Latest / Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney / Why you need KPI day in your wedding business!

Transcript

Why you need KPI day in your wedding business! · Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney

0:00
Becca: This year, my focus has been less on the big business changes, but
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more on the details of my business.
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Because often in business, it's the small changes that can
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make the biggest difference.
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In 2024, I have adopted KPI day as a way of monitoring my progress.
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And today I'm going to walk you through exactly what I'm tracking every month and
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what I think you should be tracking too.
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I'm Becca Pountney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker, and blogger,
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and you're listening to the Wedding Pros Who Are Ready to Grow podcast.
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I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies, and real life
0:32
examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.
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If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion
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and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business, doing what you
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love, then you're in the right place.
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Let's get going with today's episode.
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Let's get started.
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Let's get started.
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Now, I will be the first to tell you that detail in business is
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definitely not always my strong point.
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I love being creative.
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I love thinking of new ideas.
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I love launching new ideas, but when it comes to the nitty gritty
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details and the numbers, it's not always my favorite thing to do.
1:03
However, in 2024, I've made a commitment to myself that I'm going to be better off.
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On the numbers and that's why I've adopted KPI day and I'm
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starting to focus on numbers more.
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I do think as much as I don't like it, it's actually made a huge difference to
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my business and it's allowing me to make wiser decisions about where I spend my
1:22
money, where I don't, where I market and what's working in my business so that I'm
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not just plucking ideas out of thin air.
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Now, earlier this year, at the start of 2024, I started using a
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piece of software called Engie.
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Now, if you've listened to lots of the episodes, you may remember
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that I interviewed the founder of Engie, Taylor, back in episode 81.
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If you've not listened to it, go back and take a listen
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after you've listened to this.
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But I started using the Engie platform and it's been Been
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really helpful in this area.
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Now on Engie, it allows me to schedule all my social media so I can schedule
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to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
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It also helps me plan out marketing campaigns and most importantly
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for this episode, track my KPIs.
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Now, if you don't know what KPIs are, they're basically, that's just
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a name of key performance indicators.
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It means what are the numbers you're tracking in your business?
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And the reason that I started adopting KPI day is because
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the lovely Taylor from Engie.
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Champions KPI day.
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It's part of her thing with NG that on the first of every month she encourages all
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of her customers to go through KPI day.
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And so I've adopted that in my own business and it's made a huge difference.
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So on the first of every month or the first working day of every month, I
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go into my NG, I fill out all of my numbers at the start of the month
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and I review where things are at.
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Now, I'm also encouraging my Wedding Pro members to do this as well.
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So in the Wedding Pro members lounge, if you're a member of that,
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every single month at the end of the month, we have a lounge call
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where we go through the numbers.
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We go through a worksheet that I've created specifically for
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you and your wedding business.
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We go through it together on a call so that not only are we going through
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the numbers, but you're also being accountable for getting it done.
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as well.
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Now KPI day and lounge calls have had a massive impact on my business
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and those that are coming to the lounge calls as well, because all
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of a sudden we know more details.
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So in today's episode, I thought I'd walk you through my own KPI day, what I look
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at, how I do it, what I'm tracking, what it's telling me about the business, and
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also what I do on those lounge calls, the kind of things I think you need to
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be monitoring every single month as well.
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So let's start with what I do on KPI day.
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So when it comes to the beginning of the month, I open up my NG account.
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Now, the reason I love doing this on NG is for two reasons.
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Number one, it's really visually helpful for me.
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So all of my KPIs are in graph form, so I can have a look and it's
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all color coded to my business.
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It's very pretty, but it means I can have a look at what's going on with the
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numbers and I can get a big oversight and it's tracking it each and every month.
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So I can see the peaks.
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I can see what's growing.
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I can see what's not growing and I can compare them month to month.
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The other great thing about NG is they've now started to allow.
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Some of the KPIs to integrate with the software automatically.
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So it can pull things like your social media followers and your Google analytics
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straight into NG, meaning that you don't need to go and search for those items.
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And they're having more and more of these integrations all the time.
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Now I do actually like going to search for the items.
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I actually find it quite fun going through and doing KPI day.
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It's become something I enjoy in the business rather than something I don't
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like because I like being able to see those numbers and see those graphs.
