332. Scaling Success: Eliminating Growth-Stalling Habits in Your Wedding Business

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You're booked, your team is busy, and you're still the one holding everything together. 

This episode digs into why tiny daily habits are quietly stalling your wedding business at six figures and the exact shifts you need to make — from reactive to intentional — to stop being the bottleneck, hire smart, and finally scale like a CEO.

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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/growth-stalling-habits-wedding-business/

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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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Transcript

1:01

Wedding businesses don't stop growing because they lack talent or they lack demands. Most often it's small, tiny habits that keep you from growing over time. most often, business slows because of tiny habits that form inside the business. Small decisions that happen every day. how problems get handled, how your time gets spent. How your business gets run behind the scenes. And over time, those habits start shaping the direction of your business. Some habits help your business grow others quietly stall your growth. The habits that I see really stalling growth, right around that first six figure mark are trying to do everything yourself because you really aren't sure how to hire yet. And so right there at that first six figures is when you have a full client load, you're handling social media, you're handling all the networking, you're handling hiring, training. All the things, and it just feels like a total mess. And so really understanding how to start outsourcing at this level, how to start hiring your first team members is essential in making sure that you can go from a $100 K to $500 K. One of the biggest patterns I see that Wedding Pros do at this stage of business is they think that being busy equals being profitable. And this is such a problem in the wedding industry because we are expected that whoever's working the most, the most stressed out, the most overwhelmed is also the most successful. And that's so false because often what fills your day is just busy work, client work, getting back to emails, messing around with things behind the scenes that don't actually move the needle. What you wanna do instead is clear time in your schedule by outsourcing some of the administrative tasks. 15, $20 an hour tasks so that you as the business owner, can focus on marketing and relationship building and selling because your sales funnel is the crux of your business. In day-to-day operations, what this looks like is that your calendar is literally full from the second you open your eyes in the morning until you finally lay your head on the pillow at night. This means there's no white space in your day. There's no time to be creative. There's no time to get back to the sales funnel. One of the biggest challenges I see with wedding business owners that come into our program is I ask them, when was the last time you followed up with leads? And so often the answer is, I don't even know. Or maybe three weeks ago. They're simply just trying to tread water, and oftentimes what that means is that there's so many lost leads that are just dripping out of their funnel because they're not putting their time in the places that actually move the needle and grow their business. When you know that this is you and you need to make a change, what that often looks like is you're working 14 hour days, you're busy with clients, you have a full client load, but somehow there's never enough money left in the bank account at the end of the month to pay yourself. And so you start to wonder, how could I actually start to bring on a team if I can't even pay myself or if I hired somebody, when would I even have time to train them? These are the things that are happening in your business where you know, okay, something has to change. So small habits right here at your first a hundred K are more important than you can even realize because what's happening is you just are running the business the way that you've always run the business, and it feels like if you could just get a few more hours in the day, if you could just work a little bit harder than you would solve all the issues that all of a sudden you would just start jumping up to 300 K, but the reality is you have to start changing the way that you do business. You can't just muscle through it to grow. At this point, you've hit capacity, and so this is where you need to start creating small habits, outsourcing tasks that are only $15 an hour. Getting someone else to handle those administrative things for you. Really understanding where your business needs you as the CEO, as a business owner to focus, to actually start to make more money. If you don't make a change in your wedding business, in the habits, in the way that you're working your business every single day, what starts to happen is you start to just stall at that a $100 K mark. It feels like you're busy, but you can't seem to get past a$100, $120, $150 K every year. It feels the same every month. It feels the same, and you are so tired. I've been there in my own business. I remember this stage. So vividly, and you're not really sure how to get out of it, but it's the small daily habits that you need to start implementing to change the way you run your business so that we can really break through that ceiling. Some of the habits that I see that seem so harmless and seem like, well, but Brandee, I have to do those. The number one is client work. And I know this sounds crazy because you're like, well, if