Episode 249: Behind The Wedding Business with Mercedes Ibarra of Rev. Mercy Ceremonies

Do you ever wish you could take a peek behind the scenes of a successful wedding business and see how they’re doing things? Wouldn’t it be helpful to get the lowdown on what’s working for them and what isn’t? That’s what this episode is all about!

Come take a look behind the scenes of Rev. Mercy Ceremonies with officiant and inter-faith minister, Mercy Ibarra. She breaks down how she got started in weddings despite thinking she’d be working on end-of-life support & life celebrations, how she has made her business an absolute magnet for her ideal client (something we talk a LOT about in The Wedding Business Collective), how she balances her job, her business, and an autoimmune disorder, and so much more.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a wedding planner or another type of wedding professional, you’ll come away from this episode with some ideas you can implement in your own business.

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How Mercy got into weddings when that’s not what she set out to do
• The unusual way she got her first wedding client
• How WeddingWire & The Knot worked for her
• Creating a collaborative relationship with another vendor
• The difference WeddingPro’s Fellowship For Change made
• How she’s attracting her perfect ideal clients reliably
• What hasn’t worked for her
• Managing her dance job, her business, and an autoimmune disorder
• The brilliant way she packages her services
• Combining pre-marital counseling with a ceremony
• How become the go-to person for your ideal client

Behind The Wedding Business with Rev. Mercy Ibarra

Meet Mercy Ibarra

Reverend Mercy Ibarra is an inter-spiritual minister, which means she was ordained at an interfaith seminary. She did 2 years of training at an interfaith seminary based in New York. The first year was learning about the world’s major religions and doing some independent study as well.

The second year was all about crafting ceremonies for all of life’s major milestones. That includes weddings, baby blessings, funerals, et cetera.

Mercy started officiating weddings back in 2016. Her first wedding was for my friend Zeke, and eventually, that has grown. Now her main clients are Latino and Latina, Latinx clients who are looking for a spiritual but not necessarily religious ceremony, but one that still balances some respect towards their family’s traditions.

Usually, their families are either Catholic or Christian and are not very happy about the fact that they’re getting married outside of the church. Mercy finds a way to create something that really honors the couple’s spirituality while still respecting the family’s expectations and traditions and everyone leaves happy. It is a delicate balance.

Why Mercy decided to study at a seminary

Initially, Mercy had a totally different vision for why she was going. She was volunteering in hospice and she thought she was going to do end-of-life work. She wanted to be a death doula, and she actually still plans to do that training.

When she was graduating from seminary back in 2016, she hadn’t really told anyone she was even in seminary, so she made a big Facebook announcement. To my surprise, it was a hugely popular post. I didn’t really know how people were gonna react to it.

When she arrived in New York the weekend of my ordination, as soon as she got to the facility, she a notification telling her that my friend Zeke, telling her he was getting married and couldn’t find an officiant. He and his fiancee were getting married in South Carolina and they could not find someone who spoke Spanish and understood their spirituality because they weren’t particularly religious.

They were more interested in nature and she’s a yoga teacher as well so their spirituality had a lot more to do with what they did when they went camping or to the beach and her yoga practice. The only people they could find in South Carolina who spoke Spanish were very, very Pentecostal, very Christian, very, very in their church, and not really a match for them so they asked her if she’d be willing to do it.

The other thing is my friend Zeke is Dominican and Mercy is Cuban, so he knew that she would completely understand his family and what they were expecting from a wedding, and so they thought she’d be the perfect person to marry them. Mercy decided to take a chance and do it, and fell in love with the process.

How Mercy has marketed what she offers

Marcy’s foray into marketing outside of just talking to friends was using WeddingWire. She had a friend who was also an inter-spiritual minister who invited her along to a WeddingWire conference and she signed up there. That’s how she got her first few clients.

Then there was a wedding planner who found her WeddingWire and asked me if she’d be willing to do bilingual weddings for her because she had a whole business doing weddings on the beach. She agreed and started getting business that way too. Eventually, she also joined The Knot and those things are still her main way of marketing.

As my prices have increased, The Knot has become the more predictable source of leads compared to WeddingWire. Mercy’s contact person told her that as her prices would increase, she would get more leads from the Knot and that has turned out to be true for her.

The planner finding Mercy and The Knot working for her says a lot about positioning yourself as someone that can provide a unique expertise, a unique skill set to a specific community that, not everyone has the ability to serve, and it clearly has made people seek her out.

Mercy and I both live in Southern California and she was surprised to hear that there actually weren’t very many Spanish-speaking officiants as she would have thought. On top of that, Mercy is a Spanish-speaking officiant with a unique training background.

How Mercy’s marketing has changed

Mercy’s marketing has changed a lot over the years. She got into the Fellowship For Change through WeddingPro and her mentor was Aleya Harris. They worked together to really define Mercy’s brand story

They used Building A StoryBrand and came up with what her brand was. She built it around being, the inter-spiritual minister who serves the Latino community that isn’t spiritual but not religious, but still wants to create a ceremony that they and their family will love.

