Wedding Pro CEO | Building Profitable Wedding Businesses

319. If you want 2026 to be the best year in your business...

• Brandee Gaar • Season 7

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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

I know you’re likely listening to this while driving to a venue or stuffing welcome bags, feeling the weight of another overwhelming wedding season. 

In this episode of the Wedding Pro CEO podcast, we’re ditching the "pretty grid" advice and diving into how to audit your distractions and invest in the high-value skills that buy back your time. 

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

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https://weddingproceo.com/wedding-business-strategy-2026/

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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 

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If you want this year to be the best year you've ever had in your wedding business, it's not gonna be because you made a prettier Instagram grid or manifested more aligned clients. It's gonna be because you did four very unsexy things in your business. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through how to do all four specifically as a wedding pro, so that 12 months from now your bank account and your calendar actually match up to the goals in your notes app. Welcome to this episode of The Wedding Pro CEO podcast. I'm your host, Brandee Gaar, and I help wedding pros ditch the overwhelm and build a wildly profitable wedding business that they actually love running. This episode was actually inspired by a video I watched from Alex Hormoz that honestly punched me in the gut. I took his framework and I translated it straight into our world. Weddings, weekends, inquiries, style shoots, flaky clients, all of it. So if you're listening while you're editing galleries, driving to a venue or stuffing, welcome bags, this is your sign. This is your year to stop playing business and start running your company like a legitimate CEO. So let's get into it. Step one to completely change your business over the next 12 months is elimination the stuff that has to go. I'm gonna give you a very uncomfortable exercise. Right now or later tonight, I want you to open two things. First, I want you to open your calendar from the last 30 days, and second, I want you to open your bank or your credit card statement from the last 30 days because here's the truth that none of us want to look at. You don't build your business with what you say you care about. You're actually building it with what you schedule and what you spend on. We all say that we want more inquiries or we want better clients. We want to raise our prices. We want to have weekends off, But if you're honest with yourself, your last 30 days might actually show hours mindlessly scrolling reels instead of recording your own money on DoorDash, Amazon, and yet another pair of black jumpsuits, but $0 spent on sales training, copyrighting help, or A CRM that actually works. Networking events skipped because you were too tired. I know we've all done that, right? No time blocked off for CEO work, like pricing or building out a new funnel or creating systems that actually help you to be more efficient in your business. So I want you to literally ask yourself, if someone only saw my calendar and my expenses, would they believe I'm building a six or seven figure wedding business, or that I'm just trying to survive another wedding season? Do this exercise with me. Think back to when you first decided, I'm a wedding planner, or I'm a wedding photographer, or I'm a dj. You probably did something to step into that identity. You either bought a camera that you really couldn't quite afford. You invested in a course, you printed business cards, you built a website. You didn't just say it. You backed it up with your money and your time, and you told everyone you knew about it. If this is the year that you're gonna step into being the CEO and not just a wedding vendor, your identity has to change again. And this is something that I work so closely with our students on because the mindset of understanding that you aren't just a wedding vendor, you're not just a wedding pro, you're not just a creative, you're not just a solopreneur. You are the CEO of a very scalable business and you need to start acting like it. So here's your first mini action. I want you to circle three expenses from last month that you know, were just random stuff that keeps your bank account dry or they were a distraction. And then I want you to write down three things that you should have spent money on. This would include. Increasing your skill level, increasing something that you do in your craft. Learning how to build better systems, getting a business coach or learning how to sell or market your business better. Next month you're gonna start shifting dollars over here from the things that you spent money on to overhear the things that you. Should spend money on, and that's you voting with your money for the CEO you're becoming. That's saying, I am gonna invest my time and my money into being the business owner that my business needs it to be. Okay, so that's how we're gonna fix our money distraction. Now let's tackle one that's not so easy to talk about, and that is. People, the number one distraction that I see derail Wedding Pros is other people, the friends, the vendor peers, and honestly even family members who roll their eyes. When you start to raise your prices or tell you you're obsessed because you're working on your business instead of going to brunch, These are the same people who complain about the new TikTok brides or how the market and the economy is just trash, and they complain all the time, but they never do anything about it. Here's five questions that I want you to ask yourself about the people that you