340. Why Wedding Pro CEO Built an AI Program and How We Are Using It in Our Own Businesses

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 

You're buried in repetitive work and drowning in A.I. hype that promises a hack will save you 10 hours. It won't, because A.I. is not the strategy. 

In this episode I pull back the curtain on how we use A.I. employees inside our own wedding businesses to handle onboarding, follow-ups, sales tracking, and content, so your business runs lighter while you sleep. 

If you've felt behind on A.I., this is the foundational breakdown that finally makes it make sense for wedding pros.

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 

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EPISODE SHOW NOTES BLOG & MORE:

https://weddingproceo.com/ai-for-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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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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Transcript

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am so tired of hearing people talk about A.I. Everywhere you look, it's use this prompt or this A.I. hack changed my life or 10 Chat GPT hacks every entrepreneur needs in their life. And honestly, most of it is noise. Because A.I. is not the strategy A better prompt is not gonna fix your broken business. We didn't build an A.I. program because A.I. is trending We didn't build it because we saw some huge business opportunity And we definitely didn't build it to teach wedding business owners how to create better Instagram captions We built it because we started using AI inside of our own companies. And within months, we realized we were operating at a completely different level. Content got easier. Systems got tighter. Communication improved. Execution speed exploded. It felt less like adding a tool and more like putting rocket fuel behind the strategy, the systems, and the tools that we already had. I'm Brandee Gaar, and over the last few years, I've helped hundreds of wedding pros grow more profitable wedding businesses. But what we're doing with A.I. right now inside of Wedding Pro CEO is one of the biggest operational shifts I've seen since the rise of social media and online marketing. And in this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on how we're using AI inside of our own businesses. What's actually working, what's complete hype and what this shift is gonna mean for your wedding business going forward. So what made us start using AI in the first place? like most of you, we started using AI by going to it and just asking questions. Can you help me rewrite this email? Can you help me understand this clause in this contract? Can you help me write this Instagram post for something I'm thinking about? And the content we got back was fine. It wasn't great. It was kind of vanilla. It sort of sounded like us. It sort of didn't. It helped us to get from a blank screen, but it really wasn't awesome. And so we started learning more and more about why are people so excited about AI if what it's putting back at us is mid-level at best, right? I could honestly do it myself But as the tools have developed and AI is literally developing every single day, there's new developments coming out, we started realizing that there's so much more to it. Things like Claude Cowork, Claude Design, being able to go to all of these different platforms, all of these different apps, and learn how it can help you work while you're not working. And that's the biggest shift that we've seen and what we're looking to bring to the wedding industry is that it's so much more than a tool that you go and ask it a question. It can actually understand your business and help you become more productive. Each human in your business can have AI employees that work under it and work while you're sleeping, or work while you're at a wedding, or while you're at a tasting, or while you're putting together a million other things that only you as a human can Your AI employees can be behind the scenes working. And this was the shift that when we started using it in our businesses, we realized, oh my goodness, this is gonna change the way the wedding industry does business, and we have to help our wedding pros understand it. And that's the difference between it being a tool and actually being a skill that works inside your business for you. The difference is understanding that you don't have to go to it and feed it information. You don't have to go to it and ask, "Help me with this." You can actually create tools and skills behind the scenes that work while you don't. And that is the shift that the wedding industry needs to understand today. The gap we saw in the AI education space is that there's so much out there that says, " This hack, this prompt, this saved me 10 hours." But it's not actually breaking the foundation down so that you understand, okay, what's the difference between a project and a skill? What's the difference between chat and co-work? What's the difference between Chat GPT and Gemini and Claude? No one is explaining that at a foundational level for wedding business owners. A lot of the information out there is geared towards how to make a keynote presentation, how to use Claude Code, and the reality is, those are things that the wedding industry doesn't necessarily need. We wanna go get the AI education and bring it back to the wedding industry, adapt it to what you actually would need in your business to run your wedding business more profitably and to scale more quickly, and that's what Wedding Pro CEO has always done. My heart behind Wedding Pro CEO is learning business education from various industries, adapting it to what would make sense for the wedding industry, and bringing it back and teaching it to wedding business owners so that you understand exactly how to scale your profitable wedding business. So why are so many people teaching just prompts or hacks instead of actually teaching a system? My honest belief behind this is because so many AI gurus are teaching AI for any business, and that's not what we're doing with Wedding Pro CEO. We're helping you to create a system specifically for wedding business owners. We're taking the strategy we've already been teaching for the last many, many years that's helped over 1,500 wedding pros learn how to scale their wedding business. We're taking those same strategies, those same pillars, and putting a new engine behind it. AI, for us, and what we're bringing to the wedding industry, is simply the engine behind the strategy that we already know works, that's already proven. And so we're not teaching you prompts and hacks because the system is what's actually gonna help you scale your wedding business. So what even is the system? And I realize but You're probably thinking, " Okay, Brandee, I've only used it to prompt me for helping me write an email. So what is this system that you're talking about?" An AI system runs behind the scenes of the humans in your business. So these are AI employees that are helping you to