That has been her main message and she is actually been getting a lot more clients with that message. Usually, when they email her, they tell her that they don’t want to get married in the church, and that has upset their family. Their family has finally accepted there will be no church involved but they really want someone who gets them and wants to do certain elements in their ceremony and still find a way for the parents on both sides to love it.

It’s like they’re reading her marketing message to her verbatim when they’re writing an email to her, and that’s been amazing.

I always say in The Wedding Business Collective that you want to be the go-to person for somebody. If it’s not in any of your marketing, if you’re not putting yourself out there is, “Hey, this is who I am, this is what I do, and who I do it for” those people can’t find you.

What happens is the reaction Mercy’s clients have. They don’t want to shop around. They want her. She’s the one. It’s not even a question for them.

Marketing tactics that have worked well for Mercy

Mercy has tried many different things and the work she did with Aleya on her brand script has had the biggest impact. She used that to design her website and changed all of her marketing to align with it.

She shifted her WeddingWire and Knot pages to match the website and the new messaging. That has been the number one game-changer for her and it gets ideal clients she loves working with.

Mercy highly recommends going through the process of writing a brand script and finding your exact message and who exactly you serve. When you mold your marketing around your ideal client they see themselves in it.

That’s why they’re getting excited because they’re like, yeah, she’s the one for me. Everybody else is just kinda an option. She’s the perfect choice for me.

Not only are they finding me, but she’s enjoying who she works with as well because it’s exactly who she wanna serve. You find your people and they find you. It’s the perfect magnet for attracting ideal clients.

Marketing tactics that flopped for Mercy

Mercy is still in the experimental phase with this but the one thing that totally bombed for her in the last couple of years was actually doing one of the bridal shows. She spent a decent amount of money but hasn’t seen the results she was after.

She met a lot of people, and got a few leads, but one ghosted her and the other wasn’t her ideal client. Those people were kicking tires and looking for a lower price and it turned out one woman was on the way to get baptized in her mother-in-law’s Pentecostal church which does not align with Mercy’s ideal client at all.

She’s not giving up on bridal shows though. It’s something she’ll test again to give it a better chance. She could have done better with following up and will do that next time.

I love the way Mercy explains this. She dissected it and looked for why it didn’t work and what she can do differently. A lot of the time you’re 95% of the way there and just by making a few small tweaks you can make something work for you.

She noticed that some people were getting hung up on the word bilingual and assumed that Mercy only works with people who speak Spanish and English. She can obviously work with either group and they don’t have to speak both languages. The next time she tests this, she’ll focus more on the inter-spiritual aspect and have more interfaith symbols.

That’s a great example of those weird little things you find as you go through marketing experiments and you test things. You learn what to change and how to make it better.

How Mercy Manages Her Time

Mercy is a high school dance teacher so she has to split her time between that and her business and having a life. During COVID she didn’t have the big showcase she has with her students so she had more time and now it’s definitely more time-consuming.

She’s still trying to figure out a balance. She teaches at the high school on Wednesdays and Thursdays so she blocks those days out ad just a dance day. She also teaches workshops at elementary schools on other days but those are less intense and are already planned out.

She’s able to squeeze in some work for the business on those days on breaks and she has 1 day that’s always dedicated to her business.

Mercy also has an autoimmune disease. She has lupus and there are days where she wakes up feeling like a truck hit her so she has to factor in downtime.

A lot of people are in that position, and I feel like it’s this continuum of just absolutely beating the shit out of yourself for having limitations and just like being totally cool with it, and people kind of fall somewhere in there and it kind of moves around from time to time.

Mercy feels that way too. She can easily fall into thinking “I’m being so lazy, I have to do stuff. I can’t believe I did nothing.” but that’s what she needs. Then she’ll wake up the next day and feel totally fine and thinks, “oh yeah, I was really sick yesterday so I was right not to do anything.”

She constantly has to remind herself she isn’t being lazy, she just has to make peace with having some limitations. If she pushes too hard today, it’ll be worse tomorrow. She has to just let herself rest even when she doesn’t want to.

Mercy has a meditation practice that has helped her a lot because it does make her conscious of her thought patterns and how her body is feeling. With that, she’s able to be more mindful of what her limitations are that day and give herself grace. It’s easy to get down on yourself and let that destroy your whole week.

How Mercy’s business has changed over time

It’s definitely gaining momentum. She’s noticed that she has some followers I’ve noticed on Instagram, for example, that are potential couples now. She finally has people coming and checking her out and metaphorically knocking on the door.

She has gotten to know a lot of people in the industry and she has been learning a lot from things like The Wedding Business Collective. She’s planning to spend more time in The Wedding Business Collective now that school is out.

She remembers feeling like “Are people really gonna wanna pay for this?” She was charging too little. Now she’s charging more than twice as much as when she started so her income is much more reasonable. It doesn’t feel like a side-hobby job anymore. It feels like a real business. She is gaining confidence and feels like that’s showing as well.

That’s huge, that confidence and just knowing that you have that momentum, it’s so much more encouraging to be able to get up in the morning and run with it as opposed to when you’re in a position and it feels like you can’t seem to make anything work.