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And it gives me a reason to look at them.
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Whereas before I just have my head in the sand or I wasn't really paying attention.
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attention to what was going on.
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Now I know in granular detail, everything that's going on in my business.
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There's absolutely loads of ways that you can track your KPIs,
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and I'm going to share some more of those with you later as well.
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And it can be just on a simple pen and paper.
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But if you are interested in seeing what Engie is all about from a social
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media marketing point of view, an overall marketing point of view, and
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the KPI trackers, then I will put my affiliate link in the show notes.
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And I'm more than happy to talk to anyone who's interested.
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So on KPI day, then I open up my Engie and I go to my blog.
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graphs and I start looking at the different areas.
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So the first thing I look at is social media following.
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Now you may or may not be aware that I have two parts to the business.
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So I have the Becca Poutney part, which is all my business
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consultancy, but I also have vicinity weddings, which is my wedding blog.
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And although that's run almost entirely by one of my team, I still
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have overall oversight on that.
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And therefore I want to be paying attention to the numbers.
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So when it comes to social media, I'm always looking at Instagram
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followers, Facebook followers, LinkedIn connections, and more recently we've
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started looking at TikTok as well.
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And I track those numbers for both vicinity weddings and Becca Poutney.
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Now I'm not looking for my numbers to be massive, but what I am looking at is that
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my numbers are increasing month on month.
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So for example, having an oversight now, I can see that As of December
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end of last year, I was on 3, 300 Instagram followers for Becca Bountney.
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And now I'm on 3, 553 in June.
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So over six months, it's gone up by about 250, so it's not a huge
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growth, but it's a steady growth.
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And each and every month the numbers go up and up and up, which is a good thing
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because we want to be reaching new people.
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I can see my Facebook stayed rather steady.
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LinkedIn has gone up a lot because I wasn't paying any attention to that
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before the beginning of the year.
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And now I'm purposely doing a lot more on there.
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And also my TikTok is also growing, which I have not seen.
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Really been doing ahead of this year either.
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So I go through, I pop in those numbers, have a look at that and just have an
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overall look at how things are going.
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And I do the same for vicinity weddings as well to make sure I've
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got those numbers in there too.
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Oh, once I've done my social media following, the next thing I
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look at is my website analytics.
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So both my Becca Poutney website.
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And my vicinity weddings website are on Google analytics.
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So you can get the numbers directly from there, or if you're using NG,
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then it's pulling in those numbers.
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Now, again, there's loads and loads of different numbers that you can look
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at and track inside Google analytics, but I just want to see a big picture.
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So I'm looking at the big numbers.
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So the thing I'm looking at is website visitors.
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How many people are coming to my website?
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on a monthly basis or who's coming each month and are there peaks and
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troughs different times of year?
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Are there more people coming or less people coming?
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Now, this has been one of the most interesting stats for me to
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look at because quite frankly, I didn't think anyone was ever
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really going to my BeccaPoutney.
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com website.
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I didn't think it was there for more of an authority builder.
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I didn't think it was getting much traffic, but since looking in more
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detail at these KPIs, I've realized actually quite a lot of people are
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going there every month and I should be paying more attention to it.
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So I've done lots of updates on the site.
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So I go in, I see how many monthly website visitors I've had for Becca
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Poutney and how many for Vicinity Wedding.
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So just to give you an idea, in June I had 631 visitors.
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into Becca Poutney and 1, 600 visitors over to vicinity weddings.
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Now again, 631 doesn't sound like a big number, but that's 631 more people than
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I thought were going to my website.
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And therefore I realized early on in the year when I could see that
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numbers were growing, that I needed to pay more attention to the website.
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So one of the outcomes of that was that I decided to install a
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program called Hotjar on my website.
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You may or may not have heard of it, but basically it tracks what
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people are doing on your site.
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It video records sessions.
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They don't really realize it's doing that.
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You don't know who it is looking, but you can see where on your
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site people are clicking.
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It gives you a heat map so you can see the kind of places that most
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people are looking at on your website.
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Therefore, it allows you to improve your website.
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So I did that at the beginning of the year, seeing that more people were going
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to my site and that's really helped me.
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amend things.
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It's helped me spot mistakes because when I watch sometimes those recordings, I
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think, oh no, why are they going there?