spend the most time with. If someone said, you're a lot like blank. Would you take that as a compliment? Does time with them leave you energized and inspired or just less lonely? Can you be unapologetically yourself as a CEO around them? Or do you shrink your ambition? Do you shrink yourself to make them feel more comfortable? Do you actually like who they are today or are you in love with their potential? Would you want your future kids to be friends with somebody like them? And when I'm talking about people that you're hanging out with, I also want you to think about who you associate yourself with on social media. And the reason that that's so important is because often we'll say, oh, my closest peers, my closest friends, no, they're not like that. They encourage me. But then you get on threads and your entire feed is people, other wedding pros, vendors, people in the industry saying. The economy's trash. Nobody's booking. Nobody's able to actually make six figures in this business. Nobody can actually make $10,000 a month in this business. Nobody can ever hit seven figures in this business. All the brides are crazy. They just complain, complain, complain, and talk about how it's not possible. Instead, I want you to clear your threads, feed clear your Instagram feed, and make sure that the people that you're surrounding yourself with in person, but also online, make you rise to the occasion. Help you to see what's possible. Help you to know that it's possible to hit six and seven figures in this business because they're doing it. And that's how you encourage yourself. That's how you surround yourself with people who not only make it feel possible, but let you know that you can hit your biggest goals. I know that this can feel harsh, but this is the data that you need. You don't need to make a dramatic friend breakup Instagram reel. You don't need to post on threads that you're cleaning out your entire feed. You just need to gradually s. Spend less time in the group chat that's always complaining about these brides. You need to spend less time in threads with people who are complaining about this economy. I want you to spend more time in rooms where people are talking about how to increase their lead generation, how to increase their profit margin, how good their bookings are, and how they're hiring new people and making careers for other people in this industry. Ambitious wedding pros, you'll absolutely go through seasons where you have less friends, not more. That doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It means that you're becoming the exception. To become the exception, you have to be exceptional by definition, and I want you to understand that. Oftentimes when you start to grow, it feels almost like shedding a snake skin, right? You're shedding that outer layer. You're becoming somebody new, and sometimes that hurts. Sometimes there's a loss of friends, but most often that's because they're not growing with you, and that has to be okay. Number two of how we're gonna create a completely different business over the next 12 months is to just get started. Now, that doesn't mean to make a new Trello board or not brainstorm new content ideas. I mean, it actually is doing the thing, starting the thing. I want you to imagine your 85-year-old self looking back at this season of your business, and I want you to think about which will bother you more, that you missed a Sunday watching football or Netflix, or that you're still undercharging. You're still hustling every single weekend. You're still answering emails at midnight because you never learned how to sell price higher or market. The 85-year-old version of you does not care about the random Sunday that you took off. She cares about whether you built a life and a business that you're proud of. Here's the good news. It only takes about 20 hours of focused effort to get decent at almost anything. But the problem is most wedding pros wait years to start even the first hour. So here's the thing, we're gonna make it stupid simple. Okay, I love simplicity. Let's just pick one skill that would change your business the fastest if you were even just decent at it, right? So this could be sales calls that actually convert. It could be writing emails that get your inquiries to reply. Or creating short form video content consistently. Y'all know I'm a big fan of this one, right? Creating short form video content consistently, or it could be learning your CRM so that your clients aren't falling through the cracks. What if it was understanding your numbers so well that you knew exactly how much had to hit your bank account every single month to not only pay your bills, but to also pay yourself a livable wage? So I want you to choose CEO. Lean in, close and repeat after me. For the next 30 days, I will invest 20 focused hours into getting decent at blank. What is it? What is it that for the next 30 days, you're gonna invest 20 focused hours into getting better at? That's only 40 minutes a day for 30 days, or it's one hour a day for three weeks. It's not forever, it's just 20 hours to stop being bad at something that's costing you thousands of dollars. Okay, So what does this actually look like in real life? let's say you wanna get better at sales. Book 20 mock consults with other vendor friends or past clients. Heck, this could even be your spouse or your mom. It really doesn't matter. What I want you to do is record them and after each one, I want you to write down one thing you did really well and one thing that you're gonna say differently next time. