Why Hustling Is Actually Hurting Your Wedding Business

If you’re anything like most entrepreneurs, you equate working hard with achieving your goals. While it’s true that working hard is necessary at times, trying to hustle constantly is actually hurting your wedding business.

I don’t think the goal of a business is to work all hours of the day and night just for the sake of it. You could be working your ass off and making zero progress. If you can get the same result in 2 hours doing things more efficiently, why wouldn’t you do that? Why try to dig a ditch with a teaspoon? Just to feel busy and like you’re working hard?

I’m well aware that our society pushes us to be busy all of the time. That’s one way people may choose to measure their worth. But I’m also aware that you get to choose whether or not you adhere to certain societal norms. Working 100 hours per week is not an accomplishment as far as I’m concerned. It’s an indication of a critical failure that will eventually result in complete and total burnout.

All this work, work, work, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” shit is just that. Shit. ?

That’s why I take a hard pass on the hustle. I’m not willing to sacrifice myself for my business and you shouldn’t either. Now that doesn’t mean that I don’t think building and running a business takes work. It definitely does! What I’m saying is that the goal shouldn’t be working hard for the sake of working hard and that’s the trap that many people fall into.

The “Hard Work” Mindset

You can make building and running your wedding business easier and a lot of people resist that because it doesn’t feel “right”. I get it, we’re trained to work “hard” so when something comes easy it feels off. But this is where employees and business owners differ. As an employee you are paid for ass-in-seat time of 8 hours per day. It doesn’t matter if you waste that time or you complete your tasks in half the time. You still have to be there and you’re paid for your time, not your results.

As a wedding business owners, you are paid for a result. Your clients don’t care if it takes you 20 hours or 20 minutes to edit their photos as long as they love them. If you can reduce the amount of time the result takes you to produce, you increase your profit.

Let me give you a more practical example. Let’s say you lock your keys in your car and you’re waiting for the locksmith to come and get you back into your car. If the locksmith can get into your car in 1 minute, would you be upset that it didn’t take longer and didn’t seem difficult? Of course not! You’d be thrilled you got the result you wanted quickly so you can move on with your day.

So why are you operating as if you’re an employee selling time instead of an entrepreneur selling a result?

I get it, no one trains you to behave like an entrepreneur instead of an employee. That’s why I’m here! And I know that letting things be easy takes practice but nothing is going to get easier if you don’t consciously work on adjusting your mindset to one of an entrepreneur. The great news is, you get to choose to make that mindset shift!

Putting Your CEO Pants On

My mission is to help wedding professionals put their CEO pants on and operate their businesses from a place of power and intention. When you’re too busy “working hard” to stop and work on CEO-level activities, your business suffers. It’s easy to say you’re “too busy” to create an intentional marketing plan for your business, or start delegating, or determine why you’re not booking as many clients as you’d like to. All of these things require you to stop and put your CEO pants on. You have to slow down in order to speed up, which is insanely counter-intuitive, but it’s true.

If you don’t stop to determine exactly who you’re marketing to and create a marketing plan, your marketing will fail. You’ll have expended all of that time and effort only to have it fail because you’re trying to hustle your way through the problem. You can’t hustle your way through everything. Some things, like strategic planning, require you to slow down and plan so you can speed up. When wedding business owners don’t slow down, they run 90 MPH right off the edge of a cliff because they didn’t bother to look up.

Does it take time to slow down and think about things strategically? Yes, of course it does but you can’t execute on things you haven’t planned out strategically. Well you can, but you’ll probably get lackluster results. When you’re 100% execute and 0% strategic thinking, you going to burn yourself out and deprive your business of leads and bookings.

Instead, I teach my students to build CEO time into their calendar and it actually allows them to save more time. When you stop to plan your week intentionally, you’re able to complete the things that matter instead of just doing anything to fill your time. Not every task is created equal and you need to understand which tasks bring you closer to your goals if you ever want to reach them. This is exactly why I have the Your Most Productive Week Ever course inside The Wedding Business Collective. If you don’t control your time like a CEO, it will slip through your fingers and you won’t have anything to show for it.

What Is The End Goal?

What do you ultimately want from your business? What kind of lifestyle do you want it to provide for you? What kind of income do you want it to provide for you? How many hours per week do you want to be working?

These questions are incredibly important because the actions you take today impact whether or not you’ll ever get those results.

The goal should be creating a business that doesn’t devour your live and entire existence whole and yes, is possible. Streamline, automate, delegate, make your life easier for yourself. Don’t just suffer for the sake of “the hustle”. Fuck the hustle. The hustle is a cop-out for not building a business intentionally.

You can keep yourself busy all day but what do you have to show for it? Are you really making any progress toward your goals or are you just keeping yourself busy? Being a CEO of a wedding business means taking responsibility for your actions and recognizing where you’re avoiding the more important strategic work. We all do things to avoid and procrastinate, but the wedding business CEO develops the ability to catch themselves in the act and right the ship.

If you don’t do the CEO work of strategically planning your marketing, developing your understanding of your ideal client, reviewing what’s working and what isn’t, and setting your most important (not urgent, important to reaching your goals) tasks each and every day, you aren’t going to get the lifestyle or the income that you want from your business. Those results don’t come from hustle or working hard, they come from working smart and working with intention.

Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Instead of striving to work hard, strive to work smart. Working smart means working efficiently and doing the CEO work it takes to give yourself more time. The truth is, you can have a great wedding business and a great life. You don’t have to give up one to have the other.

How are you behaving like an employee in your business? The first step to changing your behavior is making yourself aware of it in the first place.

Where are you making things harder than they need to be? What would a CEO do in that situation?

These are opportunities for you to step into your CEO role and claim the income and lifestyle that you want.

Why hustle yourself to death when it doesn’t work anyway?