down January, but we had a great February or March overall for the quarter. Where are we? Are we. Under our sales goal. Are we over or are we spot on? That's the first thing that I'm looking at. I wanna know where we came in relation to what we projected, what we actualized versus what we projected. The second thing I wanna look at is if we were over, I wanna celebrate. I wanna be excited with our team. I wanna make sure that our team knows, Hey, we were over our sales goal, we killed it. That's an entire team effort because. Everybody on your team, regardless of whether they're actually selling or marketing, they're all responsible for leads coming in because you're only as good as your last wedding. So make sure you share with your entire team if you have one, how you did on your sales goals, especially if you were over. Now, if I'm. Over my sales goals, or even if I met it, that's exciting and I wanna celebrate. But I don't just wanna be like, okay, check mark. Like let's move on to the next thing. I really wanna look at what went right? I wanna look at did we get the same number of leads that we thought we were gonna get or that we got last year? I always wanna compare to the same time period as of last year. So I wanna look and see. Did we get the same number of leads or did we get more leads, but book less? So that's something that I wanna look at. Or did we get less leads but book more? So always just little things that I wanna know about my sales funnel compared to the same time period as last year. Did I get the same amount of leads or was it different? Was it the same number of bookings or was it different? because if you've raised your prices, you wanna know, okay, well did I get the same number of bookings of number of events? Or did that decline, but because my revenue, my prices were higher, my revenue was up. Right? These are all the little things that I wanna look at, and you guys might be hearing this and think. Oh my gosh. Brandee like this is so much data you guys, I'm telling you, I do this exercise with my students constantly. We're getting ready to do this exercise together inside of Wedding Pro, CEO, with our students because this data tells you so much about how you're going to run the rest of your year. So that you make sure that everything in that sales funnel is really running smoothly. Now, if your sales weren't as high as what you expected them to be, then that's where I want you to really look and say, okay, what was different from last year? Did I get the same number of leads that I did from last year? Did I get less leads? So now I need to look at marketing, right? If I got less leads coming in, I need to look at marketing and say, what were we doing differently last year that made us get more leads last year than this year? Did we get the same number of leads, but I booked less? So was there something going on? Was I so busy doing client work that I wasn't doing follow ups? Or this is the same question I would ask your sales team. If you have someone else selling, you wanna really look and see what made you miss that goal? Don't just look at it and say, oh, we missed buy $5,000. Not that big a deal. Let's move on. No, I want to understand what made us miss the goal, right? So that you can fix it going into quarter two. then the last thing I wanna look at is if we just completely missed the mark, right? Like maybe you had an aggressive goal for this year and you just completely missed it, like it was way off and you were just like, wow, we were way, way off. I want you to assess that sales funnel, but this is the point where I also want you to look at the rest of your year and think. Do I need to reforecast my sales goals for the rest of the year because now we have three full months under our belt. So if, if you're listening to this and you are one of those CEOs who was like, I'm going for it in 2025, like, I'm putting a 40% markup. I'm putting a 40% growth on my year, like I'm going for it. And maybe you missed that mark, quite significantly in quarter one I want you to consider re-forecasting. The rest of the year, maybe you pull your sales goals down for the rest of the year. And that's not because we wanna lower our standard or lower our goal, but we're running businesses so you can keep on a vision board somewhere where you want your sales to be, but to budget the rest of the year, we need to be realistic about what we are able to do. this is the point where if I've missed the mark for the first quarter, I'm going to adjust what I think the rest of the year should be. And on the flip side, I have many, many students who are like, you know, I forecasted a 20% growth, but we knocked that outta the park like we were way, way over. I also am gonna encourage them to reforecast up for the rest of the year, and that's again, just because we're running. Legit businesses and businesses run on numbers that are as closely forecasted as possible. So we wanna constantly, after each quarter be re-forecasting the year. So if you are way up or way down, I want you to consider re-forecasting your projection for the rest of the year for your sales goal. Okay? So this first metric that we're looking at is sales goals. And remember this. Is the value of the packages that you sold. So it's not revenue that came into the bank, it's the actual value of that entire package that was sold, regardless of when that wedding is gonna happen. Okay, so number two is versus projected revenue. So this is where that retainer is coming into play, right? So the key metric number one was our sales goals, which was the entire value of the project. But key metric number two is the actual money that came into our bank account. And this can get kind of confusing because of the two different numbers. So it's. That's why it's really important, I want you to hear me when I say key metric Number two is revenue, which means it's the money that hit your bank account. So if you sell a wedding for$5,000, that's next year, and you took in a $1,500 retainer. The