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't actually even know what I would do differently next time, because the whole problem is I don't know how to close in a consult. I have a free training Just head over to wedding pro ceo.com/freetraining and grab it. I teach you exactly how to run a consult so that it closes every single time. What if it was email marketing? So here's what you can do for that. So commit to writing three nurture emails a week for four weeks, same time, same day. They don't have to be perfect. They just have to be sent. These are the emails that are gonna get a new lead to warm up and actually book a consultation with you. And if you're listening to this and you're like, okay, Brandee, I know that I need to do this because I have terrible follow up, it's not great. You can actually grab my free inquiry funnel that we have fully written out for you. can grab them over@weddingproceo.com slash emails. They're completely free, and these are the emails that are gonna help you convert those leads into warm paying clients. Let's say that what you wanna get better at is actually posting reels or short form content, right? So here's what I want you to do for that. I want you to commit. Commit to yourself. That's the most important, right? You are the most important person in your business. Commit to yourself that you're gonna post one piece of video content every single day for 30 days. This does not mean 10 drafts saved in your phone. It means 30 actually posted and. You know what? You will not be great at it at first. You will actually probably be bad at it. And I've, I've encouraged other people to go scroll all the way back, which will probably take you a while. But scroll all the way back in my Instagram feed and look at my first probably six months of reels they were. So bad you guys, so, so bad. I'm actually so embarrassed by some of the things that I posted. I'm still sometimes embarrassed by some of the things that I post, but the thing is this, you can only get better at it if you actually do it. If you actually practice. I use this analogy a lot, all three of my daughters play volleyball, so I have spent hundreds of hours inside a cold gym on a cold, uncomfortable bleacher watching them play volleyball. So you would think that I could easily be subbed in, right? Like I've had hundreds of hours of watching volleyball, so I should be able to be an all star on the court. Do you believe that? No, because the reality is, you know as well as I do, I could not get that ball over the net if you paid me a million dollars, because sitting on the sidelines, watching someone else do it doesn't make you good at it. You have to actually get in the game, get on the court, and practice. And the same is true with social media. We're all so afraid to look like an idiot, but at first you don't have any followers anyway. No one's actually watching, and that's the whole point. Suck at it. No one's actually watching it. And all of a sudden you're gonna start to get better and all of a sudden the algorithm's gonna start bringing the right people to you. And the snowball is going to start clicking. It's gonna start rolling faster and getting bigger, and all of a sudden you're gonna see that lead funnel really start to crank. It's not an overnight thing, but you have to get in the game. You have to get good at it. You will be bad at first. You will cringe. You will feel like you should be further along. But that's the cost of greatness. So just start. The third thing that we're gonna do to have an unbelievably different business this year is to get better on purpose. What I mean by this is that ambitious people don't buy more stuff. They invest in buying skills. Wedding pros DM me all the time, like Brandee. I'm trying so hard, I'm posting, I'm going to networking events. Why isn't it working? Trying doesn't get you paid. Improving is what gets you paid. So most of you don't have a not enough time problem. You have a. Priorities problem. What that means is that you're choosing a new outfit for every wedding over sales training. You're choosing another new lens over learning how to understand your profitability. You're choosing another software subscription over actually mastering the software that you actually have. CEO this year. Instead, I want you to bet big on you. If you had $2,000 to put somewhere this year, I want you to tell me which one is smarter to put it in an index fund and maybe earn 10% or to put it into skills coaching or programs that help you raise your average booking by a thousand dollars or more forever if you do 20 weddings. That's.$20,000 a year, so it's not even close. You're gonna invest 2000 and then you're gonna get 20,000 back by just learning that skill. This is what I mean by betting on yourself. conferences, masterminds, coaching courses, strategy days. These are not nice to haves for later. They're how you buy time. You're pulling the next three to five years of experience all into this year. So here's my challenge for you on this one. I want you to decide on an education budget for the year for you as the CEO. Now, in my own business, I allot 10% of our total gross revenue to education, every single year. It is that important to me. And yes, that does mean that I often spend six figures on education for myself and my team. Even if for you, that's a hundred dollars a month, that money is not for decor. It's not for candles. It's not for buying new dresses. It's for buying skills that are gonna help you to level up yourself as the CEO. when you get in those rooms, when you make that investment, when you decide on that conference that you're gonna attend or that mastermind that you're gonna join, your mission is to become the best student they've ever had. I want you to show up live. I want you to ask questions. I want you to implement and take action fast, and I want you to report back with the results. I want you to be there. Favorite case study that they've ever had, because that one shift will make every dollar of education worth 10 times more. This is actually something that I do myself. Anytime I buy a new program or I sign on with a new coach, I go to a conference. I want to become the teacher's pet. Now, that's actually not typically my personality, though. It does seem like it would be right, but in school, I never really was the teacher's pet. It wasn't who I was. Here in my business, I take it so seriously that when I make a decision to invest in something, whether that's a coach or a conference, or a mastermind or a course, I take immediate action. I immediately am making sure that I'm showing, showing up to every single call. I want to make sure that I'm asking questions, that I'm bringing those results back, that I'm saying, Hey, this sort of worked, but I'm not exactly sure if I implemented it correctly. What can I do differently? My goal is to make at least. 