When I started my business I was stuck on what to name it. I spend time thinking about potential names and word play but what it came down to was what I want to help people do in their wedding businesses: evolve.

I’ve noticed that this evolution plays out through a series of shifts and it takes time. Nothing evolves overnight. Much like that health class you had in school where they separated the boys and the girls. You’ll be going through some changes so it’s best we talk about it so you’re prepared.

The Wedding Professional

Most wedding professionals start their business because they love the creative work they do so naturally the business side of things comes secondary. The problem with that is that in a creative business, you need people to hire you so you can do the things that you love so by putting the business secondary and adopting a “build it and they will come” mindset, you shoot yourself in the foot. Build it and they will come only works in Field Of Dreams & Wayne’s World 2.

In the beginning, wedding professionals are in love with the job but they’re not always in love with having a business. There is a big difference between the mindset it takes to do a job versus run a business where you’re the captain of the ship.

All of the things business owners lust after – the flexible hours, the passive income, the freedom to do the work they love with the people they love doing it with – come on the other side of this mindset shift.

The difference between a wedding professional and a wedding business owner is in the mindset. The wedding professional sees herself as a freelancer doing a job & struggling to do the work she loves. The idea of the classic starving artist comes to mind. The wedding business owner has decided to approach their business as the boss that they are and takes the time to learn about marketing, sales & business and starts to improve instead of waiting for someone to come along and hire them. There is more to running a wedding business than the pretty side, there has to be the smart & strategic side as well.

The Wedding Business Owner

After making the shift to wedding business owner, most people start to see an uptick in their sales. They begin bringing in enough money for their business to truly support them and for it to not be an expensive hobby. They pay closer attention to their profit and may raise their prices. The wedding business owner waits for no one. Instead of waiting for people to come to their website and contact them, they are proactive and find ways to attract the right people to them in their marketing.

I see this shift a lot from the people who go through Book More Weddings Academy. All of a sudden things start to come together. They understand who their ideal client is, how to attract them and how to take them from casual browser to booked client. They don’t just work IN their business on their client work, they work ON their business so that they continue to grow.

Wedding business owners are a take charge bunch and they’ve moved beyond the mindset of failure vs success and see the gradual evolution of their business as a journey of continual growth. Failure is part of the game, it’s how we learn what works and what doesn’t work but it isn’t the catastrophic emotional event that it is when we’re first getting started. Piece by piece they build up their business until they find themselves fully booked and getting a little (or a lot) too busy.

It’s at this point that the wedding business owner has to make yet another shift. She realizes that she only has 24 hours a day and she kind of likes to sleep and see her family (imagine that) so this whole working non-stop thing is not going to work. That’s when our heroine begins the shift from wedding business owner to wedding entrepreneur.

The Wedding Entrepreneur

The wedding entrepreneur is the CEO of her business. That doesn’t necessarily mean she has a lot of people working for her, it just means she is working more on her business and she is thinking like a CEO. You don’t see the CEO of a company doing all of the work there is to do. That’s because it’s impossible.

The CEO is the queen bee who is calling the shots for not only herself, but also the worker bees. You can absolutely be both the CEO and the worker bee. You’re the CEO – you can do whatever you want and that’s the beauty of it.

If you want to spend more time working in your business on client work, you can outsource certain business tasks to contractors or employees. If you want to focus more on the business side of things, you can add people to your team to help support you in your client work. The point here is the the CEO has to be the captain of the ship. That means navigating so that you’re going in the direction of your goals and making sure everything else gets done. That may mean that you need some help and by outsourcing tasks you can give yourself the lifestyle you want in your business.

The wedding entrepreneur values her time and knows that she can’t do it all and that there are things she should not waste her time on because it’s worth more than that. She has to say no to things that aren’t in line with her goals and if she wants to earn more money she has to figure out ways to do that that leverage her time so that she doesn’t have to work non-stop. She knows that the key to earning more money is not working more hours.

You will reach an income cap because when you only exchange time for money, you’re going to run out of time. You are limited by the number of hours you can sell. Working this way is exhausting and it can make you feel like you’re a slave to your business. The good news is this is not your only option.

The wedding entrepreneur is totally over this whole work harder and burn yourself out thing. Instead she focuses on building multiple streams of income. That means that you give people other ways to pay you than just by selling your time.

There are limitless ways to do this and we dig into them in Wedding Business Profits. The wedding entrepreneur realizes that she is not just a product or service provider, she is an expert. Just as people will pay her to plan their wedding, they will pay her to attend a workshop, an online course or a book that teaches them how to to it themselves. This applies to every type of wedding business, not just planners. It just takes different forms.

The problem is that way too many talented, creative wedding professionals get stuck in that wedding professional mode and don’t evolve. You can move beyond that stage and build a wedding business that gives you the freedom, fulfilment and the income you want. My hunch is that most wedding professionals get stuck because they don’t know that the other 2 stages even exist much less how to get there but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve gone through these evolutionary shifts in my own business. When I first started my business I was only doing 1 on 1 coaching and consulting. I was in wedding professional mode just trying to get things off the ground. Then, I shifted my mindset and started asking people who read my blog and are on my email list what they struggle with. That allowed me to understand them better and see things from their perspective which improved my marketing. After that, I turned the process I was teaching time and time again in my 1 on 1 work into a course so that I could work with more people and give myself more time freedom.

I’m still learning and evolving and next I’m going to be shifting my business to help people just like you move through these 3 phases of wedding business faster and easier. I want to help more wedding professionals become wedding entrepreneurs.

So, where are you right now? Where do you want to be in 1 year? How about 3 years? Leave a comment and let me know! Even if you’re just getting started, I want to hear from you. There is no shame in being new to this, just know that it is a journey so don’t be too hard on yourself.