I don't do client work, then I'm not gonna be able to serve my clients. But what happens is you're running on a hamster wheel of constantly letting other people dictate what you're doing in your day to day. What that looks like is waking up. Getting to your desk and the first thing you do is open your inbox and now all of a sudden, everyone that wants your attention has decided how your day is gonna go. Because I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but what this looks like on a day-to-day basis is that you open your inbox and you seem to never get out of it. And so that to-do list you made the night before never got touched because your inbox dictated the way that your day was gonna be spent. These habits tend to stick around for so long because you honestly aren't sure what to do. You're so busy that you don't have time to think. How could I hire, who would I hire, when would I train them? How could I possibly fit any more into my schedule? And if I'm not already paying myself, how could I have the money to pay someone else? There's two types of habits that wedding business owners have in their business. One is reactive, and two is intentional. Reactive habits are the habits we just talked about. Opening your inbox first thing in the morning, letting your notifications be on all day, so your squirrel brain is getting distracted by everyone that wants your attention. Intentional habits look like understanding where your time is best spent in your business to actually grow it. So that looks like not opening your inbox first thing in the morning, knocking out at least two to three items off of your to-do list. Following up with your sales funnel. Making sure you start marketing your business before you allow the outside world in. It also looks like turning off all of your notifications, 100% of them. And yes, I know that may scare some of you that are listening to this, this is the single best intentional habit you can make in your business, is to go into every social media app, your texting, your email. Everything and turn it off. No notification should come to your phone except maybe an emergency notification from one of your kids. That's the only thing that should be able to get through, and this is because you need focus time to focus on what you know your business needs from you. But what happens instead is when all of those notifications are dinging all day long, it's a distraction, and all of a sudden you go to pop into one notification on Instagram and an hour later you're still scrolling. So let's go back to the reactive habits, because reactive habits are the small habits that are killing the growth of your business. And this most often happens because you just start growing more clients book you more vendors are reaching out. For collab, all of it is so great, but you haven't figured out how to actually handle it, right? So you get up your brain immediately starts thinking about, who needs my attention today? What fires do I need to put out? And that means that everyone else is dictating how your day is gonna be spent. These small, reactive habits like checking your email and leaving notifications on. Are the great things that you've always done that worked for you when you were smaller, but as you're scaling, as you're getting bigger, those are the habits that are quietly killing your business. When you become more intentional with your habits and understand what you as the business owner need to do every single day and how to protect your time, what you'll start to see is that your business starts to scale exponentially and you instead of freaking out. Every time a new lead comes in because you're exhausted and you're not sure how you're gonna serve them or freaking out because you're working a 14 hour day and you have no idea how you're actually gonna get to your to-do list, the next day your time becomes so clear as to how you're gonna spend it. And you start to create consistent leads, consistent onboarding processes. You start to close more sales, you start to understand your profitability because you have time to think about it, you start building out that team, and I think one of the most exciting parts about this stage of business is that what you don't understand is that when you hire one person, all of a sudden you seem to have the workability of three because you just getting a few small things off of your plate gives you so much time back to actually do much bigger things in your business, and all of a sudden you just start to scale. As your business starts to evolve and grow, you as a leader need to understand the role of yourself and your team. The mistake that I see so often here is that you hire team members and you act like you're actually doing the same task together. What needs to happen is that they now have a set of tasks that keep the day to day running and you as the business owner, need to start focusing on needle moving tasks. Following up with your sales funnel, getting on more sales calls, getting into networking and building those partnerships, that's where your attention is focused. While the administrative tasks that are keeping your client work going day to day is what your staff will be focused on. What this looked like in my own business is that I had to understand that my role and their role was different, and that doesn't mean that I'm better or that they're less than. It just simply means that for our business to really grow and for me to be able to continue creating careers for my staff, I had to keep in mind that my job was to cast vision, to set goals, to become that coach of my team, and to really be focused on marketing and sales and profitability and their tasks needed to be very fully