333. Why Your Wedding Business will Plateau at $300K

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

In this episode, I'm breaking down exactly why so many wedding businesses stall between $300K and $500K — and it's probably not what you think. 

I'm sharing the real bottleneck that keeps you overwhelmed despite having a great team, the difference between delegating tasks and delegating true ownership, and the exact strategy I walked a client through to go from stuck at $400K to a clear path to seven figures. 

If you're working 80-hour weeks and still can't figure out why growth has flatlined, this one's for you.

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-business-plateau-300k/

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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

If your wedding business feels harder to run than it used to, this is why you're booked. Your calendar is full. You have a great team, and you've even scaled to multiple six figures. From the outside. It looks like you've made it. But on the inside, everything feels heavier, more work, more chaos, slower growth. This is where so many successful businesses go to die. And it almost always comes down to a few mistakes that wedding business owners don't even know they're making. Mistakes that quietly keep your business stuck no matter how busy you are. So let's diagnose what's actually going on. It might sound crazy, but one of the stages that I see so many wedding businesses get stuck is between three to $500 K. It feels successful. Everybody from the outside is like, you're it. You're the IT girl. You're the IT guy in your market and everyone's looking to you for advice, but on the inside, you feel like an imposter because everything is messy, everything is hard. Everything feels like you're running through quicksand, and that's why you can't seem to break through or even think about breaking through that half a million dollar mark. The number one sign I see of Wedding Pros that are in this stage of business is that they have a great team. They have some systems in place, some SOPs. They have a CRM, they know how to get business, but. Their hands are still involved in every single piece of the business, and this is when I have to have a hard conversation with them that they are actually their business's biggest problem. Behind the scenes. What this looks like is that you've got a great team. They're actually really good at their job. You've got great systems, but you cannot take your eyes off of your business. When I was going through this stage of business, I used to describe it as me juggling. And if I even turned away for one second, all of the balls would come crumbling down around me. So if I wanted to go on vacation, if I got sick, if I spent an entire day at a networking event, I came back to tens of hours of work that needed my attention. And my team couldn't actually do their job because I was the bottleneck. I had to have my hands in everything. So they would get projects stuck. They would get client work stuck. They would get anything that they were working on stuck and they would be staring at me waiting for me to do something, but I had tens of hours of work to do before I could get to what they needed. So many wedding businesses reached this point because as a business owner, you knew that you needed to grow a team. You actually hired really great people. But what you didn't understand is that you need to delegate fully to them. Instead of inserting yourself into every single thing that happens in your business, having to approve every single social media post, having to make sure that the tags are correct, you having to check timelines before they go out, you having to train every single person that comes into your business. All of that is creating a bottleneck. And so what happens is you continue to be busy with busy work instead of focusing on the growth of your business, and in that case, your business growth starts to stall. When wedding pros are at this stage of business and they know that they want to grow, what I see so often is that they start to offload tasks from their own plate, but as tasks. So what this could look like is you might have four or five people that are on your team and you're like, Hey, could you write a blog once a month? Hey, could you. Start to gather pictures for our social media. Hey, could you write the captions for our social media? Hey, could you start scheduling our assistance? I see this all the time. No one actually owns an area of business. They all own a task, which means when they're done with that task, they have to come back to you. The blog was written, but it was never posted 'cause you didn't ask them to do that. The pictures were pulled for social media. But the captions weren't written, so it never got posted. The assistants were scheduled, but they weren't trained, so they still aren't able to work on the wedding. These are the bottlenecks that are keeping your business from growing because now you have to get involved in all of those pieces of the puzzle. Working more hours or booking more weddings doesn't solve this problem because this is actually something I went through and I know that if you're listening to this and this is the stage you're in, you felt this too. A new lead comes in and instead of being excited about this ideal lead that just came in, you're actually a little bit nervous. You don't wanna answer the lead. You're thinking, how possibly are we gonna fit this into our schedule? Because you have to answer the lead. You have to book the consult, you have to send the contract. You have to onboard that client. You have to find somebody on your team that can actually do it, and you are still involved in way too many pieces of the puzzle, and you're already working 80 hours a week. So instead of being excited about that lead, that's gonna grow your business, you actually feel a little bit deflated and you're not quite sure how you're gonna handle it. At this stage of business, your business requires more than just task masters on your team. It requires you to actually delegate full pieces of your business. I was actually working with a wedding pro the other day who stuck right at 400 K in her business for the last two years, and when I asked her what was keeping her from getting to 500 K, she said, honestly, I don't even know how to say that number out loud. We're so busy. I'm so overwhelmed. My team is so tapped now. I don't know how I could possibly even conceptualize getting to that number. So we started digging in and I asked, who does the marketing on your team? And she said, I do. And I said, okay, great. Who does sales on your team? And she said, I do. And I said, okay. I am starting to notice the pattern. Who on your team does the hiring? And she said. I do, and as we kept going down the list, training, hr, payroll, all of it lived on her list, yet she had a team of six people. Why does this happen? Because you don't know how to delegate full pieces of the puzzle. Lots of people on her team helped. She actually had a really killer team that had been with her for years. They all had little things that lived on their plate, but their job was to, do the task and give it back to her, do the task and give it back to her. She still had to do so much in her business. This is actually what was keeping her from growing. Instead, through this strategy call, what we worked on was delegating full pieces of her business, taking one of those team members that was really great at marketing and had actually been asking to be more involved in marketing. We are now taking that team member and putting them fully over marketing. Her job will be to train them on her voice, on what she's looking for in her marketing, what she expects, and to set very clear KPIs so they know what success looks like in that position. We're also taking one of her team members and delegating sales to them. Someone on her team who had been covering sales during various vacations, so we knew it was a good fit, but we are going to now have her train that person fully on sales so that that entire funnel lives on that person's plate. This is how you go from three, four, 500,000 to seven figures in the course of 12 months. And this example isn't just unique to her. This is a common pattern I see with wedding businesses all the time at that three to 500 mark, their hands are still so involved in every piece. It doesn't feel like that though because they have a killer team. They learn how to build the team. They learn how to hire great people. They just didn't learn how to delegate. And so at this stage of business, understanding how to delegate and trust your team is essential to you scaling past this number. The hard truth that you need to hear, CEO, if this is you, is that you are the bottleneck in your business. You are the speed bump, you are the reason it's not growing And the mindset shift you have to make here is that I am not the only person that can do these things in my business. I hired a great team. What I need to do is take what I know to be true about how we sell, how we market, how we develop relationships, how we produce client work, how our operations work. You now get to become the coach and teach each of your team members how to excel at that. What's really interesting when we bring especially a salesperson into a business is nine times out of 10, that salesperson will outsell the owner not because they're a better salesperson, but because they have the time to dedicate to it. You as the business owner are doing a million things every single day, but when your team members become specialized in an area of the business, the exponential growth that happens is because they're now focused on that one role versus wearing all of the hats and your business starts to skyrocket. What's really fun about getting to work with wedding pros and help them break past this level is what their business starts to feel like behind the scenes because they now become this coach. They have people on their team that are so excellent at serving their

