Wedding Pro CEO | Building Profitable Wedding Businesses

310. The Wedding Industry is Lying to You

• Brandee Gaar • Season 6

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You didn’t start your business to stay stuck. If you're ready to finally hit 6 or 7 figures WITHOUT burning out — book a call with our team → https://weddingproceo.com/application

The wedding industry has sold us a story — that hustle equals success. But what if that story is the very thing keeping you stuck? 

In this episode, I’m breaking down the lies we’ve all believed about what it takes to “make it” and showing you how to finally scale profitably without burning out. 

Wedding Pro, I believe you are ready to reclaim your weekends, increase your profit, and lead your business like a true CEO!! 

This conversation will change the way you see growth forever.

The (FREE!)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

A favorite book of mine: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz 

https://amzn.to/4lbqZFw

Another favorite book of mine: Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell 

https://amzn.to/3ITKLb4

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EPISODE SHOW NOTES BLOG & MORE:

https://weddingproceo.com/wedding-industry-lies/

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Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Wedding Pro CEO Podcast. If you find these strategies helpful, make sure to share this episode with your fellow wedding pros. And remember, in the world of weddings, it's all about building genuine relationships and showcasing your best work. Until next time, keep shining, CEOs!

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Have a question you’d like Brandee to answer? Ask here: http://bit.ly/3ZoqPmz

Heads up, CEO! Some of the links I share may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you decide to purchase—at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools and resources I actually use and love, and that I believe will help you grow a profitable, sustainable business you’re obsessed with.

