Episode 237: 4 Members Of The Wedding Business Collective Share Their Journey To Embracing Their CEO Role

The path to seeing yourself as the CEO of your business is one we all have to go on. Most wedding pros didn’t start a business because they love running a business. You most likely started a business to be able to do the thing you love whether that’s planning weddings, officiating weddings, DJing, creating insane floral designs, taking photos, or anything else.

In order to grow your wedding business in a way that’s sustainable and doesn’t burn you out, you have to learn how to become the CEO. That requires a combination of learning how to do specific things and learning how to think differently.

In this episode, we’re joined by 4 incredible wedding professionals who share their journey to embracing their CEO role. They share the good, the bad, and the ugly that they faced along the way.

In this episode we’ll cover:

• What things were like for these 4 very different wedding pros before joining The Wedding Business Collective
• What their businesses look like now and how things have changed
• What being the CEO of their business means to them and how it has changed how they think
• How each of them market and how that has changed over time
• How they’ve streamlined their businesses and made them easier to run
• How they’ve saved time and become more efficient
• What they’ve gotten out of The Wedding Business Collective and why they stay
• What they’d say to someone who is considering joining The Wedding Business Collective

Streamline Your Wedding Business With A Systems Audit with Julie Painter Fried

Meet Our 4 Featured Wedding Pros

Rev. Erin Goodman is a wedding officiant and interfaith minister in Rhode Island and has been a member of The Wedding Business Collective since 2021. Prior to that, she ran herself ragged and decided it was time to do something to make the business more sustainable and profitable. Between growing her business, working a day job in health care, and taking care of 2 teens it all became too much. That’s when she joined The Wedding Business Collective.

Neal McFarlane is a wedding and event DJ in Toronto specializing in events for people with varied cultural backgrounds. Neal has been doing this for 36 years and he’s a big proponent of continuing to educate yourself and always be networking. That’s a big part of why he’s in The Wedding Business Collective and he’s been a member since 2014.

Costanza Bonelli is a wedding planner in Tuscany Italy and she has been a member since 2020. Costanza and her business partner plan unconventional and alternative weddings for geeky, nerdy, quirky people, so they can be unconditionally loved on their wedding day, and see their story told exactly as they want it.

Carolyn Kulb is the founder and lead artist of Bloom Poet—a full-service wedding florist and event design company based in Seattle, Washington. Bloom Poet serves couples ready to create a meaningful and breathtaking experience for their wedding day. Carolyn helps couples dream big, embrace new ideas, and look to nature and their wedding destination for inspiration. She has been a member of  The Wedding Business Collective since 2020.

What were things like before joining The Wedding Business Collective?

Costanza joined The Wedding Business Collective just before COVID hit Italy. 2019 was a tough year for her work-wise. She didn’t have many inquiries and she didn’t know how to attract more of the right people. She was spending money on marketing but it wasn’t really getting her very far. Costanza had a few clients that were not her ideal clients that overworked her and sent her into burnout.

She couldn’t find anything to help her in Italy so she looked to the US. She had previously been following Evolve Your Wedding Business and read my book and decided to take the plunge and join The Wedding Business Collective.

Neal joined The Wedding Business Collective in 2014 and prior to that, he felt more like an employee of his business and not the CEO despite having decades of experience in the industry. He was really just running on the hamster wheel and throwing things against the wall and since then, he’s been able to create more structure and better manage his time.

Carolyn was flower farming full time and trying to do weddings full time as well and needles to say, she was working a ton. We had a conversation where I showed her that was physically impossible to continue doing and she wound up shifting just to weddings and events over COVID.

She knew the work she wanted to do but she didn’t know how to find the clients that would allow her to do that work. She says she felt like she got an MBA in 6 months with The Wedding Business Collective because it was so much more than just marketing.

Erin has a job in healthcare and on top of that she was burnt out and exhausted trying to juggle her job, her kids, and her business. She was charging far too little and trying to do too much. She had the feeling that if she could just muscle through and hustle harder, she could make it work and that’s something I hear from a LOT of wedding pros.

Erin began to struggle more with her own self-care and mental health and well-being and it showed her she was trying to do too much for too little. She joined because she wanted to learn how to run a business because she never thought of herself as having a business. She thought of her officiant work as this thing she did on the side.

Like most wedding pros, all 4 of our guests started their businesses because they wanted to do the work they love, not because they wanted to start a business. They had to learn how to run a business sustainably without burning themselves out.

What are things like now?

Erin did fewer ceremonies last year and made more revenue than the year before. She now says no to clients that aren’t a great fit for her when previously she would take them because she was afraid to turn down work. All the energy she was spending on lower-paying clients was absolutely draining her.

