Busy But Not Booked: Why You’re Overwhelmed And Still Not Booking Weddings

Transcript: Busy But Not Booked: Why You’re Overwhelmed And Still Not Booking Weddings​

Heidi Thompson:

You’re overwhelmed, you’re busy, but you’re still not booking weddings. Let’s get into why that is. In a world where wedding professionals are struggling to market and grow their businesses, one podcast brings together top experts and actionable strategies to help you build the wedding business of your dreams.

This is the Evolve Your Wedding Business podcast. Here is your host, Heidi Thompson. Hey there, welcome to the podcast.

I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I’m here helping wedding professionals of all different kinds book more weddings with clients they love and make their marketing easier. And I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually answer it, not just in your head, out loud, whether you’re in your car, at your desk, wherever you are right now, unless if this is going to make you look absolutely crazy, then don’t answer it out loud. But the question I have for you is, what are you busy doing? Not are you busy.

I already know the answer to that question. Every wedding pro I talk to is busy, but fully booked out with clients they love is a completely different question. And somewhere along the way, we started treating those two things like they’re the same thing.

And they’re not. The gap between them is what this episode is about. Now if you’re like most wedding pros I meet, your Tuesday probably goes a little something like this.

You were at your desk by nine. The first thing you did was answer the inquiry that came into your inbox at 11 40 p.m. last night because you saw it before bed and your stomach dropped and you felt like you should answer it. So you’ve kind of been half thinking about it since then.

Then you built a custom proposal for someone who still won’t tell you their budget. You rebuilt a document you have now rebuilt probably nine times this year because you can never find the last version. You chased a venue coordinator who has ignored your emails twice.

You sat through most of a webinar you’ve already seen. You made graphic for social media. You answered 41 messages across three different social media apps and somehow two of those apps are Instagram.

And now it’s seven at night. You close your laptop and you cannot name one thing that you actually did today that moved your business forward. Does that sound familiar? Here’s the part that should really bug you.

You did that yesterday too. Every single thing on that list was real work. Nobody is accusing you of scrolling on your phone mindlessly though you may have but none of that work was yours to choose.

You didn’t sit down on Monday and decide that Tuesday would be spent on a proposal for a tire kicker and a document you’ve already made nine times over. That day got handed to you by whatever was loudest and you took it because that’s what was in front of you. You weren’t running your business on Tuesday.

Your business was running you. It decided what you did when you did it how late you were up doing it. And this is the thing almost nobody says.

There are two hats you have to wear in your business and you’ve only been wearing one of them. There’s the CEO hat. The CEO decides what matters.

It makes the plan and hands the work over and then there’s the worker behalf. The worker bee takes that work order and execute it. Hands down gets it done.

You need both. There’s nothing wrong with worker bee mode. It’s important.

That’s where the actual work happens. And that’s where most of us are genuinely happiest. But the problem with your Tuesday is that you were the worker bee from nine in the morning until seven at night and the CEO didn’t show up to work at all.

So nobody handed the worker B anything. And when nobody hands the worker bee a plan she doesn’t just stop. She’s the worker bee. She just starts running toward whatever’s on fire.

Whatever’s calling her attention. A worker bee with a work order and instructions is productive. A worker bee with nobody giving the orders is an unpaid intern running around all day putting out fires and never getting ahead.

Now here’s the most uncomfortable part and I say this with love because I’ve done it and I’ve been there. Most of those fires you’re the one that lit them. Not on purpose because when you never plan, never schedule, never hand anything off, everything becomes urgent eventually.

That’s just natural. The follow up you didn’t do in March becomes an emergency in April. The system you never built means every wedding is a scramble.

The boundaries you never set mean every client thinks right now is the reasonable response time because you taught them that. Worker bee is running around with a bucket and CEO you left the matches out. The same person and I need you to hear this without hearing it as an insult because it’s not one because nobody teaches you to think like this.

We’re all raised to think like employees who are functionally worker bees. Do the work you’re given. Do it well and somebody above you handles the rest.