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Or, oh dear, they've clicked on something and that link is broken
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or that information is out of date.
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So it's meant that I can keep updating my website, but it also means I can
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see the kinds of things people are interested in and build on them more.
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So for example, a lot of people are coming to the website and looking
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at different podcast episodes.
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So I know that keeping the podcast episodes updated on the website
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is really, really important.
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So that's the numbers I track from the website analytics.
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definitely made a difference to my business.
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And since I've been doing that and improving the website, I'm also seeing
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those numbers go up every single month.
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So if I look back at the end of last year, so October, 2023, I only had 321
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visitors that month and each month, pretty much it's gone up, had a bit of a dip in
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February and then last month it was 631.
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So you can see it's.
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Change is basically doubled where I've been doing those improvements.
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So just the simple act of tracking that KPI has made a
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big difference to my business.
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Now, the next thing I look at is my email list subscribers.
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So I want to know how many people are subscribing or unsubscribing to my mailing
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list because people do unsubscribe.
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And as I always say, you don't need to panic about people
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unsubscribing, let them go.
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It's fine if they don't want to hear from you anymore.
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It doesn't mean you should email any less.
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It just means they're not right for you at the moment.
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So I just keep a track on my email list growth to check it's going in the
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right direction to see what I'm doing.
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And I will see that if I do something particular, so for example, I may be
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sharing you lead magnet or do some kind of sign up for a masterclass, then I
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will generally see an increase on people on my mailing list and it will go up.
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Whereas if I don't do anything, but just send emails, then sometimes it will go
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down where a few people have unsubscribed and no new people have joined.
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But again, it's helpful for me to see how many people I've got on that list.
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What's happening to that list.
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And it's a reminder that I should be sending them an email or I should be
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trying to encourage new people to join it if it stays stagnant or goes down.
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So it's a really helpful number to track as well.
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Now, the next thing that I track probably isn't that helpful to most
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of you, but I'm going to share it anyway, because I'm being quite
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transparent about all the KPIs I look at, and that's to do with the podcast.
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So I've been doing the podcast now we're on episode, I think
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119, something like that.
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And I've been doing it a while and I want to know what impact
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is having on my business.
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And so there's a few different things that I've been tracking with the podcast.
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First of all, I track the downloads now every single month.
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So how many people are downloading and listening to the podcast?
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I do it on a monthly basis.
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Is rather than on a per episode basis.
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But I can go into more detail in those analytics and see which episodes do
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particularly well and what topics people are the most interested in.
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And again, with the podcast, I just wanna see that it's trickling up.
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I'm not looking for big numbers, but I wanna know that suddenly everyone
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hasn't stopped listening to it or that I haven't gone off track.
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Or is there a particular month when it's really boomed.
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I need to look at why that is.
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Is there somewhere that I was talking about the podcast?
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Maybe I've been talking about it more on social media and that's
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attracted more people over to it.
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The other thing I've started doing with the podcast is something
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called attribution links.
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So within my podcast player, when I say two things like, oh, there's
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a link in the show notes or go and find out about my wedding pro
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members lounge in the show notes, I can make that an attribution link.
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So I can actually track how many people are clicking.
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each month to those various things.
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Now that's important for me because obviously the podcast is
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a way of marketing my business and marketing my services.
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So I need to know if that's working.
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If I talk to you about something on the podcast, does it impact
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sales into the business?
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Does it mean people go and have a look at what I'm doing or not?
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Obviously it takes me a lot of time and a lot of energy to make these
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episodes and to interview people.
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And as much as I want to do it to give people back to all of you and to
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give you a good thing to listen to.
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Ultimately it won't happen if I don't make any money in the business because
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it wouldn't be financially viable.
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So by tracking those attribution links and seeing where people are clicking, it helps
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me work out whether I should be doing different adverts on the podcast, what my
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topic should be, and whether or not it's financially viable to keep the podcast
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going, which the good news for you all is at the moment, it definitely is, so the
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podcast isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
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Now, before I go into the last couple of things that I track on a regular
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basis, it is important to realize at this point that everyone's business
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is slightly different, and my business may be very different to yours.
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Obviously, what I do is business to business.
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I'm helping you grow your businesses.
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I'm not working directly with couples other than on vicinity weddings, but in
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terms of bringing money into the business and the key performance indicators,
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it's mostly around business to business.
