The #1 Struggle Wedding Pros Face

There is an issue that has been lurking in the shadows of the wedding industry for far too long. It’s the silent struggle that’s been holding you back, and it’s time we brought it into the light.

I’m talking about time, or rather, the lack of it. It’s a universal issue, affecting wedding pros across the globe, regardless of their specialty or location.

You’re overworked, overstretched, and overwhelmed. And the worst part? It’s keeping you from booking more weddings and reaching your goals.

But here’s the thing – it doesn’t have to be this way. Working 60-plus hour weeks isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a trap.

So, if you’re tired of being stuck in a loop of busyness, if you’re ready to reclaim your time and your life, this episode is for you.

Don’t let the love for your work turn into a prison. Tune in, and let’s start turning things around.

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How big of an issue lack of time is in the wedding industry
• How not having enough problem prevents you from booking more weddings
• How a common mindset wedding pros have about time causes them to stay stuck
• How many hours wedding pros are actually working vs how many hours they want to be working
• How much time wedding pros are actually taking off
• The shocking number of wedding pros that take no time off
• How often wedding pros are feeling overwhelmed
• What to do if you’re feeling overwhelmed and overworked
• What I’m doing to address this time issue in our industry

The #1 Struggle Wedding Pros Face

Hello there, my friend, welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I’m here to help you and wedding professionals all over the world build wedding businesses that allow them to work with the people they love while also having freedom and flexibility. And that’s why today I want to talk to you about the number one struggle that wedding pros face.

Not enough people are talking about this. We are not paying enough attention to this. And I see it rear its ugly head time and time and time again.

This struggle is around time. I can’t tell you how many wedding professionals I meet in all different types of wedding businesses, in all different cities, in all different countries that are all having this same constant problem.

They don’t have enough time. They’re already overextended. They’re working too much. And then this weird thing happens where, you know, we talk so much about booking more weddings, which of course is important, but you find yourself in a situation where you don’t even have enough time to do the work to book more weddings.

So you have yourself in this loop of just being busy and not being able to book more weddings and not being able to reach your goals. And I have noticed this the entire time I’ve been in the industry, you know when I worked as a planner I absolutely saw this. We for some reason get this idea that It is okay, or that it is acceptable, or that it’s even expected, it’s the norm, to work 60-plus hour weeks.

And I think we have this idea that we should expect to do more work than, like, a Victorian child chimney sweep because we get to do the thing that we love, and that’s bullshit, and that traps us, that keeps us trapped. The acceptance of this norm is a huge thing that is keeping a lot of wedding professionals trapped.

Because, as you know, you’ve seen in episodes of this podcast and this will continue to talk about, I work with wedding professionals and often they start off in a position where they are very overwhelmed. They’re working crazy hours, but we get them down to a point where they are well under 40 hours a week.

And this is not an anomaly. This happens all the time with wedding pros that I work with. And it’s because we’re taking the approach that 60-plus hours isn’t the norm. It’s something we need to work to rectify so that you are only working the number of hours that suits you.

And I think the more we stay in this mindset of, well, I get to do this, which is lovely. Don’t get me wrong. Having that gratitude for the things you get to do is great, but don’t allow that to trap you into thinking that.

You should somehow be working almost two full-time jobs to make that happen. I decided to ask my audience about this. You may have received an email from me, and I’ve been collecting data to see what I could find.

And the people who have responded are really across the spectrum, whether it’s like florists, DJs, bridal attire, decor, rentals, wedding planning, venues, catering, cake makers, dance lessons, photographers, you name it. And I asked them all the same questions.

And the first question I asked is how many hours do you work per week during the wedding season?

And I knew this was gonna be kind of a rough answer for me because I hate seeing people just work so hard for you know, not what they want out of their business. They don’t have the freedom and flexibility that they wanted when they got into the business. So it’s costing you that plus you’re working all those hours if we divide down how much you’re making and so those hours you’re probably not making very much and that’s not okay either.

So that first question, how many hours per week do you work during wedding season?

51.5 percent of everyone who responded is working over 40 hours during wedding season, which I’m not really that surprised by because We hear that a lot, that it’s the norm for a lot of people.

What did surprise me was that 12.1 percent are regularly working between 60 and 70 hours per week during wedding season.

Then I asked them, how many hours per week would they like to be working during wedding season?

Only 13% responded that they wanted to work over 40 hours.

Most people said, so we have 21.2 percent said under 20 hours. 33.3 percent responded that they wanted to work 20 to 30 hours a week. And that’s in my business, what I see is the most common range for people. That’s the largest slice of the pie here.