She really worked on her connections with planners and nurturing those relationships and now most of her leads come in totally pre-qualified because their planner spoke so highly of Erin. She now has systems in place that allow her to easily work with clients without spending a ton of time.

She’s very smart about how she spends her limited time. Erin works full time, has 2 kids, and has a business so her time is absolutely limited but she still managed to make more money doing less. That was a challenge for her in terms of her mindset and realizing she actually could serve the select clients she wanted to serve while making more money was huge for her.

Carolyn’s business has changed dramatically. She had to stop farming entirely due to an injury and now focuses on wedding & event design. She’s been able to book well-qualified leads who are her exact ideal clients and it doesn’t feel salesy.

Carolyn tripled her revenue in 2022 compared to the previous year and booked her biggest wedding ever that had a $35k floral spend. She has started doing online courses for florists to diversify her income and she is experimenting more. She’s very strategic with what she does and she no longer does things on a whim.

She raised her minimum to $12,000 and is taking fewer clients this year. Her business now is much more playful because she gets to experiment and try new things while still being strategic. She realized she can make her business what she wants it to be instead of a cage she built for herself.

Costanza has more than doubled her prices and clients are accepting that with no issues because she’s able to demonstrate the value she provides. She’s been doing more destination weddings and she has also been able to work with couples who are more in line with her ideal client compared to the clients she had a few years ago.

She now has clear boundaries and isn’t afraid to communicate them to her clients. This is very different from past experiences she’s had where she’s been afraid to enforce boundaries and as a result, she burned out. Costanza no longer works alone, she has a partner and a virtual assistant she works with.

Costanza said that what she learns in The Wedding Business Collective is about 3 years ahead of the Italian market so she’s able to stay ahead of the competition. She feels more self-assured with her clients and she has more time for herself.

Neal has been able to implement several processes that have made his work easier. Automation now handles many of the things that Neal used to have to spend his time on. That gave him the time to be able to add more people to his team and he is slowly backing away from being the face of the company so his team can take more weddings and events.

Having more help means that Neal can spend more time training DJs which is something he loves to do. He has learned to analyze data so that he can see what marketing channels are working for him and which aren’t. He has also applied this to his finances so he can clearly see where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and if it’s getting a good ROI. Before, he wasn’t paying himself and was spending a lot of time doing work that he has since automated.

Batching has given him a lot of time back and automation has allowed him to create a superior client experience that stands out.

What does being a CEO mean to you?

Neal said that being a CEO means eliminating or streamlining the things that take up your time and drag you down. It means being able to distinguish between which things really need to get done and which can wait so you don’t overwhelm yourself. It also means that you hand off tasks that the CEO doesn’t need to do to other people to free up time.

Erin feels like being the CEO has made her more objective and less emotional. Before, she would take a failed experiment or a rejection very personally because she saw herself as the business instead of the CEO of the business.

Running the business is a different role than working with her clients and she’s been able to separate that so a failed marketing strategy doesn’t make her second guess how skilled she is. It’s just an experiment!

Having CEO dates allows her to spend dedicated time as the CEO and batching is saving her time she was losing to context switching. She felt like she was flitting between tasks and that’s how her creative mind worked. Now, she’s been able to give more structure to how she works so she can use her creativity in her client work.

Thinking of herself as the CEO means yes, she is very proud of her business but she doesn’t think of the business as who she is as a person. They’re two separate entities.

Carolyn has given herself a lot of permission as the CEO to be visionary and set goals, break them down, and take intentional steps toward her goals instead of just feeling like she had to do all the things every day and hope things work out. Before, she felt like if she just hustled harder things would work out and she’d be able to take a month off to travel instead of intentionally making that happen.

Being in the CEO mindset helps Carolyn think about what she wants, what she could possibly wish for, and what she could achieve. She now can create a plan to make those big goals happen instead of working from the bottom up and just working on things and hoping to hit her goals. Being a CEO means being strategic and intentional in creating a business she actually enjoys.

Carolyn points out that we all have days when we want to throw the towel in and quit but they are a lot fewer and far between now than they used to be. She’s always moving forward instead of just doing random things and hoping things work out. That shift has been huge for her and has allowed her to do amazing things while escaping a scarcity mindset.

Costanza struggles with losing control of things and a big CEO win for her has been delegating to other people. Being the CEO means coordinating the people that she works with and managing them.

