Wedding Vendor Marketing ADHD: Why You Keep Avoiding Your To-Do List (And What to Do Instead)

In this episode we’ll cover:

• Why you keep avoiding your wedding marketing tasks even when you know what to do
• How executive dysfunction shows up for wedding vendors and what to do about it
• The real reason traditional productivity advice doesn’t work for creatives in the wedding industry
• How to make your wedding business marketing feel easier and more doable
• Small shifts you can make to actually follow through on your to-do list
• Why your marketing plan needs to be ADHD-friendly even if you don’t have ADHD
• How to set up your environment and systems to support consistent marketing habits

Wedding Vendor Marketing ADHD: Why You Keep Avoiding Your To-Do List (And What to Do Instead)

0:00:00 – Heidi Thompson
Do you ever feel like you have marketing ADHD? Let’s talk about why you’re avoiding your to-do list and what to do instead.

0:00:11 – Intro
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.

0:00:33 – Heidi Thompson
Hello there, welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson, and I help wedding pros of all different kinds book more weddings with couples they love to work with, make their marketing easier and do it all without working crazy 60 plus hour weeks every single week. And today we’re going to talk about what I call marketing ADHD, and why you’re avoiding your to-do list and what to do instead.

I see this in a lot of people, so let’s talk about why marketing feels so overwhelming, because I hear this from people time and time again it just feels so overwhelming. They don’t know exactly what to do. They feel like there’s so much that needs to be done. Well, let’s start with your to-do list, because your to-do list is definitely the problem. It is full of huge projects and set of tasks that you can take action on right now.

What I mean by that are things like do Instagram, create content, improve website, get more referrals. Those are huge projects that you can’t just check off a to-do list, and we have to differentiate between a project and a task. A project is something that’s made up of several tasks that build to an end product, whereas a task is a single thing that you can complete in one session. I typically think about this as like two hours or less one session. I typically think about this as like two hours or less, but putting projects on your to-do list instead of tasks leads to guaranteed overwhelm. So I want you to look at your to-do list and see are you putting tasks on that list or are you putting projects on that list? Because if you are putting projects on that list, quite honestly, like most people do, you need to break those down, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in just a minute.

But first I want to introduce you to the idea of the CEO versus the worker bee, and it’s this weird thing we have to do in our businesses. We have to exist as two different roles, two different people. In our businesses. We have to be both the CEO of the business and the worker bee, the one that’s doing stuff. The CEO makes decisions and gives orders stuff. The CEO makes decisions and gives orders. The worker bee then executes on those orders and does the work.

Now, if you’re in The Wedding Business Collective, you know that I always talk about making as many decisions as possible in CEO mode inside of our quarterly planning sessions as possible in CEO mode inside of our quarterly planning sessions. And we do this because then worker bee you just has to follow the instructions that CEO you has given them, and it makes things so much easier. So CEO you makes the decisions around things like where you’re going to market, how you’re going to market, exactly what you’re going to do for each of these platforms or places that you’re going to market, what actions you need to take and in what order. CEO you removes the ADHD from your marketing because it makes all of these decisions in advance.

But Most people don’t give this version of themselves any time, so they just wind up buzzing around in worker bee mode, because without CEO you giving the orders, worker bee, you is just going to flit around from one thing to another, always being busy, never really getting anything impactful or important done. Worker bee, you will always stay busy and work on anything. That’s the point of Worker Bee You. So you need to give yourself direction, and the way we do this in the Wedding Business Collective, like I said, is we have our quarterly planning sessions, where we put ourselves into CEO mode for two hours together and we make decisions about. Okay, this is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what the plan is going to be that I’m going to hand over to worker be me so they can actually execute on it, and it’s not like a list of things like redo website, like what, what on a Tuesday morning. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I can’t take action on that, right. So CEO me needs to break it down.

So let’s talk a little bit about creating that plan for your worker bee. You want to start with what’s working. I’m a huge fan of this. You’ve probably heard me say it a million times. My goal is always for my clients to do more of what’s working and do less of what isn’t, and the same is true in my own business.

You should never start from scratch with your marketing unless you’re brand new or you’re making like some sort of huge change. If you’re not in one of those positions, you can look at what is already working. So I want you to ask yourself what is already working to bring you leads and bookings. And we do this in our quarterly planning sessions and we decide okay, what’s worth continuing to do, what is worth maybe getting rid of. Okay, what’s worth continuing to do, what is worth maybe getting rid of? And instead of introducing something that’s new, a shiny object, it’s unproven I want you to double down on what already works.

So your task here is to find out what is already working, to bring you leads and bookings, and that tells you what you should be doing more of. You don’t have to guess at what you should be doing. A lot of times, you know, people just sit down in front of their computers and they’re like okay, what am I supposed to do? No, your business will tell you, and then CEO version of you will tell you. No, your business will tell you, and then CEO version of you will tell you. This allows us to get better results the lazy way, the more intentional way, because, remember, the goal is not to work harder and do more stuff, it’s to get better results. And in order to do that, you need to be intentional and focused with your actions.

