Tools
Your Legal BFF is your go-to legal bestie for easy-to-understand and industry-specific contract templates that help you confidently start, grow and protect your business baby. Building a business is just like building a house – you need to lay a proper legal foundation before you can get to the fun stuff like painting the walls and decorating. Without a solid LEGAL ground to rest your business on, you run the risk of your walls crumbling down.
Frankenstein contracts cobbled together from what you’ve found online will not protect you and we saw during COVID just how important an iron-clad contract really is. Your Legal BFF has contract templates that are super easy to customize and use and you can rest assured knowing that a (very awesome) lawyer wrote them and they will protect you and your business.
YOUR LEGAL BFF CONTRACT TEMPLATES
Hate doing your bookkeeping and want to hand it off to someone else? Bench has got you covered. Bench does my bookkeeping and I don’t even have to think about it. My statements import automatically, they do my books, and just send me a message about any transactions they had questions about.
I spend maybe 5 mins per month on my books now and they are always up to date! I can see exactly how my financials are doing quickly and easily and that’s all I ever wanted from bookkeeping. Tax time is super easy because I know everything is done and ready to hand off to my CPA.
BENCH BOOKKEEPING
Your business logins are too important to risk having an easy password but remembering insane 25 character random passwords isn’t exactly easy. That’s where LastPass comes in. LastPass is a password manager that allows you to store and fill all of your logins and you only need to remember 1 password.
On top of securing all of your accounts, LastPass makes sharing your logins with team members really easy and secure. It also allows you to name a next of kin on paid accounts which is not something we think about but is super important.
lastpass
Every business needs a way to manage projects and this is my favorite project management tool that I’ve ever tried. I’ve tried Trello, Asana, and bunch of other project management tools but none of them really felt like they made intuitive sense to me. ClickUp is super flexible and just makes sense to me. It works the way I think it should and I’m not left trying to jam a square peg into a round hole.
ClickUp provides the perfect balance of structure and flexibility and it has all of the features you need to help you keep track of all of the to-do’s and projects in your wedding business. It also has a lot of things that other free project management tools lack that will make your life easier. In my opinion, it’s a damn near perfect project management tool!
clickup
Business Tools
I’m a huge fan of email marketing for wedding businesses. Email marketing fills in the gap between “I’m just researching and I’m not ready to have a sales conversation yet” and “I’m ready to work with you, let’s talk”. That gap is HUGE (it can be many months long) and it’s where decisions are made so it’s important that you insert yourself here.
With email marketing, you allow a visitor to your website to sign up for your email list so that you can keep in touch with them. Couples don’t make these decisions quickly, they spend hundreds of hours researching, so the chances of them booking you off of their first website visit is pretty slim. You could see this as an annoyance or you could use it to your advantage. Honestly, it’s a wedding business opportunity waiting to be taken advantage of!
How do you use it to your advantage in your wedding business? You set up a sales funnel to nurture them as a lead over time and market to them so that when they are ready to work with someone, you are top of mind. But you need to use an email marketing provider in order to do all of this and harness the power of email marketing. That’s where ConvertKit comes in.
I’m a big fan of ConvertKit and when I came across it years ago, it was the first email marketing provider I used that actually made sense to me. It’s a powerful tool and it can help you keep in touch and market to those interested but not quite ready to book people and convert them to clients.
convertkit
Tailwind is the smartest tool I’ve used for both Pinterest and Instagram. I started off using Tailwind for Pinterest and I absolutely love all of the unique features they have like optimized scheduling, multi-board pinning, bulk upload, drag-and-drop calendars, content discovery, and seriously awesome analytics. Tailwind now supports Instagram and has a range of similar features that help you optimize what you’re doing on Instagram and find opportunities to improve.
Tailwind really goes beyond a social media scheduler. It’s a full-on Pinterest and Instagram manager that will help you get the best out of both platforms. It’s no secret that Instagram and Pinterest are big platforms for the wedding business owner and Tailwind will help you take advantage of the opportunities that are out there for you.
tailwind
With everything from stock photos, videos, and art—to mockups, templates, and styling blocks—Sourced Co. offers everything you need to curate an engaging library of the eye-catching, on-brand imagery it takes to book leads and build your business. I love that Sourced Co. creates their stock photos and video SPECIFICALLY for wedding pros. There are a lot of stock photo companies out there but Sourced Co. is the only one with a background in the wedding industry and a focus on creating what wedding pros need for their websites, portfolios, and social media.
