Why You’re Struggling To Book Weddings While Other Wedding Pros Are Booked Out

Ever wondered why some wedding pros effortlessly book their dream clients while others struggle to secure bookings?

I’ve studied these two groups of wedding pros and have found what makes it so easy for some wedding pros to book all the weddings they want and makes it difficult for many other wedding pros to get booked at all.

As engagement season reaches its peak, this is the perfect time to discover the hidden key to unlocking your booking potential.

In this episode, I’ll break down the crucial element that separates successful wedding professionals from those left waiting for business to come their way.

In this episode we’ll cover:

• Why some wedding pros easily book out and others struggle to book weddings
• The post-COVID pattern you need to pay attention to so you can book more weddings
• What you can do now to make the most of this engagement season
• How successful wedding pros spend less time marketing and get better results
• The high cost of winging it with your marketing and what to do instead
• The 3 big reasons to make a change for you marketing this engagement season

Why You’re Struggling To Book Weddings While Other Wedding Pros Are Booked Out

Hello there my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I am your host, as always, Heidi Thompson, and I’m here to help you book more of the weddings that you want to book with the people you want to work with while also being able to have a life, freedom, and flexibility that you created your business with the hopes of being able to have.

Today I want to talk to you about why you’re struggling to book more weddings while other wedding pros are booked out as well as three big things that come as a result of that.

Now is absolutely the time to focus on this. We are right smack in the middle of engagement season and if you don’t have time to work on your marketing so it attracts and helps you book your ideal client, you’re going to miss out probably not just on this booking season, but the following since we work so far in advance.

And since the end of COVID I’ve seen a really clear pattern in the wedding businesses that are able to book all of the weddings that they want, (that number varies a lot depending from business to business) at the prices that they want to charge and that pattern really boils down to being intentional and having a marketing plan.

So wedding pros who have relied on couples finding them or getting referred to them are the ones I see struggling the most. And this group of wedding pros doesn’t have any strategy.

They don’t have a plan to attract their ideal clients. So they’re left sitting and waiting for the business to come to them.

And because there’s no strategy involved, they actually have no power or control to change how things are going. Things are just going the way they’re going.

And a lot of people in this group are feeling frustrated. And if you’re one of those people and you’re feeling frustrated, I get it. I would too. I hate being in that position where I feel like I don’t have any control. I can’t change anything.

The wedding pros who have made themselves the go-to person for their ideal client and have made time to create a marketing plan that they are executing strategically are the ones who are getting booked out. And the reason for this is that having a marketing plan that attracts your ideal clients and makes you stand out.

It makes a substantial difference because you know what you need to do. And having a plan, especially one that helps you stand out, matters more than ever.

And if we really look at what is underneath this, yes, one group has a strategy and a marketing plan and the other doesn’t. The pattern here is all about intention.

The wedding pros who struggle are winging it and are hoping that business falls in their laps.

And sometimes it does. And that’s wonderful when it does. But what they’re really doing is hoping for bookings. Hope is lovely, but not a strategy.

The wedding pros who are absolutely killing it are being very intentional about what they spend their time on so they have the time to create and execute a marketing plan.

They are not the ones who feel pulled in a million different directions because they know exactly what it is that they need to do. They’re proactively taking the steps they need to ensure bookings follow.

So you need to go into the rest of the 2024 booking season and the 2025 season with a strategy and a plan.

You need to have intention and not just using hope as your strategy because as we’ve seen, that does not work super well and it can leave you feeling just completely at the whims of what everybody else is doing because you have no real control over how you are bringing people to you, how you’re booking more weddings.

And this is where the Wedding Business CEO Summit can definitely help you. So be sure to get your free ticket at WeddingBusinessCEOSummit.com. I’ll have that link in the show notes over and you can also just message me on Instagram and comment on any of my posts or send me a DM. Just use the word summit and you will get the link sent to you.

So we all want to have a great booking season. That’s a given, right? But why?

Well, one is financial freedom from booking clients that don’t focus on your price. So a previous speaker at one of my summits and floral designer, Carolyn Kulb, when I first met her, she was still flower farming and she was just starting to try to market to couples to sell weddings, but didn’t really know how.

And this is how most people start off.

None of us just know how to do this stuff.

She wasn’t getting consistent or quality leads. She was paying for advertising that was not worth it. And she was barely paying herself.

Then, she changed her focus. She got really intentional with her plan. And she focused on attracting and booking the clients that she wanted to work with and she told me that after joining The Wedding Business Collective, she felt like she got an MBA in six months.

Her pricing now starts somewhere between $12,000 to $18,000 now. She actually booked a wedding with a $35,000 floral spend. She’s been able to outsource and start teaching as well. You may have learned from her about the workflows that she’s taught about.

And she’s not unlike another member of The Wedding Business Collective.

He’s a DJ, Neal McFarlane. When I met Neal he was a solopreneur and he wasn’t getting enough of his ideal clients. The business since then, because he has put very focused intention and strategy on it, has become a multi-person business because Neal realized he didn’t want to work every weekend until 3am.