How Mercy’s services have changed

The way she thinks about her services has changed. She used to do just a ceremony and then maybe the rehearsal would be something added on. Now, Mercy has her packages set up where the main service she provides is a ceremony and rehearsal, and people kind of have to ask her if she can do it without the rehearsal.

She will still offer a ceremony alone if people really don’t want a rehearsal but she made it part of the package because people are more comfortable once they’ve had a rehearsal. She doesn’t rehearse everything verbatim. There’s a special magic to the ceremony being done fresh the day of. It just feels better for everyone involved, especially if you have a big wedding party, to have the rehearsal included and everybody knows what they’re doing, what to expect.

It makes the couple feel more secure knowing that Mercy has been to the site and they can her in action. She now packages that include premarital counseling and there are different levels of premarital counseling, so that has changed as well.

She used to offer that as its own little independent thing as well, and let people ask for it but now she has built it into 2 different packages that you can get. You can get one, which is just one session of premarital counseling and then she has another package that’s the big bonus package that has several sessions of premarital counseling that go through different subjects such as, you know, finances, dealing with each other’s families, things like that.

That’s what’s new and then she is also still offering baby blessings. She has done a few funerals, so she doesn’t just have the wedding services. It’s just that wedding services are the main part of her business.

The psychology of how Mercy has structured those packages is really smart because there’s a difference between seeing a bunch of things and feeling like one of those is being taken away when you go for the lower package versus I’m gonna have this and I’m going to add this on, then it feels more like, do I really need that?

We just question it way more than if it just all comes as one package. There’s so much that happens with that. Like, okay, it clearly all comes together for a reason. Yes, I want all this. Now I feel like I’m connected to it. I don’t want any of it to be taken out because I want all of it.

So I think it’s really smart the way she has structured her package.

Mercy has discovered that when a couple asks for even just one premarital counseling session ahead of time, it actually results in an even better ceremony because I’ve spent even more time with them.

She’s gotten to know them even better than our initial meeting because they do have their planning meeting, which is a couple of hours long. Mercy asks them a lot of questions to get to know them, in order to design a custom-made ceremony. But when she also has the counseling session with them and they get into these deeper dynamics of their relationship, it adds more depth to the ceremony in some way.

If a couple asks for it, I think it really does help. It gets their mind set on, okay, this is what marriage is gonna be about. It’s not just this party, but it also makes the ceremony itself more special.

Challenges Mercy Has Faced

Time and energy management are an ongoing challenge, especially in terms of dealing with health issues. Being able to be productive while still taking care of myself is the biggest challenge. Another challenge is people not understanding what she does beyond her wedding work.

If you’re planning to have a kid and you’re spiritual but not religious and you don’t wanna have your child baptized in the church, you have options. There are other life milestones that you can celebrate in this really special and sacred way and Mercy is somebody trained to do that and to help you figure that out.

Mercy’s funerals aren’t really funerals, they’re life celebrations. She’s really trying to find new ways to celebrate the person’s life. She wants people to see that they do have options and an inter-spiritual minister can do any sort of ritual celebration you might want to have. She’s working on figuring out how to make people more aware of that. It’s exciting because she has her marketing down for weddings and now she can let that work and shift her focus to something else.

Having that foundation of having your people finding you reliably allows you to be able to just like take a deep breath and we’re gonna work on something else.

What Mercy wishes she knew when she was just starting out

The one major thing she wishes she knew when she was just starting out is the whole concept of your story brand and knowing that there’s a client for everybody out there. So if you have a service that you know, you believe in and you know will be a good service but you just don’t know how you’re gonna find people, just fine-tune who you are trying to serve and that person will show up.

There’s somebody for everybody. Mercy isn’t a fit for everyone and not every client is a fit for her and it’s working. That’s possible for everyone who wants to be in business.

That’s very exciting because a lot of times we feel like we have to just like fit the mold of what everybody else is doing. But when you realize like, no, I wanna work with this particular type of person, you can become that go-to and it’s so much more fun that way.

What Mercy is focusing on next

Mercy is toying with the idea of starting a YouTube channel or starting a podcast or some combination of the two.

The other thing she has been playing around with doing some types of module training or coaching for premarital counseling for people who don’t want to spend as much on it. That could be like a lower tier, like a monthly membership that a couple might pay, and they do things on their own.

About Mercy

Rev. Mercedes Ibarra, a.k.a., Rev. Mercy, is a bilingual Latina Interspiritual Minister based in Los Angeles. She was ordained by One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in 2016 and has been in business since 2017. Rev. Mercy crafts beautiful, custom ceremonies, in both English and Spanish, that honor her couples’ spirituality, while still respecting their families’ traditions.

Website: www.revmercy.com
Instagram: @rev.mercy.ceremonies

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Links & Resources:

Episode 237: 4 Members Of The Wedding Business Collective Share Their Journey To Embracing Their CEO Role
Episode 215: How To Use Quarterly Planning To Squash Overwhelm
Episode 231: Behind The Wedding Business with Carolyn Kulb of Bloom Poet
Episode 235: Behind The Wedding Business with Neal McFarlane of DJ XTC Entertainment Services
Episode 242: Behind The Wedding Business with Nancy Skipton of Simply Celebrations & Events
Building A StoryBrand

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