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Whereas I, Understand that for most of you, you'll be talking directly to the
12:41
customer, which is why shortly, I'm going to be talking about the other KPIs I
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think you should be tracking, but I just wanted to give you a real life example
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of the things I track just to give you an idea of what goes on in my business
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and a little peek behind the curtain.
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So the next thing I'm tracking at the moment is vicinity weddings applications.
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Now this one might seem a bit random, but at the moment in our
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business, we've been talking about the viability of vicinity weddings.
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I started vicinity weddings as a wedding blog.
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ultimately as a way to promote the amazing businesses that I work with.
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So when I first started it, I realized that, you know, there's lots of
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big directories and I'm not trying to compete with those, but they're
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quite expensive to be part of.
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And quite often when you submit your stuff to them, they have so many
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submissions that it means you've worked really hard on style shoots and
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it's hard for you to get published.
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And so I started vicinity weddings as a way of giving back to you, the wedding
13:30
supplier community, because it was a platform where I could promote your
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businesses and I could also get blogs written about you, you could submit your
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style shoots to and so on and so forth.
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But vicinity weddings itself makes no money but it costs me quite a lot
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of money to run because I'm paying someone to run it all of the time.
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So that is quite an expensive outlay and so I'm having to look at the financial
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viability of vicinity weddings and whether or not it's worth continuing with it.
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Now I do love vicinity weddings because it is great to be able to feature peoples.
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blog posts.
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It's great to feature your shoots and to promote your businesses,
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but I need to look at how it integrates into my business.
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So we're on a mission at the moment to work out what positive benefit vicinity
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weddings can have into our business, as well as us giving back to you guys
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by letting you be on the platform.
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So we've been looking at areas of the country where we don't have
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very many suppliers represented.
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We've been going into Facebook groups and offering people the
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opportunity to be listed on vicinity weddings free of charge.
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And what I'm doing now is tracking how many people apply to be part of the site.
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Now when you apply to be part of vicinity weddings, it won't cost you
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anything to apply to be on that site.
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As long as you're in an area that we are looking for new people for and
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there's no kind of monthly payment or anything like that, but what it does
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mean is that you will then go onto my email list and hopefully in the future,
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maybe you'll join a member's lounge or buy a course or something like that.
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So what we're doing is we're looking at how we can use vicinity weddings
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as a way to bring people into the business as well as give out to it.
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And if that works, then it means we can viably keep doing it.
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Facility weddings going, if it doesn't, we may look at shutting
15:01
that down at the end of the year with that still very much up in the air.
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But again, we're making these decisions based on numbers and based on the
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key performance indicators, rather than just making decisions off the
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fly or how we're feeling emotionally.
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Because if we do emotional decision making, I'd never give up
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anything because vicinity weddings has been around a long time.
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And I love being able to give back to you guys.
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And I love being able to feature you all on there and feature your shoes.
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But actually, sometimes we have to look at things objectively and see
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whether it's actually just a cost, a sunk cost into the business or
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whether it's got a business benefit.
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So by tracking how many people are applying to be part of it, and then
15:35
that feeds into my email list and everything else, then we can start to
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have a better idea on those numbers.
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So if you're listening to this and you've never been to Apply to
15:41
be part of vicinity weddings and you want to apply, then feel free.
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Again, I'll pop the link in the show notes.
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You can apply.
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It won't cost you anything.
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You'll get a listing on there and also the opportunities to submit as content
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and to submit as your style choose if you've got any, and we'd love to
15:55
feature you if you're based here in the UK or you work in the UK as well.
16:01
Okay, the final part of my KPI day is then looking at the money.
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Now this part takes me a little bit longer and involves another
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spreadsheet as well as my NG thing.
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But the things I track in NG are how much income has come into the business
16:13
that month and what are the costs that have come into the business that month.
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So that gives me an overall picture.
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I can see if there are months that are better financially than others
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and I can see if there are months that are, the costs are particularly high
16:26
compared to others, but really I want a bit more of a detailed overlook.
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So Which is why I go into another spreadsheet.
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Now, if you are in the Wedding Pro Members Lounge and you want a copy
16:36
of the spreadsheet that I use to track each month, the numbers, then
16:40
you're more than welcome to have that.