He didn’t want to have to DJ all of those events himself and he didn’t want his time to be a limiting factor on the revenue so he’s been able to bring on associate DJs and train them in his unique way of doing things so the clients are getting the same great Neal experience no matter who works their wedding day (even though they 100 percent fight over Neal, and I get it. He’s great.)

But now he has the financial freedom of more revenue coming in and the time freedom to focus on other aspects of the company, as well as teach young DJs, which is something he absolutely loves to do. He gets to bring up that new generation of DJs.

The number two thing here that you get when you really have that plan and that strategy down is the freedom to spend more time with family, with friends, and to travel more.

And I know a lot of you want to do that. I recently did a survey in my audience related to time, how much time you take off, how much time you want to take off, and what you would do with that time. Everybody’s answers are a little bit different, but they really boil down to these categories, whether you want to be able to take time off and travel more, or you want to spend more time with certain people.

Erin Goodman is an officiant I had the pleasure of working with in The Wedding Business Collective, and she has a full-time job that she loves, a growing wedding business, and two kids, two teenagers, older teenagers.

She had made the conscious decision that she didn’t want to work every weekend and instead have weekends where she could hang out with her kids at the beach because pretty soon they were both going to be out of the house and she realized, you know, that special time you have when your kids are still at home really runs out fast.

You may have younger kids like stationery designer, Emily Foster. She has two young kids and a stationery business and her youngest will be starting school pretty soon, but she’s still doing the one kid at home, one kid in school thing. When she does have both kids in school though, she’ll have a lot more time to dedicate to her business.

So she has been super focused on using the limited time that she has now to focus on creating her marketing plan and setting herself up to be able to start outsourcing. She’s able to do that in such a limited time because she works in a less chaotic manner than she once did.

She’s doing fewer things but the things that she is doing are the impactful ones. As I’ve mentioned in the previous episode, not all tasks are created equal, not all tasks have the same return on investment.

She is being very intentional about her time and how she uses it and that’s something you’re going to learn more about how to do during the Wedding Business CEO Summit.

There is also an officiant I have had the pleasure of working with. Her name is Liz Grimes. She was able to go from when she first joined me in The Wedding Business Collective, getting questions about her price, getting compared to the other officiants in her area, to raising her prices several times over and still being fully booked.

She got her work time down to 30 hours per week at most before retiring earlier than she thought she was going to be able to. And she is now off somewhere in the woods traveling with her husband and exploring the wilderness in their camper. That’s what she wanted for herself.

The third thing is the way that you’ll feel.

When business is doing good, you just feel good. You feel proud. You feel confident. You feel like a legit business owner.

And when a friend asks, “Hey, how is business going?” You’ll feel that sense of pride that you’re really getting to live out your dreams of being a photographer or a planner or a baker and you’re making a great living from it and getting to have time to enjoy that.

Emily had previously mentioned in a panel that we did about The Wedding Business Collective that she actually felt like a legitimate business owner for the first time because she was no longer flying by the seat of her pants.

And if that is what you are currently doing, I want you to know that that is a place that everybody is in at some point. We all start there. But you can move past that.

Christy Hunter, a photographer on that same panel said that going through the Create Your Overwhelm Squashing Marketing Plan course, which is inside The Wedding Business Collective. She told her husband after she went through that course that she felt like she just took a whole freaking semester of business school in this one course and she feels so confident.

She now feels like a legitimate business owner because before she was trying to do all the things, but she wasn’t having any intention behind any of her decisions. So everything just felt scattered.

I’m sure you know the feeling. I’ve been there myself and now she has a really good grip on that so she gets to do less and have the feeling of having it all under control.

And that feeling like I have it all under control feeling is one that many wedding pros never really have, and I want to change that.

That’s why the Wedding Business CEO Summit that’s happening February 12th through the 16th is entirely focused on helping you stop working insane hours. and regain control of your time.

So you can continue booking the weddings that you want without feeling like your business is on fire and you’re being pulled in a million different directions. Because if you don’t have the time to work on your marketing, you’re not going to book the weddings you want.

If everything feels like it’s on fire all the time, you’re going to drop the ball for clients and you’re going to constantly feel stressed and overwhelmed.

And if you’re working insane hours all the time and you never get to take time off and enjoy the freedom and flexibility you wanted when you started your business, well, it just sucks. No one likes to feel like they’re trapped like that.

So join me and 30 other amazing speakers at Wedding Business CEO Summit. You can get your free ticket, that’s right, it is free to attend at WeddingBusinessCEOSummit.com or just DM me on Instagram with the word summit and I will send you the link. I am @evolveyourweddingbusiness over on Instagram and I can’t wait to see you there!

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Links & Resources:

Get your FREE ticket to Wedding Business CEO Summit
The Wedding Business Collective
The #1 Struggle Wedding Pros Face
How To Stop Feeling So Busy & Overwhelmed
Doing It All Is Killing Your Wedding Business
The Real Reason You’re Not Booking More Weddings

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