If You’re Not Making Enough Money In Your Wedding Business

I heard something from a wedding professional recently that really worried me. They said that they weren’t making enough money in their wedding business and they didn’t want to borrow more money from family so they might just have to close it.

Hold up, wait a minute. Pump the brakes there. Your wedding business does NOT have to be all or nothing. In fact, most people go through an in between period where they’re working either a full time or part time job and building their business at the same time. And you know what? That’s totally okay! In fact it’s a good thing.

Sure, when you have a job you have less time to work on your business on any given day, but sometimes that’s actually a good thing. A lot of wedding professionals I talk to who have moved from part time in their business to full time and have left their day job behind actually end up being less productive than they were when they had a full time job on top of their business.

Why?

It has to do with something called Parkinson’s Law.

Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to the time you allow for it. Remember back in school when you’d put off writing that big paper until the last minute? Then you’d finally sit down and crank it out just under the wire. That’s Parkinson’s Law at work.

Just think, if that paper were due a week or a day after it was assigned, you’d still get it done. So the time isn’t really the issue, it’s the urgency.

When you only have a few hours each day to spend on your business, that urgency is there and you get a lot done despite not having a ton of time. That’s because you’re focused and it’s urgent. You’ve set up a constraint for yourself (or your schedule set it for you) so you just do what you have to do to get things done.

And when you have a job while you’re building your business, you have the ability to leverage that to fund yourself. Sure, maybe you only have a few hours per day to work on your business but you could use part of your salary to hire a virtual assistant to do tasks for you while you’re at work or invest in tools to help you automate those tasks. You also have the ability to use part of your salary to get support and education that will help your grow your wedding business faster. You may not be making tons of money but you are making money. Put it to work for you!

But maybe do this first

Not to mention that when you have money coming in, you aren’t constantly stressed out and coming across as desperate. Believe me, people can tell. Have you ever found that it’s easier to get a job when you already have one? Or get a date when you’re already dating someone? It’s because you’re not stressing and coming across as desperate.

One of the great things about the super-connected world we live in is the ability for many to find jobs that allow them to work remotely. Just look at Flexjobs. It’s full of all sorts of different remote and flexible jobs. Even if a 9-5 isn’t going to work for you, there are other options to help you bootstrap your business.

A business takes time to build and there is NO shame at all in working another job alongside growing your business. It doesn’t mean that you’ve failed or that your business can’t work or that you should shut down your business because you can’t make a full time living from it yet. In fact I know wedding professionals who love their business and their day job and wouldn’t give either of them up, and that’s okay too!

There is no shame at bringing in enough money to sustain yourself and cut down on the stress to grow your business overnight. I want you to know that building your business takes time and it doesn’t happen overnight despite some of the success stories that claim otherwise.

Let’s be real. Growing a business is hard. My job is to help you make that easier and I do that one-on-one with clients and inside The Wedding Business Collective. If you need help, let me know!

But don’t make it harder on yourself by putting all of your financial eggs in a basket that’s not ready to carry that kind of a load yet. You’ll get there, but in the meantime don’t make your life harder than it needs to be by adding that kind of stress and burden.