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Let's talk about the lies the wedding industry keeps feeding you, and more importantly, how they're keeping you stuck at the exact same revenue level year after year. Because if you're sitting at 100, 300, 500 K, or even hovering around that seven figure mark and can't seem to break through, it's not your talent that's holding you back. It's what you've been taught to believe. I wanna show you exactly what shifts at every stage so you can stop spinning and finally scale profitably. I know these patterns because I've lived every one of them. When I first started my wedding planning business, I thought success meant being fully booked, I hit that a hundred K mark by pure hustle and grit saying yes to every client, every weekend, every email at midnight. I was proud of being booked out, What I didn't realize was that booked out was just code for being completely burned out. I pushed through it and I kept going, Then I hit 300 K, and that's where I hit my first real wall. Suddenly my time was maxed, but my income never seemed to be moving forward. I couldn't pay myself any more than I already had been. I had no systems, no team, and I was terrified to delegate because I thought no one else could do it as well as me. Sound familiar. At half a million dollars. My team was growing, but somehow my profit still wasn't at every stage. I kept thinking, how much money do I have to make for me to actually make more money because I just keep working harder taking on all this new stuff. Our revenue is growing and scaling. I feel proud of that, but somehow I still have no more money in my pocket. the question kept coming up, how much money do I have to make in revenue to actually see more profit? And that's the wrong question to ask. I was managing chaos, not running a business. I was working for my business instead of on it. I remember sitting on my back porch literally crying and thinking, how did I get here? How did I get to this place where I feel like. Everybody from the outside sees success and on the inside, all I wanna do is take a match to it and walk away. And that was the moment that I realized we've been building our business on the wrong blueprint. We've been told hustle equals success. When in reality, hustle just hides inefficiency. That's why I started Wedding Pro CEO to teach business strategies that no one else in the industry is teaching no one else has built a team like ours. No one else is dissecting the data behind hundreds of wedding businesses every single year, no one else is obsessed with helping creatives become CEOs quite like we are. The difference is we aren't just teaching creatives how to be better creatives. We're teaching creatives how to run a legitimate business based on data and facts, profit margins, and understanding how to actually pay yourself a livable wage from your business to grow a team, to help you build a business that's bigger than just you, to help you stop trading time for money and to understand that you can make a living without having to give up every single weekend. the wedding industry has told us for way too long that being burnt out is just part of the culture that working every weekend is just part of the game. That 80 hour weeks are something that is standard in this industry and we have to just love it. Those are the lies that we've been told for way too long, and that's why we are here to help the wedding industry understand how to do business differently so that you can build a business that's profitable that you actually love. Here's what I've learned after coaching thousands of wedding pros. There's a predictable pattern to what keeps you stuck at each level. at a hundred K in revenue, you're doing everything yourself, and that's understandable. You're building the business you're doing. Everything. You're running on referrals. You're living in your inbox, which is complete chaos, saying yes to clients who drain you because you're scared to say no. The lie here at that first six figure mark is that more bookings equals more success. But what actually gets you past this first six figure stage is clarity. It's understanding your numbers, pricing for profit, and selling competently. The way most of us start our businesses is to just look at the pricing that everyone else in our market has and fall somewhere to the low middle side of that so that you can start booking, right? We have no idea how much it actually cost us to produce any of our packages or our services or how many hours go into each one, that's okay for a very small portion of time, while you're figuring it out, but very quickly, you need to understand exactly how much money you're making from each of your services and how much you're billing out per hour. Without understanding these costs, we make these crazy revenue goals that actually aren't even possible to meet because we aren't charging enough per hour. Physically impossible to reach a high enough profit margin to pay yourself or to start building out a team. this is why so many people come into Wedding Pro CEO, because they're like, I'm not really sure what the problem is. I think I need more leads. But the idea of booking any more clients makes me overwhelmed because I'm already exhausted. But if I don't take on more, I can't make more money. They just don't understand profit margin, and this is what keeps you on the hamster wheel right there at that first a hundred thousand dollars of running as hard as you possibly can and yet still not making enough money. I think about one of our students, a DJ who was right here, he was stuck at a hundred k, fully booked, looked so successful from the outside, but he had no weekends off and could barely pay himself came to us and said, I don't even know how I could possibly start building out a team because I already have so many bookings. I turned bookings away, but I can't even pay myself. So how would I start to pay other people to work for me? Once we started working through his services and understood that his profit margin was off, his sales looked amazing, right? Of course they did because he was underpriced for his market, so he was getting tons of bookings, but he wasn't making enough money to actually send profitability flowing through to the business to cover salary for him and to start building out that team. Once we fixed his pricing and he learned how to price for margin for profit and not just for sales, his profit doubled and he didn't even add a single event. The thing to remember at this stage of business is that revenue is a vanity metric. Revenue is fun and exciting, and you wanna get to that first hundred K. It's like you just wanna see those six. Figures on that. P and l and I have been there. I totally get it. I understand this, but revenue is a vanity metric. What we really wanna be measuring here is profit, because profit is sanity. Remember, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and profit is what keeps you sane and keeps your business open and growing. Okay, 300 K is this next benchmark that we see so often in the wedding industry where we hit that next brick wall at this 300 K mark. This is when you have lots of team members, but most of the time you are still very much a bottleneck in your business. You've got help, but you're afraid to let go. The lie here at this stage of business is that leadership means control. At this stage of business, you have lots and lots of help, but