So you have to break it down. First, brainstorm, action steps to double down on what’s already working for you. Think of those things that are already working for you. If you need to go find out what they are, pause me, go find out, come back Then I want you to think about how can you get more strategic? So, for example, if you’re already getting referrals and that’s working really well for you, you could find ways to stay top of mind with those referral partners or you could offer a bonus to the client for them coming through your referral partner. We’re taking what’s working, we’re tweaking it, we’re making small changes, small improvements and getting exponential results, and these are better results than you’re going to get, just starting on something random and new. And we put this together in The Wedding Business Collective in our 90-day plan, our quarterly plan.

You may have heard me talk about this. If you’re a member, you definitely know what I’m talking about, because we do these every quarter, where, for each area of focus or goal, maybe the goal is like increase referrals by 20% you’re going to map out your tasks for 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. So if you want to increase referrals by 20%, maybe and I’m not saying this is the only way to do it, there’s a million ways to do anything Maybe you, in the first 30 days, want to create an outreach plan for people you want to build relationships with.

You also want to identify networking events to attend regularly, and maybe you decide you’re going to start spotlighting, featuring venues in your content, whether that’s in blog posts, your content, whether that’s in blog posts, video, podcasts, social media, whatever You’re going to identify those. Those are the tasks for the first 30 days. Then your tasks for the next 30 days, so by the 60-day mark of the quarter, is to publish three venue spotlight blog posts highlighting those venues, doing that marketing for them, sharing about how much you love them. Then, by the 90-day mark, you will have created a referral plan, a referral program where you’re gonna give a bonus, something special, to Sarah’s clients when Sarah refers them to you, and you’re going to communicate this to your vendor friends.

Those are the specific tasks that go into the overall strategy, the overall project of increasing referrals by 20%. And we don’t get there unless we stop. We think about okay, what are the steps to this? And then how can I break this down into a 90 day plan? From there, I take members through breaking your 30 day goals into weekly milestones so you know what you need to do and when you need to do it, and on a daily basis. I encourage you to set your top three priorities and focus on those before anything else? Because if you know that the most impactful thing you could do for your business right now is increase referrals by 20%, why are you doing anything else? When you first sit down at your computer, that is the most important thing. This gets you so much more intentional and so much more focused.

With all of this, you have to focus on what you can control, because you can’t control outcomes. You can control things that lead to them, and the way I like to think about this is what is the domino that you can knock over? That sets a chain reaction in motion to knock over the rest. So an example in my own business is getting on podcasts. I do a lot of guest podcast interviews. A lot of people discover me that way. I get a lot of new people into my world and clients that way. So I know this is really important for me, but I can’t control whether or not someone decides to have me on their podcast or not someone decides to have me on their podcast. What I can control is how many pitches I send out per week or how many I send out per month. The task right, and I focus only on that. Did I do the task? Because that is going to be the domino that knocks everything down. Risk, because that is going to be the domino that knocks everything down. So everything I’ve talked about here is about being really intentional.

But in order to do it, you need to make time for CEO you. You need to make time for planning. You need to make time to review what already works so you can get more out of it, so you can do more of it. You need to make time to create your 90-day plan by breaking these goals down and to start setting your top three each day and then decide what metric you’ll focus on. That is in your control, right? You can’t control if someone’s going to refer you. You can only control the things you can control. When you do this, you will absolutely remove the overwhelm and the marketing ADHD that comes from it, because you can just sit down and do the work that CEO you has assigned to you. No more guessing, no jumping around from one thing to another, no piling more and more onto your plate.

And inside The Wedding Business Collective, we will be doing our quarter three, our mid-year planning session, together on July 1st. We do it together. So we work on this, we reflect on the previous quarter and make decisions about. Okay, what am I going to be intentional about? What am I going to focus on? What am I going to do? What is that plan that CEO me needs to hand to worker be me this quarter and these are hugely popular with members.

If you’re not already a member, head over to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/invite to join and you can get your first month for a dollar. Like I said, we’ve got our quarter three, our mid-year planning session, happening on July 1st and I will walk you step by step through this entire process and we can do this thing together. So you are not doing this ADHD, jumping from one thing to another, guessing like, changing your focus every five minutes, because the reason why that’s happening is because, CEO you doesn’t have a plan. You’re just little worker bee you, buzzing around from flower to flower, staying busy, because that’s your job. Except it’s not.

There’s a whole other version of you that you have to be in your business in order to get results and that’s the CEO version of yourself that makes this plan, breaks it down so that worker bee you can open your laptop and just get to work. So if that sounds like something you would find helpful, like I said, you can join us in the Wedding Business Collective and join our planning session on July 1st.

Head over to evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/invite. You can get your first month for a dollar and let’s stop flitting from one thing to another and embrace the CEO version of you so you can do less but do things more intentionally and get better results without feeling so frazzled and overwhelmed and pulled in a million different directions. All right, my friend. The show notes for this episode will be at evolveyourweddingbusiness.com, slash 316. I would love to hear if this is something that has resonated with you. Send me a DM on Instagram. I am @evolveyourweddingbusiness over there and I will speak to you again very soon.

Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Episode 215: How To Use Quarterly Planning To Squash Overwhelm
Episode 237: 4 Members Of The Wedding Business Collective Share Their Journey To Embracing Their CEO Role

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