10 x that investment. So if I invest 2000, I want 20,000 back. If I invest 10,000, I want a hundred thousand dollars back. And that happens for me every single time because I know that I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna take the action. The thing is, have I ever made a bad investment with education? 100%. I specifically remember paying someone $7,000 to do one-on-one coaching with me for three months, and it was the worst investment I've ever made. She was not a good coach at all. But here's the thing, every single investment can help you to shape your business. And for me, what I learned from that was how I didn't want to be a coach. I got to see all of the things that I did not like about the way that she coached or the way that she made me feel, the way that she made me feel about being a business owner. And I took that and said, these are the things that I wanna make sure never happened to my students. This is so important to me. And so while I didn't necessarily see a monetary gain from that, I was able to implement that into my business, and I think that that actually probably taught me a lot more than some other things that I've invested in because it helped me to see what I don't want to be like and how to make sure that I shield my students from feeling the way that I felt in her coaching program. So yes. Is it possible that you could make a bad investment? Yes, you could, but nine times outta 10, if you go in and you take action, you are gonna get something out of it no matter what, because you're, it's on your shoulders. You need to take responsibility for your investments, and you can get something out of every single piece of education. okay, so here's what you're gonna do. I want you to build your failure resume. Now, I know this is the part that no one likes, but it's real. If you wanna win faster, you have to be willing to lose more, right? So I want you to stop being embarrassed by failure and start tracking it like it's a resume, because failure is gonna make you better. I think about it sort of like sandpaper. I, I think about it like sandpaper, that's shaping me. Sandpaper hurts, right? If you ever rub it against your skin, it freaking hurts. I don't wanna use sandpaper on my skin, but when I think about failure, I think about it like that, where it's like, yes, sandpaper hurts even on the wood that you're trying to put it against, right? But that the purpose of that sandpaper is to make that piece of wood even better. To make it smoother. To make it perfect. And this is exactly how we should think about failure. Think about it with the number of sales calls that you've bombed, you've learned from each one, or new offers that have flopped, or reels that have totally tanked. Or even networking events where you felt super awkward or left out. Maybe you've raised your prices and it didn't land, so you had to pull them back. Every single loss is proof that you took action and you learned from it. But wedding pros who never fail, they're not even playing the game. They're literally sitting in the stands on the cold bleachers, complaining about Instagram or complaining about this economy. The highest earning CEOs in our industry have the biggest failure resumes, the most rejected proposals, the most nos on sales calls, the most content that never took off, the most experiments that didn't work until they did. But you only have to win big once the right offer, the right niche, the right positioning for everything to change. The last thing that we're gonna do to make our business completely unrecognizable in the next 12 months is to never stop. This is where so many wedding pros lose. Do not tune out at me. It's not because they're not talented, but it's because they rebrand every single year, or they keep changing their offers every single season. Or they bounce from Instagram to TikTok, to YouTube, to email, to Threads. They try something for two weeks and then they declare, oh, that didn't work. That didn't work. Let me put this in our language. You think business is like watching a wedding highlight film. You see the getting ready shots and the sparkler exit and you think, oh, that looks so fun. But building a business is like planning the wedding. It's months of emails, site visits, timeline edits, rain plans, family drama. None of that shows up in the three minute video, but it's all part of it. Success in your wedding business is exactly the same. You only see everyone else's highlight reel, but you don't see the months or the years in the middle. And here's what kills your momentum. This year I'm gonna focus on SEO, and then two weeks later, actually I'm gonna go all in on Reels. And then wait, I should launch a course and then wait, what about a second brand? Does that sound familiar you guys? I see it all the time. We have students that come into Wedding Pro CEO, and they've got one mission when they come in and literally less than a month later, they're telling us about their rebrand or how they're completely redoing their website or how they're changing their offers, or maybe they're gonna become an educator now. And I just look at them and I'm like, this sounds crazy. That's not to say that you can't ever try something else. Of course you can, but