And then when you go out on your own and you have your own business, suddenly there’s nobody above you and nobody ever mentions that. So you do the only thing an employee knows how to do when things aren’t working. You work harder.

That is the only move a worker B has. It’s the only move you have. Okay, so let’s make this concrete because I don’t want you to just nod along and then go answer 40 more emails.

There’s a number I want you to run and it’s going to get a little uncomfortable. It’s called your effective hourly rate EHR. I want you to take your revenue.

You can do this for a monthly period, quarterly, yearly. Take your revenue number, subtract your costs, it’s your profit. Now divide that by the number of hours you actually worked.

Not the number of hours you meant to work, not the number of hours that were included in the package, the real ones, including Sunday night when you stayed up late to finish something. Let’s say you cleared $3,000 in profit last month and you worked 250 hours. That’s $12 an hour.

It’s not a judgment. It’s just a number. It’s stepping on a scale.

All it tells you is whether it’s going up or down. But if that number came out low, I want to be really clear about why because it’s not because you didn’t work. Let’s look at that example of your Tuesday.

You worked plenty. You hustled all day. You spent the whole week doing worker B work at CEO prices because not all tasks are worth the same.

And once you begin to see this, you can’t unsee it. $10 an hour work is your inbox. You’re scheduling.

You’re invoicing, formatting documents, rebuilding that thing that you already built last week. $100 an hour work are things like your client meetings, the actual creative work, following up with leads, making content, fiddling with tools you’re setting up. And here’s the one that might sting a little bit.

So I’m just going to come out with it. Doing your client work is not the highest value thing you do. It’s important.

It has to happen. But it is not the highest return on the investment of your time. That’s what we’re looking at here.

$1,000 an hour work is planning, sitting down as the CEO and planning things out, having sales conversations, rewriting the service page that justifies your pricing, running a promotion, deciding on your top three priorities for the day. $10,000 an hour work is the real important stuff. It’s building those real referral relationships.

It’s pitching yourself for something bigger. It’s creating something that solves a problem no one else is solving. And handing off everything in that $10 row.

Too many wedding professionals spend all day in $10 an hour work. And it’s why they feel like they never get anything done. Because none of that CEO level work, none of that strategy, those sales conversations, running a promotion, building relationships that will bring you business actually gets done.

So run the math on your own Tuesday. Run it on your day today. If most of your hours were in that $10 an hour column, that doesn’t mean you’re lazy or you’re bad at anything.

You’re an expensive person doing cheap work. And the reason it never feels like a problem is nobody’s sending you an invoice because it’s work on your own business. So it’s easy to ignore.

But the real issue is opportunity cost. Every single hour you spend on a $10 an hour task is an hour that you said no to $1,000 task or $100,000 task. You’re an expensive person doing cheap work.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s the real trade you made. You just made it without realizing that you are that expensive person.

Without realizing that the hourly rate you would charge is not covering the work that you’re doing in your own business. So what do you do about it? There are three things a CEO does with a cheap task. You stop it.

You give it to a machine or a tool or piece of software, or you give it to a person. And you go in that order, and the order really matters. Stopping comes first because it’s free and it’s instant.

The worker bee doesn’t get to decide something shouldn’t exist. She only gets to do what she’s handed. Only the CEO can kill something, which means that this is a decision that has just literally never been available to you because you haven’t put the CEO hat on.

I see people outsource things all the time that they don’t want to do. And I understand where that comes from, but you have to keep in mind that you’re then taking that opportunity cost and you’re making it a real cost. So if, for instance, you are outsourcing Instagram marketing that isn’t getting any results for you, it’s probably going to continue to not get results for you, certainly if you’re doing it the same way.

So why are we paying a person to do work that isn’t generating results? Kill it instead. Or go back, put your CEO hat on, and change the strategy. So go look at your list and ask yourself, of all of these tasks on a task list, what is actually important? And you have to be careful with this because the word important doesn’t mean in this context what it means elsewhere.

It doesn’t mean it needs to get done. You know, just because your books need to get done, it doesn’t make them important. If something is important, it moves you toward your goal.