you still have your hands in literally every pot. I remember describing this stage of business for myself and I would say. I feel like I have lots of people to do the things, but none of those things get done without me having to either put my hands in the task or make a decision I felt like I had created more work for myself at this stage of business because I was like, now I have so much more going on. I have my own clients and I have. A huge team that is all doing things, but they all need something from me. So it felt like, you see those memes where it's like you've just got voices all over, And there's just people all the time that need you and it never stops you're like. What have I created? It almost feels like a monster or a ball rolling down a hill that you can't seem to catch. I don't know if anybody listening to this, and you're like, how is she in my head, it's because I've been there. I've lived this, I've literally walked this stage of business. the way you scale past the 300 K mark is to learn to delegate outcomes, not just tasks. This is when everything changes. I can very vividly think of a planner that we work with inside of Wedding Pro, CEO, who came to us where she was done. She was at this stage of business. She literally came as a last ditch effort. She was like, if this doesn't work, I'm out. I can't do this anymore. I don't sleep. All I think about is business and there's never enough money left over. And the hardest part of this stage of business is asking for help. Because You are typically one of the top people that everybody's looking to being like, how's she doing it? How's he doing it? How are they killing it? They have this huge team, they have all this business, But on the inside it's. Literal nuthouse. It's crazy. she came to us in that exact position and I just looked at her and I said, I promise you, I know what you're feeling. I promise you I know what this is and I know exactly what we need to do to get you to that next step. What she was missing from her team was understanding how to remove herself completely from certain areas of the business. Instead, what she was doing was she was delegating tasks, right? And we all do that. It's something that is so common. so what we did was we restructured the team she already had, her fix was so simple because she had this incredible team. She just wasn't letting them. Run with their position. So what we did was we pulled out the best qualities of each of her team members, and trained them to give them a whole section of the business. So we had somebody that stepped into the operations and they started taking over training assistants, hiring assistants, putting together trainings for the lead planners on her team. We put somebody that was in charge. Of marketing on her team completely in charge of marketing. She had the vision, she had the strategy. we taught this person exactly what we wanted, the outcome of the marketing to be and let them run with it. And then we put someone in charge of sales, and this one was probably the most difficult. But it was time in her business for her to give up sales, so we put someone on her team who was so excited about the possibility of sales. We trained her, we helped her understand exactly how to close in the call using our Assume method, and you guys. Can I tell you that she increased her revenue that year by $140,000 and she herself was working a fraction of the time that she had been working when she first started with us. Here's the thing, your revenue will exponentially increase when you learn how to stop being the bottleneck and get out of your own way in your business. let's talk about this next stage of business, which is that half a million dollar mark so few businesses in the wedding industry get to this stage it's really such an exciting, and almost when I see our pros that hit this stage after going through 100, 300, now they're hitting this 500 K. They're almost like, what do I even do here? Like, I'm not even sure what my role is in the business at this stage because. When you first start to hit that half a million dollar stage, you have a team, but the reality is you don't have a ton of structure. You're managing people instead of leading them. And so in this stage, you're still really helping each person on your team to do their job, right? They have an outcome. they know exactly what they're supposed to be doing, but you're very much still managing people instead of leading people. And what does that mean? What is the difference? I know sometimes we spit out these things and it's like, yes, that's so profound, but then you're like, what does that actually even mean? What I mean by managing people instead of leading people is that when you're managing them, you're very much still in it with them on the day-to-day. Like you're in the job with them, so you're kind of walking alongside them as they're doing their job, you're still very much guiding a lot of the decisions there. you're helping to really, walk through the strategy to get to those outcomes that you want them to get to. When you're leading people, they now are the leader of their area. Instead of you going to them with strategy, they're coming to you with strategy. They're coming to you and saying, I spot this problem and here's how I wanna fix it. They're a leader. They're coming to you and you're saying. I love it. Yeah, let's run with that. Or you might help them rethink that a little bit. But for the most part, they're leading a specific area of business and you are simply leading them and helping them to have that thought process to be that leader. So that difference is that you're completely stepping. Out of the day to day, you're no longer involved in how the job gets done. So you're casting the vision and then you're allowing them to implement the strategy to make that vision come to life. I would say this is the stage that feels the most foreign because you've just been in it for so long. It almost feels guilty. I very vividly remember using that word specifically with my team because As I started removing myself more and more from the day-to-day operations, I wanted them to understand, Guilt is something that I am feeling because they're the ones that are working every Saturday. They're the ones that are in it. They're the ones that are dealing with client issues. They're the ones that are, out there doing the networking where I am not necessarily. so what I had to really understand, and this was probably my biggest hurdle in business so far, is that if I was out every Saturday, or if I was at every networking event, or if I was the one who was still just in the day-to-day constantly. I wasn't able to see the path forward. And I think about that a little bit, like you're in a forest, right? if you're the one hiking through the forest, you can only see so much in front of you, But if I am looking at it from a helicopter or from like a drone shot up above, and I can see the entire path forward, I'm able to cast a vision. I'm able to tell my team, here's where we're going. I know what the end looks like. this is what we're looking to do. here's the journey three years from now. my job is to literally get out of the day to day enough to be able to see. the path forward to cast the vision and to cast that vision to my team, and then their job is to then lead the doers and help them to see the strategy to get there. Right? I want you to think about it also like a baseball coach, If the