my philosophy is that you have to get really freaking good and locked in at what you're currently doing before you take that time and energy and put it into something else. I. Every single time you restart, you go back to uninformed optimism where everything looks fun and easy, everything right, but you never push through the part where it's hard and I hate it. And that's where real results live. So here's the rule. Okay? Here's the rule. When it's working. Do more of it, and when it's not working, don't quit. Just try it differently. Do it differently. If your consults aren't converting, you don't stop doing consults, right? You can't stop doing consults or you won't have a business. No. You fix your process, you get coaching, you learn, you practice. You adjust the way you're closing. If your content isn't landing, you don't just disappear from Instagram for three months. Well, I think some of us do, but that's not the right answer here, right? No. You're gonna study your metrics. You're gonna see what performed. You're gonna refine your hooks, you're gonna improve your storytelling. Consistency isn't about posting every day when you feel inspired. Consistency is the complete opposite. It's about doing what works, even when you're bored or you don't feel like it. Running a successful business isn't about vibes. It's about showing up even when you don't want to and even when it feels hard. If you've never given your business a focused 30 day sprint. I dare you. For the next 30 days, I want you to pick one main business goal, one book five new weddings, build out my email funnel, master my consult process, and I want you to work two to three focused hours a day only on that goal. Turn off your notifications. Turn off your notifications. Please let me say this one more time, as loud as I possibly can. Turn off your notifications the very first module. When you come inside of Wedding Pro CEO, the very first thing that you do is turn off all of your notifications because for you to make time to learn the strategies that we teach inside of our programs, for you to actually implement those strategies and see real results inside of the program, you can be distracted like a squirrel. You have to understand that every single day there are about a billion things that want your attention, and by turning off your notifications, you're gonna be able to take focused time and focused effort and put it into actually changing your business. I want you to say no to everything that doesn't move that goal forward. You will not die, I promise you. You'll discover a gear that you didn't even know that you had, and once you have that gear, you'll trust yourself differently as a CEO and your business will look wildly different. Okay, CEOs, let's land this plane if you want this year to be the best of your wedding business so far. Here's your exact framework. Eliminate distractions, audit your calendar and your expenses. Audit your friend and your vendor circle. Start voting with your time and money for the CEO you're becoming. Get started and pick one skill. Commit 20 focused hours to getting really freaking good at it. Be willing to be bad before you're good, but get better. Set an education budget. 10% of your gross revenue should be going into educating yourself and getting new skills. Bet big on you. Build your failure resume and be proud of it. Never stop. No more shiny object hopping. When it's working, do more and when it's not working, do different. Do not disappear. And here's a quick recap of your homework from this episode. Okay. I want you guys to write this down if you're doing something else. Pause this. Get a notebook. I want you to write this down. Here's what you're gonna do. Circle three distraction expenses and three CEO investments for the next month. Homework number two is to decide your education budget and one 20 hour skill focus. Homework number three is to choose one area you'll commit to for 90 days. Sales, content, pricing or funnels, and refuse to change lanes. If you're listening to this and you're thinking, Brandee, I know my business has more in it. I just don't know where the gaps are or what to fix first. CEO. That's exactly what we help you do inside of Wedding Pro CEO. My team and I can look at your numbers, your offers, your pricing, your lead flow, and we help you build a clear plan, a clear specific plan to you to hit your revenue goals without burning out. When you first come into Wedding Pro CEO, the very first thing you do is meet with one of our coaches to review your business and create a very specific plan exactly to you on how you're gonna two or three x your revenue. If you're like, yes, I need this. I need this hands-on help with my business. I want a coach to walk beside me, and I want to be in a room of other CEOs who have seen what's possible and can show me the same thing That can encourage me to hit my biggest goals. I want you to head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application and I want you to book a GAP assessment with my team. We'll walk you through your goals, your bottlenecks, and whether wedding pro CEO is the right room for you this year. CEO if this episode lit a fire under you, if you listen to it and you were like, Ugh, that is exactly what I needed to hear this January. As we're going into this year, will you do me a favor and will you screenshot it and share it to your stories and tag me. I'm at Brandee Gaar over on Instagram, and I want you to send it to one other wedding pro who you know is meant to be a CEO and not just a vendor. Because this year isn't gonna just get better by accident. It gets better because you decided to act like the CEO of your wedding business. And that starts today. CEO I am cheering you on and I will see you in the next episode.

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Brandee Gaar

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