only amount that we're counting in this key metric number two is that $1,500. Now, the really easy way to run this number is to run an actual versus budget from your financial system. Or if you have a bookkeeper, your bookkeeper should be giving you this number. So if you did a budget last year, if you're part of Wedding Pro CEO, you definitely did a budget with us last year. We do budgets with our students every single year inside the program. Um, so you should have that budget. If you are not part of Wedding Pro CEO one, I wanna invite you to apply to join us inside of Wedding Pro CEO so you can start running your business like a legit business. I would love for you to head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application and apply to work with us, apply to be part of our team. Our team will jump on a call with you to assess where you are in your business and let you know if we think that we can help you scale. We take our client results very, very seriously. So we only accept students who. Are ready to two x their revenue and to really scale their business. So if that's you and you're listening to this and you're like, I need this kind of like, support inside my business because I want to run this legit business, head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application. Fill out a few questions for us and grab a time on our calendar to do that gap assessment and let's get you inside of the program. Okay, so we're gonna run that budget to actual inside of your financial program, your financial software, or get it from your bookkeeper. If you don't have a bookkeeper or a financial software, then really all you're gonna do is you're going to just. grab a bank statement from your bank for each month. Compare what your actual revenue was. I wanna know exactly how much money went into your bank account each month compared to what you budgeted to go into your bank account every single month. Right? And we're looking at the same thing here in key metric number two that we did in key metric. Number one, was it up or was it down to what you forecasted? And then based on either one of those, why was it up or down? If it was significantly up. Some of the things that I'd be looking at for us, we're a planner and we do percentage based pricing. So did we have a client that we had under forecasted what their final payment would be? Right? we may have a client who spent way more than we initially thought that they would, and so we got a larger final payment than we had expected, and so that might drive up our revenue in one of those months. It could also be that we booked maybe. Higher packages than we had expected to book, or our sales were way up, so we took in much larger retainers. So there's lots of reasons you could have additional revenue coming into your bank, but you want to understand what that was because when you go to make your budget next year, you wanna understand why you had a really large month or a really down month. It's really important to understand this. Okay, now if that was. Down if your revenue was down in the first quarter to what you thought it was gonna be. Again, I wanna look and see why was it down? Could it be that a wedding canceled and so you were expecting a final payment to come in that didn't. That happens a lot, right? In our industry, more than clients would like to believe that it happens, right? It could also be that your sales were down and so you didn't get as many retainers as you thought that you were going to. Now, just like I encouraged you to reforecast the year based on whether you're significantly up or significantly down. I want you to reforecast your year for revenue as well. Now, this is where, this is gonna be really, really important because if you did a budget for the year, which you should have done a budget for the year, if you did that, then you have then based your expenses and you're spending off of that budget. Off of what you projected to do for this year. So if your revenue is down for the entire first quarter, we may need to re project the year in revenue and make sure that we're gonna cover all the expenses that we've thought we were gonna spend. That's gonna be really important because as you're spending throughout the year, you're gonna wanna know, okay, did I make enough? do I still think I'm gonna make enough for the year, or are there some expenses I may need to pull back on? on the flip side, if you're way. Up in revenue, you wanna consider that. It may be time for you to start adding a team member or add some additional software or buy that piece of equipment that you've been needing to buy because now you can invest in the growth of your company. Being way up and not knowing it or being weighed down and not knowing it are just as bad because if you have a ton of money sitting in your bank account that you didn't realize was over what you needed, you're not. Investing in the growth of your company. So it's really, really important that you understand if you're way up or what you're way down. Now, one other thing, I saw Braden Drake actually post about this on threads a couple weeks ago, and I loved that he mentioned this, which is I want you to also know when your down season is. I'll give you an example. My company, we're in Florida, and so our high seasons are spring, march through May and fall October through December. And in the summer it's like tumbleweeds, like there's no one getting married 'cause it's hot, it's hurricane season and there's a million bugs in Florida, right? So like we have very, very few weddings in the summer. And so our summer months tend to be extremely, extremely lean, cash flow wise. So I count on having a really big first quarter and second quarter so that we can store up that cash. I kind of think about it like storing up all the acorns for winter, right? I wanna store up as much cash as I can to get us through summer. I wanna understand how much of this extra cash I need to get us through summer, right? If I had a really big first