coach is covering second base, how can he see that his outfielder needs help? How can he see that his pitcher isn't quite hitting the right mark? How can he see that his ACEs aren't in the right places? He can't because his concentration is on how to cover second base. Instead, we want that coach to be able to see from the sidelines. We want the coach to be on the sidelines be thinking, is my outfielder doing the right job? Is my second baseman killing it? Is my pitcher hitting the right mark? And if they're not, how do I help them? The coach is the one who sees the problem, who can say, Hey, this is what we need to do next. This is what we're trying to do. We're trying to win the game. And sometimes the coach is making decisions that everybody else isn't quite sure about, but they believe in that coach, They're like, I don't know how that's gonna affect the game. But then they win and everybody's like, wow, we have the best coach. I know I'm giving a lot of analogies, if you're sitting here, if you're at like 4, 4 50 just hitting that $500,000 in revenue this year, or even you just crossed it and you're like, I feel like I'm not sure what to do with myself. I hear that from so many of our CEOs. I wake up and I'm like, what do I do?'cause my calendar isn't stacked right? Like, I don't have a hundred appointments, I don't have 18 weddings. this month. you almost feel like, uh, I don't know what to do every day because someone's not dictating it. And that's the point. Once you get to this stage in business, you have to become the coach and not the player because if you're still in the game, if you're still in the day to day, you can only see so much. You can only see the path forward a little bit. What we wanna do is we wanna get you out of the day to day. We want your team to understand they want you there. When we really started growing past this stage, my team they would almost protect me. They would be like, we don't want you on a wedding on a Saturday because we don't want you to have a wedding hangover on Monday, and we want you to be like out there doing what we need to do to press the business forward. The lie at this stage of business is that being busy means you're growing. It doesn't, if you, as the CEO, are still having a stacked calendar, if you still have tons of weddings, if you still wake up every day and you've got so much work on your plate. you're gonna start moving backwards very, quickly. Without systems, without data, without leadership development, you are only scaling chaos. And trust me, it will not last. This is where having a leadership coach inside of Wedding Pro, CEO, like Susan Sutherland, is such an incredible win for Wedding Pro. CEO. Susan Sutherland is our newest addition to our coaching team inside of Wedding Pro, CEO, This woman has scaled a business that does events all over the world and her businesses. She has two of them do multiple millions of dollars in revenue every single year. She helps our clients inside of Wedding Pro CEO, turn team drama into team profit, and I am so obsessed with being able to have Susan on our team to help our CEOs to really understand how to build a business that's so much bigger than them. This last one is when you finally cross that seven figure mark, and this is where you start to finally lead leaders. The lie here is that scaling any further means losing creativity, and that's just simply not true. The truth is, this is where your business finally buys back your time, and you can start to look at secondary revenue streams. This is where you go from being an operator to being a visionary, and this is where your brand scales because of your team, because you've hired amazing people that are. Better than you at what you do not in spite of them. Here's the thing, CEO, as you're listening to this episode, understand that success leaves clues and at every level the lie changes, but the pattern is the same. You have to unlearn what got you here to move to what's next for you, and that's what we help you do inside of Wedding Pro. CEO. Literally why I built Wedding Pro CEO to give you the blueprint for growth at every single stage of business because no one else in the wedding industry is doing what we're doing. No one else is auditing literally hundreds of businesses and analyzing the patterns and coaching pros like you to scale with real data. We don't just scale wedding businesses based on what we think is right or what we did in our own businesses No, our company literally audits hundreds of wedding businesses every single year, and we use the patterns, we analyze the data, we know exactly what happens at every single stage, and we've created the strategy to get you past each of those stages. Confidently so that you can scale quickly and avoid the road bumps that so many of us had to go through to get here. So if you're ready to stop believing the lies that are keeping you stuck, and stop letting the wedding industry dictate the way that you run your business, I want you to book a free gap assessment with my team. One of our business consultants will walk you through your numbers. They're gonna pinpoint your biggest bottleneck in your business at the stage that you are now, and they're gonna show you the next step to break through your current level without burning out, because hustle isn't the goal. It's not the goal. Freedom is, and that's exactly what we help you build inside of Wedding Pro, CEO. Here's the thing, I want you to click the link in the description below. If you're listening to this episode and you're like, literally, she's in my head. I don't know how she does it, but she's hearing my thoughts that are

happening at night at 3:

00 AM This is exactly what's keeping me up at night. I get it. that's what I walked through for far too long, and I had to go outside the wedding industry to learn the strategies that it takes to build a business that's profitable I bring that back to the wedding industry, our coaching team, every single coach in our team still runs a very successful wedding business while coaching. So we know what's happening today, what are the trends, what are the battles that you're facing today inside your wedding business? And that's what we're teaching. We're constantly updating our strategies for what's working today, not what worked. Pre COVID, we all still run our wedding businesses, and that keeps us on our toes. That helps us to understand what's going on inside of the wedding industry and how to scale you in spite of the challenges that we're facing inside the industry. Click the link in the description below and book a gap assessment with our team. We wanna talk to you. We want to show you how to scale your business. So click that link. Tell us a little bit about your business and book a time that works for you with one of our business consultants, and let's change the way the wedding industry does business. And if you really are feeling generous today, then make sure you take two minutes and whatever platform you're listening on, please leave us a five star review that helps other wedding pros to know, Hey, this is a legit podcast. It's gonna help me scale my business and I wanna listen to it too. CEO. Thank you so much for being here every single week, and I hope to see you on a GAP assessment with my team here in the next couple days. See you next time.

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Brandee Gaar

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