If something is urgent, it just means it wants your attention right now. Most urgent things aren’t important. And most important things aren’t urgent, which is exactly why they sit on the back burner for two years.

And when you cut something, don’t leave that time empty because it grows back if you don’t assign that time to something else. Take the hours you just freed up and pour them into one thing that is going to get you results, one thing that’s already working for you. Not a new platform, not a new tactic you saw someone talking about, more of the thing that is already producing.

If you’re doing really well off of referrals, I want you to use that hour to deepen those referral relationships, to get more strategic about those relationships, or to build more of those relationships. Not to go run off and start making TikTok videos, which is something you’ve never done before, but you feel like you should. And that’s how you fill the time.

That’s how you end up continuing to get busy with tasks that don’t generate results. Because really, when we think about it, if you’re busy, you should be getting results. And most wedding pros I meet are busy, and they’re not getting results.

And that’s a problem. The second decision you can make here is to automate. And when I say system here, I don’t even mean tech.

I just mean a process for doing something. The tech comes after, always. You have to have a process for doing something before you can introduce a tool to run that process.

So the rule for this is really simple. Anything you do more than once should have a documented process. And documenting it takes 10 minutes, not a weekend.

Next time you do the thing, record your screen and talk through it out loud. That’s it. That’s the document.

You can hand that video to a person, or you can run it through AI and let it turn that video transcript into a checklist for you. That took almost no time, and it’s giving you time back. Sometimes you just want somebody to tell you what to do.

And that somebody is past you with their CEO hat on. So do write by future you here. The third decision you can make is to hand it off.

And this is the one where everybody has a reason it won’t work. So let me go through them real quick. A lot of people say, I can do it all myself, or should be able to do it all myself.

Yeah, if you want to be burned out, if you want to work 60, 80 hours a week, by all means, that’s not what I want. And it’s probably not what you want. So don’t do that to yourself.

Something else I hear from people is, I don’t have time. And this is pretty crazy when you think about it, because I meet so many wedding professionals who don’t have time. They just don’t have time to work on their marketing.

They’re too busy. And when I ask them what their bookings look like, they’re not anywhere near as booked as they need to be. So it’s like, what are you busy doing exactly? Because the things you’re doing aren’t getting you results.

And when I hear people say, I don’t have time, this really translates to, I don’t have time to get my time back. Say that out loud, see how it sounds. It’s this crazy thing we put ourselves into where we are just working hard as the worker be.

We are doing things, and they’re not getting results. This is why one of the first things I have people do when they join the wedding business collective is go through a process where they free up, on average, between five to eight hours per week. Because I can’t have you not having time for your marketing.

That means you don’t have time to get new work. That means you don’t have time to get paid. What are you spending time on that’s more important than that? That is the main function of the business is being able to bring in clients and book them.

And I just can’t tell you how many times I meet people and they’re busy, and it’s like, busy doing what exactly? Because you’re putting all these hours in, we check the effective hourly rate, you’re making way less than minimum wage. So something’s got to give here, right? We can’t let that keep going. Something else people have that comes up in their mind when they’re thinking about handing things off is, well, nobody can do it like me.

Let me tell you, 90% or more than 90% of what you can do can be done by someone else if you showed them how. And a lot of people say, you know, it’s faster if I do it. Today, yeah, but I want you to multiply that by every week for the next 10 years that you’re having to do this task that you literally cannot afford to be spending time on because it’s a $10 an hour task.

That is costing you so much. But again, you just don’t see it because you’re not getting an invoice. Budget is another one.

So let’s do the math. Let’s say you pay somebody $20 an hour to do five hours a week of work. That’s 100 bucks.

That’s easy math here. Now, you’ve just bought yourself five hours that you can spend on the $1,000, the $10,000 tasks that you can spend on that referral relationship, that you can spend on that sales conversation, that you can spend on that page that does more selling for you and makes your pricing more justified. Can you make more than $100 by spending five hours in that $1,000, $10,000 an hour column? You know you can.

I know you can too. And it isn’t one booking. If those five hours went into marketing or a relationship, that is a time investment that pays dividends.

That’s bookings going forward. You didn’t buy $100 back. You bought something that continues to pay you.