quarter, how much of that do I need to get us through summer? So I might not want to go spend that money. I might be like, oh my gosh, I don't want to eat ramen all summer and have to skip payrolls. I need to store that cash up. To get through summer, right? So I focus on that in quarter one and quarter two. That's how we don't have the big peaks and big valleys in our payroll or in our cash flow in our business because we know we need that extra cash to get through summer. Now, if I had a down first quarter, and I need that money to get through summer. That's where I'm gonna have to start really realizing like, summer's gonna be rough this year because we didn't make enough to get through those summer months. I want you to know what your down season is and make sure, you know, do I need this cash to get through down season? So again, all of this are things that we work through with our students inside of Wedding Pro, CEO. So if you're listening to this and you're just like, I love this, and I, I feel confused by it, but like excitedly confused, I want to understand these numbers better and I want help with it, again, I would encourage you to get inside of Wedding Pro CEO. We do this constantly with our students. We want you to understand your numbers. We believe it empowers you to be a more confident pro, and that is really the foundation of how you're gonna. Scale your revenue so quickly because you're gonna understand it, you're gonna know it, you're gonna be able to breathe it, live it, sleep it, and it's gonna make you such a much better business owner and operator. let's move on to key metric number three. Key metric number three is all about your team and has really nothing to do with revenue or sales. So let's talk about how we're assessing our team. After quarter one where we've gotten the bulk of our bookings for this year, we can now start to understand how the year is gonna play out. And I really wanna understand, do I have enough ACEs on my team? Do I have the right people in the right places on my team? Do I have enough team members to make sure that we're not all gonna burn out and be fried by the end of the year? Right now, of course you're still gonna get more bookings in the year for the year, but at this point, after quarter one, it's much. Fewer that you're gonna book in the year. For the year. I would say most wedding pros book another 10 max 15 weddings for the rest of the year. In the year. Most of your bookings at this point are gonna be for the following year, right? So you have a really idea of how many events that you have now this year, and I wanna be thinking about things like. Do I need second shooters to be trained up? Do I need, assistants to be trained up? Do I need to actually hire more leads for the fall? Do I need to hire more DJs? Do I need to start training more roadies, right? Like all of the people and things that you're gonna need to run your busiest seasons for the rest of the year. You're gonna need to start training and thinking about that now. So assessing your staffing levels after quarter one for the rest of the year to understand do I need more staff? Do I have too much staff? Are there staff that I need to move up into different positions? Do I need to completely hire? Like I see a lot of wedding pros hiring right now because it's a perfect time. It's like, Hey, now we know what we need for the rest of the year. It's time to start hiring so you have time to do your training before you actually need them. But assessing your staffing levels is something that I really, really encourage you to do at this point because this is going to be so important. So you don't get caught with your pants down all of a sudden working 80 hour weeks every single week because you didn't hire in time. The number one killer, people building teams, why teams don't work. Why new hires don't work out is because you wait to hire until you're actually drowning and you have no capacity to do the training. And so they come on, you're drowning. You're just like, I don't know, throw me a life raft. Like do something. And they're like, do something. What? Like, I don't even know what you need help with. Right? And so if we can train now, if we can forecast now what we need for the rest of the year, it's gonna help you to bring that team member on really, really well. It's gonna ensure you have the capacity to train them and that they come on really, really strong, so that by the time you're in your busiest season, that you can really rock and roll with that new team member. Okay, CEO. So now you know what to measure, and because you are the CEO of your business, because you are taking your business seriously and you're running a legit business, I want you to, right now, I want you to look at your calendar in the next two weeks, and I want you to put an hour on your calendar where you're gonna sit, quiet, turn the do not disturb on your phone and your computer, and you're gonna pull these numbers out and you're gonna go back through this episode and you're gonna listen. Okay, what do I need to assess first my sales? What do I need to assess? Second, my revenue? What do I need to assess? Third, my team. And I want you to put that time on your calendar because you know what? Your business deserves it. Your business needs you to. Step up and understand these numbers and to set that time aside on your calendar to really assess how was quarter one and what does it mean for the rest of your year so that you can ensure that 2025 is the most profitable year you have yet. And if you didn't already apply to join Wedding Pro ceo, we would love to have you do that. You can head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application apply to be part of Wedding Pro CEO, where we are building profitable wedding businesses. you can jump on a call with our team, make sure it's a great fit, and get inside of Wedding Pro, CEO so we can help you work on these numbers. You guys, thank you for being here every single week and I will see you next time.