business in these niched areas: 9:34

Marketing, operations, sales. And then the business owner can be focused on really coaching those people to be excellent at their job. This becomes so fun because typically you get into the wedding industry because you love serving people. You love delivering a high quality of service, and now you get to do that by really coaching your people. This also looks like instead of you managing tasks you're managing people. And so you in that coach role your every day looks like engaging with your people, engaging with your staff, and then they are going to execute the tasks that have to do. So you've now gotten yourself out of the task and your day to day looks like managing people. If you're listening to this and you're like that student I was talking about, that I was coaching with earlier this week, here's the first thing that I want you to do. Assess your current team at this level. You have a team. You have people that are working for you, that are doing random tasks. I want you to really sit down and take a good hard look at your team and say, okay. Who do I feel like would excel at marketing? Who do I feel like could excel at sales? Who do I feel like on my team could really lead my team well? And who could really handle the operations? That first step of just identifying who's already on your team that you already trust to do the work with excellence, we are now just gonna pour into them and elevate their role to own certain areas of your business and to really run with it. If This is where you are in your business, I would love for our team to dig in with you through one of our free gap assessments. Our business consultants do these every single day, and we wanna talk to you about where you're getting stuck in your business, what the bottlenecks are that are holding you back from hitting that multiple six figures, and even hitting seven figures. You can book a time with our team at the link in the description below, or head over to wedding pro ceo.com/application and book a time that works for you. If you got any value out of this episode, please hit like and subscribe on whatever platform that you're listening on. And if you're feeling extra generous, I would love it if you would take two minutes to leave us a five star review. Thank you so much and I'll see you next time.