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Please reach out to me and I will get that over to you.
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Or if you're interested in that, then come along and join
16:47
the Wedding Pro Members Lounge.
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We'd love to have you and you can get access to that spreadsheet.
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So within that spreadsheet, first of all, I look at all of
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the income and I split it out.
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Now, again, for you, it'll look very different to what it looks
16:57
like for me, but mine is split out by what income has come in for
17:00
the wedding pro members lounge.
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What's come in for my wedding pro agency.
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How many courses have I sold?
17:05
How many planners have I sold?
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How much one to one work have I done?
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Is there any budget?
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Affiliate work that I've done.
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Is there any venue consultancy or training work that I've done?
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And each of those are categorized separately.
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And then I mark next to it, what's come into the business.
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So for example, I can see that in May I sold the wedding pro business
17:23
builder course for 447 pounds.
17:25
So I can see that as the income for that.
17:27
Part I can see that in speaking opportunities, for example, in January,
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I can see that there was some speaking opportunity money come in so I can
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look at it in detail across the year.
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Now I do that by going into my QuickBooks and my accounting software and also
17:43
my Stripe because I take payments on Stripe and then breaking it down.
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So if you ask me how much money I made from the membership each month,
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I could tell you to the penny, how much money the agency made.
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I could tell you to the penny as well.
17:53
And that's because I've started doing KPI day.
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If you asked me a How much money I made from each part of my business.
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Quite honestly, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer, which is
18:02
why this has been such a big positive change for me, because I can see
18:05
which parts of the business are making money, which are not making money,
18:08
and therefore what I should focus on more and what I should focus on less.
18:11
So it's the same for you guys.
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You may see that if you do this regularly, you'll see peaks and troughs.
18:14
You might want to say how many new deposits have come in.
18:17
You may want to.
18:18
do it by category.
18:19
If you do more than one thing you may want to do final payments as a category.
18:23
However, it helps you to categorize it, but you don't just want it as one block
18:27
of income because that doesn't give you as much information as you really need.
18:30
So I work out the income based across all of the different things inside that
18:33
spreadsheet that members can get hold of.
18:35
And then I just take the total sales amount and put it over into my ng
18:39
so that I can see whether my are kind of similar across the year.
18:43
If they're up on last year, if they're up month to month, I know that some months
18:47
are better in my business than others.
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And it gives me an oversight on where those dips are going to be so that I
18:51
can prepare for them in the future.
18:54
Once I've sorted out my sales, the next thing I need to look at in my spreadsheet,
18:58
in my finance spreadsheet are my costs.
19:00
Now, this is a really big change for me is really paying attention
19:03
to the costs because it's great.
19:05
marking how much money you're bringing into the business.
19:08
But actually, if you're spending all of the money you're bringing in on costs,
19:11
then the profit is basically non existent.
19:14
Earlier this year, I read the book Profit First, and it's helped me really think
19:17
differently about profit and costs.
19:19
And so now I've set myself a target of wanting to sit at about
19:22
35 percent costs each month.
19:25
So that means out of a hundred percent of income, only 35
19:27
percent of it goes out on costs.
19:29
Now costs doesn't include paying myself.
19:31
This is literally costs into the business.
19:33
So anything that I'm paying out, that's not paying myself.
19:36
So paying any freelancers that comes under a cost, paying any software,
19:39
all of that comes under a cost.
19:41
If there's costs associated with the work you're doing.
19:43
So as a florist, if you were buying flowers that would come out of costs,
19:46
but you don't take your owner's wage out of costs that comes out afterwards.
19:50
So I'm starting looking more in detail at costs.
19:52
So again, I do this using QuickBooks.
19:55
When I'm in my QuickBooks, I can filter it by money out.
19:58
I can mark the money out, make sure that I've got it all tracked, and then
20:02
it can pull up a report of how much money I've spent that month, as long as
20:05
I've reviewed all of the transactions.
20:07
And I take that amount and I put it over into my spreadsheet, and then
20:11
my spreadsheet does the maths for me.
20:12
So it says, here's the money you bought into the business.
20:15
Here's how much money you spent on costs.
20:17
Here's the profit leftover.
20:19
And then it tells me the percentage of costs So as I said earlier,
20:22
I'm looking to get my costs to about 35 percent each month.