focused on running the day to day. And so it's hard as a leader when you're first becoming a leader to understand this, but knowing that you jumping in and doing the same thing as them and rubbing shoulders with them and saying, oh, let's do this together. That's not helpful to anyone. We really want our team to own portions of the business. What are tasks or projects or areas of the business that they can really feel like they get to run with, of course, with approval, but we don't wanna just have task managers. We want them to be excited about really helping the business in their way. And then you are focused on growing the business. The biggest mindset shift that happens right here is really deciding that you are gonna run your business like a business and not like a creative. And that's a really big difference because as a creative, you're just excited about getting out to the weddings and. Producing the best pictures or keeping the dance floor packed. And while that's all still important in your business, once you decide that you are gonna run and grow and scale a profitable business that creates careers for other people, that creates legacy for your family. That creates revenue coming in for not just you, but also for your staff. The mindset shift here is that you really wanna understand what it's like to run a business. You wanna understand how to read a p and l, how to understand your profitability, how to lead a team well, because all of those things are going to be the catalyst to helping you scale. When you make these changes, these intentional habits instead of reactive habits in your wedding business, you will see that you naturally start to scale from that $100 K mark, so quickly towards three or $500 K. I see this. All the time inside of Wedding Pro, CEO students that come in, they're right there at that a $100 K, and they're like, I don't know how I could possibly get to$300 K. It feels chaotic right now, but when we switch from those reactive habits, those daily habits that are keeping your growth stalled, and we start to implement those intentional habits, all of a sudden the revenue starts to skyrocket and you get so much of your time back. Day to day, what this feels like is instead of you waking up and the world dictating what your day looks like, instead you're gonna wake up and know, these are the three things that must happen in my business today before anything else gets done that is intentional. That is you taking your time back. You deciding that my business is worth me deciding what's gonna happen today instead of everyone else deciding for me. Now, let me be clear about this because some of you may be listening and going. Okay, girl, this sounds good in theory, but is that really what it looks like? Life happens, I've been a business owner for 18 years inside the wedding industry. I get it. Sometimes you wake up, you have the best intentions for your day, and all of a sudden all the fires start burning down around you. That is the exception to the rule, and that's gonna happen. That's part of running a business. That's part of being an entrepreneur. But we want that to be the exception and not the rule. Things will happen, life happens, client issues come up that you have to deal with and put that fire out, but that needs to be something that happens once in a while. Not every single day. So if you think that you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know how that would happen in real practice it happens by you becoming intentional with your time and the habits inside of your business. If you're listening to this and you're in this stage, if your business isn't growing the way that you want it to, or you've stayed stuck right there at that six figure mark for way too long, one habit that you can change today, you're listening to this, you're gonna end the episode, and I want you to go do this right now, is turn off all of the notifications on your phone. I promise you. I promise you that this will make such a difference in the amount of time you have to do focused work every single day. And while it may feel scary at first, because a lot of our pros say that inside of Wedding Pro, CEO, it is by far the biggest comment we get inside of our program is, I am so glad I did that. I feel honestly like a whole new business owner. So go now, turn off all the notifications because this will be the best, first intentional habit you can make to scale your business. If this is you CEO, and you're feeling stuck at that 100 K mark and you're like, I love this episode, I know I can do this, but I really want help in doing it. I wanna make sure that my marketing is on point, my pricing is on point, that I understand sales conversion and that I can actually start bringing on team members, that are gonna make a difference in my business. I wanna invite you to book a gap assessment with my team. These are free calls that my team does every single day for wedding industry professionals where we're gonna break down your business and we're gonna spot the gaps that are keeping you from scaling. We're gonna give you strategy and if it's a good fit for you to work with our team to scale your business. We're gonna walk you through what that looks like. You can click the link in the description below, or head over to wedding pro ceo.com/ application to grab a time that works for you and CEO If you've gotten any value from this episode, make sure to like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on. And if you're feeling extra generous, we would appreciate it so much, if you would leave us a five star review so that we can get this podcast into as many ears of wedding pros as we can. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.