And 30 percent of people wanted to work between 30-40 hours. Some people absolutely did want to work more, like I said, about 13 percent wanted to continue to work over 40 hours, which is cool, you do you, but that is obviously a very small minority of this group of people.

So then I asked, how many hours do you work per week during the rest of the year when it’s not peak wedding season?

You guys, I still have people working 50, 60 hours on this during the rest of the year. What I saw here is that about 14 percent of people are still working over 40 hours, even during, you know, what we consider the off-season, the rest of the year, where you’re not actively doing weddings.

And I think the important thing here is what people really want.

It’s a very even split between under 20 hours and 20 to 30 hours. There’s only a couple of percentage points difference between that being the desired amount of hours people want to work per week.

Some people, about 15%, want to work, you know, 30 to 40 hours a week. But when we look at who wants to work over 40 hours per week during this time is a very small minority. It’s about 9%. So it gets even smaller.

But we’re seeing, you know, a vast contrast between where people would like to be and where they are. And that is a huge, huge problem throughout our industry.

Then I asked, how much time do you take off for vacation each year?

18.5 percent don’t take ANY time off. Another 18.5 percent take a few days. And 21.2 percent take one week. That’s dire, if you ask me. Especially because many of us start our businesses thinking we’re going to have this freedom and flexibility, and we’re going to be able to have control of our time.

I think it’s especially dire when you contrast it to how much time people would like to take off for vacation. So the largest group for that was 36.4 percent wanted to take more than a month each year. And 2 percent of people are currently doing that.

The next highest was 4 weeks. About a month of vacation each year. This was about a third of responses, 33%. 6 percent of people are taking that much time off.

So, the amount of time we want to have off of our businesses, and the amount of time we’re actually taking off of our businesses, is in complete misalignment, which is definitely what I expected to see, but this does solidify the fact that we are working ourselves into the ground and we are not reaping the rewards that should come from being in control of how you make your money and how you use your time.

I also asked people, how often do you feel overwhelmed?

And 15 percent said always. 42.4 percent said often. 36.4 percent said sometimes. And rarely was the smallest piece at 6 percent. So we have 42.5 percent of people sitting squarely in that I am often overwhelmed. So it’s not surprising that they’re not taking time off. It doesn’t feel like it’s possible.

I also asked, which of the following things do you wish you had more time for?

And the number one response to this, 65.5 percent of people said they want to spend more time traveling. 59.4 percent said time to relax and unwind. I let people choose multiple options for this one.

43.8% is a tie between hobbies and more time with family. 37.5 percent is spending time with friends.

And then some people thought that they could get crafty and they could add more work into the things that they wanted to spend more time on. I allowed people to enter their own options and some people are saying things like, time to focus on my business so it’s sustainable.

So we’re even looking at, you know, in time off, how can I work more?

What is preventing them from taking more time off?

And the thing that’s preventing people from doing these things is, well, there’s a couple pieces to this. I’m doing it all myself. I’m looking at their responses here. Time and money. That’s a big component of it. I’m not making enough money.

Basically over-committing, trying to juggle a lot. These businesses require a lot of work, some people running multiple businesses, the administrative side of businesses, working to bring in more leads. And I have someone who actually had a revelation as they were writing this, so I’m probably working on too many things at the same time.

Feeling like I have to do everything, working too much. So it’s time and it’s money, it’s twofold, but more people are citing time-related issues than money-related issues. And I think this is really interesting because we talk so much in the industry about booking more weddings, about raising your prices, which yes, are 100 percent important to running a business.

But we don’t talk anywhere near as much about making sure that makes sense for your time, making sure that that is sustainable, making sure that you’re not working the kind of hours that people worked hundreds of years ago because it’s 2023 and you shouldn’t have to do that.

And because of this, I wanted to bring together both my experience in this, because I do teach a lot about this, as well as experts in other areas to put together a Wedding Business CEO Summit entirely focused on helping you reclaim your time so you don’t feel so overwhelmed and your business doesn’t feel like it’s on fire all the time.

Because I do encounter a lot of people who are in this perpetual state of overwhelm, this perpetual state of working too much, doing too much, and feeling like they have to do too much. And maybe things are set up right now where you have to do that, but it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way.

So I am bringing together a group of experts in other areas because I don’t want you to just get this information from me. I don’t think relying on one source is, you know, super helpful because we all have different lives, we all have different businesses, and we all have different ways that we want to approach things.

So this summit is going to feature an array of different types of experts from all sorts of different backgrounds, and different countries sharing how you can get that time back, because this piece is really important to me. It’s always been super important to me.