20:26
Last year, my costs were way too high and therefore it was impacting my profit.
20:29
Now, when I look at my costs, I can tell you across the year.
20:34
So in June, my costs were 31%, which I'm pleased with.
20:37
In May, 36%.
20:39
So a little bit higher in January, 32%.
20:41
Now in April, I can see that my cost was 75%, which is way too high.
20:47
But I can also say I've made a note underneath is because
20:49
I had to buy a new iPhone.
20:50
My phone broke.
20:51
I wanted to buy it in last year's tax year.
20:53
So I bought it on the 1st of April and that's why my costs are so high,
20:57
which is why I made a note of it.
20:58
So when I look over it next year and think, why was there
21:00
so many costs in that month?
21:02
I've got it noted down.
21:03
So once I've got my costs in my spreadsheet, I then also go ahead
21:06
and put my costs into my NG platform.
21:09
As well.
21:11
So now I can see my sales and my costs for every single month in there too.
21:15
So to recap, the things I'm looking at inside my NT account, my KPIs
21:19
are my social media following.
21:20
I'm looking at my website analytics.
21:22
I'm looking at my email list subscribers.
21:24
I'm looking at my podcast numbers and links in my podcast.
21:27
I'm looking at how many people apply to be part of vicinity weddings, and
21:31
I'm looking at my income and my costs.
21:34
So what should you be looking at in your wedding business?
21:38
So as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, I've been having a big push
21:41
on my own Wedding Pro members that they should be doing a similar thing to
21:45
me at the end of every month as well.
21:47
And so what I've done is I've started implementing over the last
21:50
couple of years, lounge calls.
21:51
Now our lounge calls are where all of my members, if they can
21:54
make it, invited to come along.
21:55
Sometimes they're in the evening, sometimes they're in the day.
21:58
I give them the dates ahead of time.
21:59
You come along onto Zoom, we jump on the Zoom call together and
22:02
then we go through a list of KPIs that I think you should track.
22:06
And as a group, we go through them.
22:07
It gives people the opportunity to sit down and do it.
22:10
It gives people the opportunity to feedback.
22:12
It keeps them accountable to me because we're talking about all
22:15
of the numbers and it means that they can track what's going on.
22:19
It also means that people who can't make it live can watch the
22:21
recording on catch up and people can get to know each other as well.
22:24
So they're really, really great calls.
22:25
We do them at the end of every single month.
22:27
Now, at the beginning of this year, I realized there was a
22:29
gap because I was giving people a principal sheet each month.
22:32
But really, if you want to see these numbers as a whole, it's really helpful
22:35
if you can look back on the previous month and see where things have
22:38
come, which is why I love my graphs.
22:40
So I designed my wedding pros who are ready to grow 24 month planner with my
22:45
members and anyone else who wants to track their wedding business goals in mind.
22:49
So it's available on Amazon.
22:50
If anyone wants to grab a copy of it, just search Becca Poutney on
22:53
Amazon, you'll see them come up.
22:54
There's even a musical theater edition, which is full of musical
22:57
theater quotes, which I love.
22:58
And what it does is basically it just gives you the worksheets to
23:01
work through every single month and every quarter and annually as well,
23:05
so that you can go through and track your KPIs and have it in a physical
23:08
place that you can look back on and.
23:09
And either do with me on a lounge call or just do in your own time as well.
23:13
So if you want one of those, I'll put the link in the show notes
23:16
for you to find out more about it.
23:18
But what we then do is we go through these sheets on the lounge calls,
23:21
and I'm gonna go through with you now the things that we are looking
23:24
at so you can work out what things I think you should be tracking as well.
23:27
Now, my planners are undated purposefully, so you could buy them
23:30
any time of year and put the months in.
23:32
There's two years worth of.
23:33
planning in here.
23:34
So whatever month you start, it doesn't matter.
23:36
And it means you can do two years worth of planning in one little book.
23:40
So the top of the sheet will allow you to put in the month because it's
23:43
important we know what we're tracking.
23:44
It also, I have a series of faces, a smiley one, a neutral one, and a sad one,
23:48
because I want you to be able to track how you're feeling about your business.
23:51
I think this is really important when I talk to my members to work out if they're
23:55
always feeling down about their business, then maybe something needs to change.