be more productive at what you already do. So think repetitive tasks that you do all of the time. So you can an AI employee that runs your administration, your client onboarding, your inquiry follow-ups. You can have an AI agent that creates new content for you every single day based on your consultation calls, your final details meetings, your planning meetings, things that you already say all the time. It takes what you already do and turns it into content that's gonna draw in your ideal customers. The system isn't meant to replace you or the humans in your business. It's meant to operate behind the scenes as the engine that makes you so much more efficient at what you already do. Now that you know about the system running behind the scenes, the engine. Let's talk about what we actually use AI for in our wedding businesses. One of my favorite things to use it for is to help you take those reports that your bookkeeper sends you every single month and actually understand them, actually break it down and help you to understand what's your profitability, where are you leaking cash, where could you be more profitable, what packages could you sell more of so that you make more money and spend less time. One of the biggest deficits we see with CEOs that come into our program is they may have a bookkeeper. Every single month, they're getting these reports, but they sit in their inbox because they have no idea how to read them. So creating an AI employee, that breaks it down and explains it to you like a fifth grader, because we all need that sometimes, right? That's my favorite. Another favorite of mine is having sales manager or a sales tracker agent running behind the scenes, so really helping you, again, to understand what's going on in your sales funnel. I've probably done 100 podcast episodes on understanding how many leads you get in, how many of them go to consult, and how many of them actually turned into bookings. Now, we can create an AI agent that can give you a weekly report of this every single week delivered to your inbox to say, "Hey, Brandee, you got this many inquiries last week, but only three of them went to consult. You have five still sitting out there. Would you like me to follow up with them, or would you like to send a personal text? I can draft it for you." Your AI agent is, again, working behind the scenes for you to help you understand what needs to happen in your business to make more money and become more profitable. The last one that's my favorite, and I know I said they're all my favorite because honestly, I love the little agents that run behind the scenes in our businesses. But you can literally take the calls that you already do, so you're not doing any additional work. You have your AI agent scan your Fathom, scan your, the recordings of your calls, however you record your virtual calls with your clients. This can be consultations, final detail meeting, planning meetings, vendor calls that you're doing. Anything that you're recording, we feed into your AI agent, and then we have your agent make a week of content, two weeks of content based on things you already say. We talk about this all the time. There's so much gold in the things that you repeat over and over and over again, either to wedding guests or to your clients when they're planning, when they're in their consultation. You are such an expert at what you already do. Now we're just gonna have that agent work behind the scenes to take your call recordings and turn them into little pieces of gold that you can put on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok to draw in those ideal clients. Our business feels so much lighter already because there are these agents working behind the scenes. For things even like client onboarding, the old way of doing it is using automations that you wrote once and go out to every single client the same way every time. The new way is creating an agent that sounds like you, that understands your services, that understands who you are and what you do, so that a custom onboarding email is going out to that client as soon as they sign their contract. They're getting them onboarded into your CRM. They're getting them set up with their portal all behind the scenes while you sleep or while you're at a wedding. The best part about Wedding Pro CEO is that all of our coaches actively run wedding businesses. So when we decided to create an AI program to bring to the wedding industry, we all started using it in our own businesses and came together to think, " What is it exactly that the wedding industry needs so that we're not completely overwhelming you with here's everything AI can do. Most of the businesses are solopreneurs or very small teams. And I don't know about you, but there's always a list on my desk of projects I hope to get to because we just don't have the capacity to get to it. That all changes with AI, and that's what we're gonna show you inside of this program because we want you to understand that this new era of the way that we do business is actually going to help be able to have such a much more powerful team. I know this can all sound a little, or honestly, a lot overwhelming. What are agents? What are skills? What's Claude Code? What's Gemini? It all just sounds like a lot of lingo that you don't have time for right now because you're busy running your wedding business. But what I'll say to you is this. I started my wedding business almost 20 years ago, before social media, when websites were still optional, when we didn't have any other way to advertise except through bridal shows or print magazines. And over the last 20 years, I've seen people wait to adapt the latest technology because they weren't sure it was gonna stick around. And those people that waited on Instagram, that waited on TikTok, that decided they weren't gonna do automations, that weren't gonna have a CRM, have struggled to keep up because by the time you adapt, everyone else is so much further ahead. AI is changing the game bigger than any other shift I've ever seen happen in the last 20 years. You taking the time now to understand AI is gonna only help you to become more profitable, more efficient as you scale your wedding business. And those people that say, " Eh, that's not for me, I'm not gonna adapt to it," will be trying to catch up in 18 months. And I'll say this, CEO, you may be thinking to yourself, " I can just figure this out on my own. Like, I can just get in there and toddle around with it and mess around with it, and I'll eventually get it." And you can. You absolutely can. But what we've done is go out and learn AI from all of the different industries that are out there, and we're bringing it back in a packaged system that already works for wedding businesses. We're already seeing it work inside of our own businesses. We're teaching it to our students inside of Wedding Pro CEO, and now we're bringing it to you. So being able to get the system already built for wedding pros, already created to help you build your wedding business faster, why would you want to go out and do it on your own?