I’ve always firmly believed that your business should provide you with the life that you want and that you’re building a business and not a job.

And what I mean by that is you’re building a business in that it is like this machine that is outside of you and that can operate and that you can step back from and it continues to operate when you build yourself a job. You know, it’s really easy to get into the position where you’re working 50, 60 hours a week because not only do you have the business side of the work to do, but you have the client side to do too.

We don’t want you in a position where you’re building yourself a job and you’re being the worst boss ever to yourself. Like, a lot of you are doing illegal shit to yourself. And I say this because I want you to realize it, and I’ve done it too, where like, the amount of time off you are giving yourself in many, many places in the world would be illegal.

The amount you’re paying yourself per hour for working this much would be illegal. So, I want you to recognize that and recognize also that if you are doing that, that’s okay. A lot of people, I would think the majority of our industry is in this situation of this, you know, 60-hour-plus week norm of thinking this just is how it is and this is just how it has to be.

And it really does not have to be that way. I work with people all the time, we get their hours down, and we get them focused on the things that actually move the needle in their business. One of the first things people do when they join my membership, The Wedding Business Collective, is go through a training that’s focused on helping them free up at least five hours per week.

Because everything on your plate doesn’t necessarily need to be there. And the things that need to be there can be prioritized differently, can be organized differently, can be streamlined differently, can be automated differently, so that you’re actually building yourself a business that gives you the life that you want to live.

But if you are in a position where you are working these crazy hours, I want you to know that you are in the majority, but I also want you to know that you don’t have to accept that it’s just the way it is and the way it’s going to be from now until you die. No, you don’t have to accept that.

And during the summit, which, by the way, is happening February 12th through the 16th, you are going to get access to all sorts of different people’s strategies and tactics for freeing up their time, for reclaiming their time, for getting out of overwhelm, for getting to a point where they no longer feel like everything is on fire.

So if you feel like everything is on fire, This is for you. And we have done Wedding Business CEO Summits in the past and focused more broadly on topics around growing the business. Basically, you get to that point of, okay, I’m booking weddings. Now what the hell am I supposed to do?

But I really wanted to focus on time this time around because I’m not seeing this get better.

For all this time I’ve been in the industry, I’ve, you know, been working with wedding professionals for 12 years. Before that, I was a wedding professional myself. It’s not getting better.

And I think it’s not getting better because a lot of people don’t know what they’re supposed to do. They don’t know that it can be different and they don’t know what they’re supposed to do to make it different.

So we’re changing that. During Wedding Business CEO Summit from February 12th through the 16th you are going to find out what you are indeed supposed to do to make this better for yourself.

If you are on my email list you will get a notification when registration starts. We will be opening up registration for free tickets toward the end of January.

If you are not already on my email list, Just head on over to my website, evolveyourweddingbusiness.com, and grab the free training. You get this awesome free training, plus you’ll be on the email list, so you will definitely get the invite.

And you’re going to see a lot of people that you know and you love and you respect talking about how they do this for themselves. These are the conversations that we really need to be having in our industry.

If you look at other industries where people have better balance, I mean if work-life balance is even a thing, but that’s a whole other conversation, but they have better control over the amount of time they’re working, they would be appalled about it the amount of time that we are spending working and the amount we’re making, like what we have to show for it.

And I want more for you. And I know that that’s possible because I’ve helped people do it time and time and time again over the past 12 years. So with that, I just want to leave you with the knowledge that if you feel this way, you are not alone.

I had that inclination based solely on how often I hear people talk about this, but even just having some data to look at, like, yeah, over half of people are feeling like this. You’re absolutely not alone. You shouldn’t feel bad because there aren’t enough conversations happening in our industry around creating a healthy sustainable wedding business that gives you, the business owner, the freedom and the flexibility to work how you like and get to have your time.

That should be part of being a business owner is that you get your time back but it’s so easy for your business to just eat up that time. So know that it is extremely common and know that you don’t have to accept that and that you can get your free ticket to the Wedding Business CEO Summit coming up from February 12th through the 16th.

We’re going to show you how to fix this because we have to do better for ourselves and for each other. If this is something that has hit home for you, I would love to hear from you. Send me a DM over on Instagram. I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness and I’d love to hear what your experience has been like around time with your business.

I will have more information about Wedding Business CEO Summit coming up very soon. Have an amazing rest of your day, my friend, and I will speak to you again very soon!

 

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Links & Resources:

Get your FREE ticket to The Stand Out & Get Booked Challenge
The Wedding Business Collective
Episode 187: What To Do If Your Wedding Business Is Attracting Price Shoppers

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