Operating as a CEO has given Costanza more time to discover things about herself and learn. It’s always an ongoing process and Costanza points out that she’s still unlearning things from the work culture in Italy. A big part of being a CEO for Costanza is being proactive instead of reactive in her business and with her clients.

How has The Wedding Business Collective helped you grow your business?

Erin identified that relationship marketing was going to be a huge focus in her marketing plan. Her relationships with other vendors bring her qualified, ideal clients. After realizing that this was something that was working for her, she dug into the data and found out that a few planners were referring her a lot of fantastic clients so she got strategic about improving her relationships with those planners and connecting to others like them.

She realized that she had 12 years of content that she could repurpose and took what she learned in The Wedding Business Collective to repurpose one wedding in several different ways. She started blogging in a really intentional way to focus on SEO and the questions that her ideal clients were asking.

Erin streamlined her business by streamlining her processes. She has an online calendar that makes it easy for clients to book without the back-and-forth emails. She now only accepts one form of payment to be more organized and streamlined. This has made her bookkeeping and taxes much easier.

Erin is scaling her business by working with people who are having a friend or family member officiate their wedding to help them craft a ceremony. The relationships she has built with planners are bringing her these consulting clients as well.

She has realized that due to the phase of life she’s in, she doesn’t want to focus on booking more and more weddings each year. She needs more time to focus on her teenage boys, one of whom is getting ready to go off to college. Every business is different and knowing what you need right now and having the confidence to create it is an absolute game-changer. You can shape your business however you want, you just have to put your CEO pants on and create it.

Erin says she’ll always stay in The Wedding Business Collective because it’s a vault of knowledge and she has Heidi on retainer to help whenever she needs it.

Carolyn was focused on booking more weddings when she joined The Wedding Business Collective because she needed to pay the bills. She had very little experience with marketing and sales so getting really clear on her ideal client and marketing strategy was huge. She feels much more competent at those things she once felt overwhelmed by.

Learning to run marketing experiments has been really helpful for Carolyn, especially as a former scientist. She gave Pinterest a shot and went all in for 4 months but didn’t see the results she wanted so she could confidently throw that away and try something else. She learned how to let go of things like Pinterest that weren’t serving her.

Remember, marketing shouldn’t be a pile that you keep adding to. You want to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. That means removing the things that don’t work so you don’t have to spend your time on them any longer.

Carolyn went from sending individual PDF proposals and contracts by hand to having that all be automated. She does custom work so she meets with clients for an hour and can easily create their proposal and have Honeybook handle a lot of the work for her. She has set it up so people automatically get her brochure when they fill out her form and they go through an email sequence that doesn’t require Carloyn to lift a finger.

The Wedding Business Collective has helped Carolyn have a better mindset around getting help so she doesn’t have to do it all herself. She has a freelance team of 5 or 6 people during the summer that operates like a well-oiled machine. Her processes do so much of the heavy lifting.

This also allows her to take on big projects like the one with a $35,000 floral spend. She wouldn’t have been able to do that installation without her team.

Now that the wedding side of things is largely streamlined and on autopilot, Carolyn has had time to test and explore new things like teaching a class on sustainable floral design. This is something she’s really passionate about and loves having the time to dedicate to it.

Without all of the systems and processes she has in place, she would have never been able to do that without feeling super overwhelmed. Feeling like so much of the business is just comfortably cruising along has been incredible and she didn’t think that would be possible in just 2 or 3 years. That used to feel like a 10-year goal for her.

Neal says that having Heidi on retainer as part of his team has been incredibly helpful and it’s why he has been a member since 2014. He says The Wedding Business Collective has helped him in two big ways, with his business, and with his mindset. Neal deals with anxiety and is prone to overwhelm so having a streamlined business and a mindset that allows him to step back and take a breath has been huge.

He has taken several steps to eliminate overwhelm for himself from batching, to shutting out notifications, to automating as much as possible so he doesn’t have to worry about it. Now, he has the boundaries in place where he has his evenings to himself. From 6pm-10pm it’s his personal time and he doesn’t work. He’s no longer running to respond to emails and scrambling to get back to people at all hours.

Back in 2020, Neal was contemplating bringing on other DJs so he could book more events without having to personally work them. Now, he has a team of 4 and he’s continuing to bring new team members on. Last year was the busiest year he’s ever had and there were many times when 3 or 4 people were working different events and things worked seamlessly.

Costanza has been able to reclaim her time and avoid burnout. Before joining, she was getting messages from clients at all hours and it was stressing her out. She now has boundaries in place and she isn’t afraid to enforce them.