One of our members, Liz, an officiant in North Carolina, she was running into this issue of being too busy. Then she really looked at what she was spending her time on. And her marketing and business management went from 10 to 15 hours per week down to five.

Plus about 25 hours of client work. So she got her entire work week down to 30 hours or less. She took four full weeks off over the holidays because she felt like it.

And she went camping with her family. And she more than doubled her income while doing fewer weddings. She didn’t find extra hours.

Nobody has those. She never could find more time. She decided what these hours were going to be used for.

Most people never actually make that decision. They’re just in this mode where they’re responding and they’re running around putting out fires. And those fires don’t make you money.

Those fires don’t move you closer to your goals. They just take up your time. Here’s what I want you to take out of this episode.

And it’s just one thing. Book a CEO date with yourself. 15 minutes once a week in your calendar, recurring.

And treat it like it’s an actual client appointment that you would never flake on. That’s all I’m asking you to devote to yourself. It’s 15 minutes.

And in those 15 minutes, you answer four questions to take the pulse of how things are going in the business and what actually deserves your time. What actually deserves your attention instead of a million things just getting thrown on your plate. Question one.

What did I accomplish this week? Question two. What could have gone better? No week is perfect. Question three.

How did I actually spend my time? We have to pay attention to where your time is going if you want to use it more wisely. And question four. What am I going to do different next week? Then just look at the numbers, the overall health in your business.

Money in, leads in, inquiries, bookings, because you should never be starting from scratch in your business. Data already exists. You’re just not looking at it.

And you’re chasing after every new thing that’s calling your attention. That 15 minutes is the appointment where you are not the worker bee. And hell, get luxurious about it.

Make it a half hour. Make it an hour. Light a candle.

Have a drink. That’s the whole idea here. If you never carve this out, if you never set aside CEO time, CEO you will never show up.

And if CEO you never shows up, worker bee runs the company. And worker bee you, bless her heart, only knows how to be busy. She doesn’t know how to get results.

She doesn’t know how to get bookings or bookings with the right people. If you don’t make the time for that CEO work, your business won’t fail dramatically. It’s just not going to go anywhere.

And it’s so easy to just put your head down and work in worker bee mode. And then you look up and it’s been four years. And you haven’t actually made any progress toward where you want to be.

I’m thinking a lot about this right now as I prepare to speak on this topic about being the CEO of your business at the DWHSA conference in Jamaica later this month. It is an incredibly important topic, but it gets shoved aside because we always think we need to do more. And more is part of the problem.

Nobody is actually making the decisions about how we’re spending our time because no one’s actually wearing that CEO hat. So tomorrow morning, you’re going to open up your laptop and there will be about 47 things waiting for you, calling for your attention. The entire internet is built on calling your attention.

If worker bee opens that laptop, they start working through things. They start from the top. She’s not being lazy.

She’s doing exactly what she’s made for. Nobody handed her a plan, so she takes whatever is screaming the loudest and makes it her day’s work. But not CEO you.

CEO you already decided. Last week in 15 minutes what you’re devoting your time to. And then worker BU gets to do the work knowing it’s the right work.

It’s not more hours. You don’t have more hours. And I can’t get you any.

I’m not a wizard. I’m sorry. It’s that somebody in your business finally made a decision instead of just receiving one and responding to what’s happening.

And that somebody has to be you because you’re the CEO. There’s nobody above you who’s going to do it. Most people are not in control of their businesses.

The business is in control of them. And you’ve been the worker bee for years with nobody handing you the work order. So take some time to put that other hat on.

15-30 minutes is all it takes. You’ve always been the CEO. Today is just the first day you actually showed up for the job.

This is exactly what we’re working on inside the wedding business collective this week actually. So if you want the actual step by step the time audit in a room full of wedding pros doing it alongside you instead of white knuckling it all on your own. Come join us.

The link is in the show notes or you can go to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/pod. And if you do nothing else after this episode go put those 15 minutes on your calendar. Do it before you answer another email because it’s so much more important than any email in your inbox ever could be.

Thank you.