When you sign up for a membership, you’ll gain access to Sourced Co.’s entire library—including thousands of styled stock photos, an array of stunning video clips, customizable graphics, and easy-to-implement templates. We’re talking 45 different collections plus new content added every quarter.
sourced co.
Marketing Tools
Maroo makes it easy to get paid with no fee on bank transfers, checks, or debit card transactions. Their credit card processing fees are just 2.9% and all payments process within 1 business day. No more waiting for the money to actually land in your bank account. Oh, and it’s free to use.
Maroo offers a Pay Over Time option. It allows you to offer installment plan options to your clients while receiving 100% of the contract amount within 1 business day. Cancellation insurance is included to protect you from chargebacks.
Maroo
There are a lot of little things that need to happen in your wedding business to keep things humming along smoothly, but you don’t have to physically do them. You can automate a LOT the tedious things in your business with Dubsado. Why do it over and over again yourself when you can use a tool to do it for you? Dubsado can handle a lot of different things for you including client onboarding, workflows, proposals, funnels, payments, and so many glorious automations that you’re just going to love. It’s like a magical robot that runs part of your business for you.
I’d recommend Dubsado to anyone who has a business that needs robust automated workflows like stationery designers.
DUBSADO
Rock Paper Coin is a tool that is all about simplicity. It brings all of your contracts, invoices, payments, and documents in one place to simplify the paperwork side of your business.
RPC provides event professionals and clients a simple and easy way to process contracts, invoices, and payments all with the click of a button. The entire platform is built around the idea that workflow automation should be affordable, simple to adopt, and ever-evolving.
Rock Paper Coin
Aisle Planner is an all-in-one platform where you can market your business, connect with and close new clients, collaborate with your partners, and design and deliver spectacular events down to the very last detail.
You can even invite your couples to collaborate with you so that everything really is in one place. No more lost emails or scribbled notes on napkins. Get 25% off of your first 3 months of Aisle Planner when you join using this link.
Aisle Planner
Tools To Manage Clients & Get Paid
Studio Ninja is the world’s most user-friendly photography business app (web and mobile), designed specifically for photographers, by photographers! It will help you manage your shoots, clients, leads, invoices, automation, workflows, and so much more. Studio Ninja will help you streamline and automate your photography business so that you have more time to do the things you love.
Get 50% off of your Studio Ninja package when you sign up and us coupon code EVOLVE.
Studio Ninja
Goodshuffle Pro is designed specifically for event companies with inventory- event rental, custom design/decor, floral, tabletop, and more! Their features are built for your business needs, and are also customizable to tailor your unique process.
Goodshuffle Pro is easy-to-use, lightning-fast event company software that you can use on-the-go. Easy-to-build interactive quotes, quick inventory tracking & conflict detection, online signatures & payments, CRM tools, task management, and beautiful dashboards.
Goodshuffle Pro
Timeline Genius is a super smart tool that creates beautiful, detailed wedding day timelines in 65% less time. You just answer a few questions and let Timeline Genius create a customized initial timeline for you. Something change in your timeline? Timeline Genius instantly shifts the times for as many timeline items as you want. This tool is a wedding planner’s best friend.
Click here and use coupon code HEIDI20 to get 20% off your first year with Timeline Genius, or 20% off a 5 pack of timelines - your choice!
TIMELINE GENIUS
Specialized Wedding Business Tools
- Pinterest for Wedding Pros
- Identifying your Ideal Client
- Keywords & Pin Descriptions
- Idea Pins & Video Pins
- Scheduling & Analytics
- Best Practices & Secrets
- Blogging for Wedding Pros
Pinterest & Blogging Course for Wedding Pros from Gabby Pinkerton
Sara’s Wedding SEO Bootcamp is the only SEO course and program that is laser-focused just on wedding professionals (wedding planners, photographers, venues, florists, makeup artists, officiants, DJs, stationers, calligraphers, and more).
Because Bootcamp is just for the wedding industry, it contains exactly what wedding pros need to know to move up on Google — no fluff!
Wedding SEO Bootcamp from Sara Does SEO
The Copy Bar provides copywriting templates to help you make more money with your wedding small business's words—all without the 1-on-1 copywriter price. You’ll find all sorts of templates from The Homepage Copy Template to The Sweet 16 Sales Page Template that shows you how to create a service page that does the selling for you.
THE COPY BAR COPYWRITING TEMPLATES FROM ASHLYN CARTER
The Building Your Team Intensive is a done-with-you program for creative business owners that combines group coaching, 1:1 coaching, and the comprehensive tools you need to help you build and manage a team with ease.