She also learned that she has ADHD and everything she learned about managing her time and setting boundaries was incredibly helpful for managing that. Costanza says she’s easily distracted and all of the things she has learned in The Wedding Business Collective have helped her reclaim her time, even before she got her ADHD diagnosis. Costanza has learned that she can run both of her businesses in a way that is ADHD-friendly.

She loves that the information inside The Wedding Business Collective is on demand and she can listen in the car and take it in at any time of day. Like many people with ADHD, Costanza sometimes needs to do 2 things at once in order to really be able to focus. She says the Get-It-Done Days are great for accountability and loves knowing she can ask questions in our group or in our Mastermind Calls and get the support she needs and she says it’s a safe place for her.

The Wedding Business Collective is like a Trojan Horse. People join because they think they’re going to book more weddings, and they do, but they also change their entire business for the better.

What would you say to someone thinking about joining The Wedding Business Collective?

Costanza said that you can spend a lot of money on different courses and programs but in The Wedding Business Collective, you’ll find the back-and-forth between members that we need but often can’t find. Sometimes we’re afraid of our competitors but The Wedding Business Collective has shown her that other wedding pros can be incredibly helpful friends.

Costanza used to spend a lot of money on directories like WeddingWire and The Knot and now no longer pays for those and instead, pays for The Wedding Business Collective and knows how to attract her ideal clients without those directories.

Neal says he’s been around since 2014 and continues to be a member so clearly, The Wedding Business Collective is doing a lot for him. He says the cost is well worth it to be a member and a big part of what we do is work as a collective. We help one another and it’s a community. You don’t just get help from Heidi, you get help from all of us.

Carolyn points out that since you can join The Wedding Business Collective on a $1 trial you should absolutely go do it now. Business ownership can be really lonely and all of the people in The Wedding Business Collective are so helpful, as is Heidi.

She adds that if you’re thinking “well what if I need this thing and it isn’t in The Collective?” Heidi will literally make it for you. “That’s insane! There’s nowhere else on the internet that provides that.” As Carolyn says, there’s nowhere else that provides the same level of insane support that Heidi and the other members do.

Carolyn says that without The Wedding Business Collective, she doesn’t know what she’d be doing now. It helped her stop farming, rebrand my entire business, book a wedding with a $35,000 floral spend, pay all her bills and pay for a team, and so much more. She also now books 100% of qualified leads that come to her and that’s with a minimum spend of $12,000.

She says she’s never going to not spend the money to be in The Wedding Business Collective and even if she wasn’t going to do weddings anymore, she’d stay in The Wedding Business Collective because it’s so valuable. All of the education and resources are so valuable no matter what type of business you have or what niche you’re in. She loves everything about The Wedding Business Collective and says “do it, join!”

Erin had an issue with her credit card and her membership to The Wedding Business Collective got canceled and she sent Heidi a frantic email saying that she definitely didn’t want to leave. She was like “let me back in!!!”

Erin knew about Heidi for quite some time before she joined The Wedding Business Collective and at the time, she was hustling to put food on the table and couldn’t afford to join. She said that Heidi was really gracious and told her that The Wedding Business Collective is here when she was ready.

When the time was right, Erin joined on a trial and was like “whoa” at all of the resources available to her. That may sound overwhelming but the 6 Figure Wedding Business Roadmap is there to guide you and like you’ve heard from everyone else, it’s about chipping away at things little by little and taking small steps to reach your goals.

Erin has let other business expenses go so The Wedding Business Collective can be her main priority. She trusts Heidi as a resource and if she recommends a product or an expert on a particular subject, she follows that and always gets what she needs. That saves her from having to spend a ton of time researching.

Costanza chimed in to point out that The Wedding Business Collective is filled with courses made by Heidi but she also invites experts in other areas to come in and teach in their areas of expertise. If we need something, Heidi will either create it or find someone to create it.

So come join us inside The Wedding Business Collective! You can get a $1 30-day trial when you sign up for the free 6 Pillars To Creating A 6+ Figure Wedding Business That Doesn’t Burn You Out Private Podcast Training here.

Get more from our guests

Reverend Erin Goodman
Website: www.reveringoodman.com
Instagram: @reveringoodman

Neal McFarlane
Website: www.djxtc.net
Instagram: @torontoweddingdj

Costanza Bonelli
Website: www.magicalvows.it
Instagram: @magicalvows

Carolyn Kulb
Website: www.bloompoet.com
Instagram: @bloompoet_

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Links & Resources:

Get The FREE 6 Pillars To Creating A 6+ Figure Wedding Business That Doesn’t Burn You Out Private Podcast Training!
Join us inside The Wedding Business Collective!
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

 

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