23:58
And by thinking about that question, each month.
24:00
It allows us to kind of keep an eye on how people are feeling,
24:04
whether people are struggling or whether people are feeling good.
24:06
There's also a part on there where you can track where you
24:08
are inside the members lounge.
24:09
So inside my wedding pro members lounge, all of our training
24:12
videos are split into sections.
24:14
There's like a build section, a grow section, an advanced section,
24:18
and depending on where you are and your business will depend what kind
24:20
of videos you should be watching, what training you should be doing.
24:23
So there's a.
24:23
part in the plan where you can note whereabouts you
24:26
are in that program as well.
24:28
So the first things that we look to track are similar to what
24:31
I was talking about earlier.
24:31
So we look at your Instagram followers, we look at your email subscribers,
24:36
we look at your website visits, but we also add in that we look at
24:39
how many reviews have been left.
24:41
This is feedback that I got from my members last year that they wanted to
24:44
have a more trackable way of remembering to get people to leave reviews
24:47
because they would go through phases of getting people to leave reviews
24:50
and then six months later realize.
24:51
They hadn't asked anyone for a review for ages.
24:54
So by looking at it each month, it just reminds them, Oh, I haven't had
24:56
any reviews this month, so I should probably try and get some for next month.
24:59
And it keeps us all accountable.
25:01
So they're the four first things that we look at.
25:04
So your social media, your email subscribers, your website
25:06
visitors, and your reviews.
25:08
The next thing we do is look at the financial goals because
25:11
in these lounge call sessions.
25:12
Unlike my KPI day where I'm just looking at what's happened in the
25:15
lounge cause we look back at what's happened, but we also set targets
25:18
and goals for the month ahead so that everyone's got something to work towards.
25:21
So we look at numbers in terms of sales and we also look at
25:26
numbers in terms of inquiries.
25:28
I think wedding businesses and venues live and breathe on the amount of inquiries
25:31
we're getting through to the business and we look at both inquiries and sales.
25:35
So I always say you can look at that as a number form.
25:37
So you could say I had five inquiries into the business and
25:39
one of them converted into a sale.
25:41
Or in monetary form.
25:42
So we had 5, 000 pounds worth of inquiries and we made 1000 pounds worth of sales.
25:48
Next month we want to do.
25:49
10, 000 pounds worth of inquiries and make 5, 000 pounds worth of sales.
25:53
So again, similar to what I talked about on my KPI day, we're looking at the
25:56
numbers, but as well as looking at sales and costs, we're also projecting forward
26:00
and also looking at number of inquiries, because if you're getting a huge amount
26:04
of inquiries into the business, but not converting many of them into sales, it's
26:07
a good sign that maybe there's something not quite working there, something
26:10
that needs to change and it can be.
26:12
lead to a bigger conversation.
26:14
Now the next thing as members, we track is where enquiries came from.
26:18
Again, I think in the wedding industry, we have so many different
26:21
avenues where people can contact us.
26:23
Did they find you at a wedding fair?
26:24
Did they find you online?
26:25
Did they find you on Instagram?
26:26
Did they come to you via Google?
26:28
Did they come to you from a particular venue?
26:30
Did they come from you from other suppliers?
26:32
And when it comes to making your decisions on where to spend money on marketing,
26:35
having this information to hand is actually really, really important.
26:38
So every month we track, okay, yes, you've had five enquiries,
26:41
but where did they come from?
26:42
from because often where we think we're doing all of our marketing isn't
26:46
necessarily what's working best for us.
26:48
So you might say to me, I spend all my time on Instagram, but if all hundred
26:51
percent of your inquiries are coming from venues, then maybe you should
26:54
spend more time building relationships with more venues rather than so much
26:57
time on social media, for example.
26:59
So having this information to hand will help you make wiser decisions.
27:04
Now the next thing we always do is rate ourselves because again in a group
27:07
setting, I think it's helpful for us to get a track on where you're at.
27:09
So I have a system one to five, one being terrible, five being amazing,
27:14
and we look at how you're doing for things like marketing, sales, personal
27:17
development, and work life balance.
27:19
So that you can look back and reflect on, okay, I forgot to
27:22
do any marketing last month.
27:24
And I worked all of the time and I didn't have any balance.
27:26
So again, we're just identifying areas that may be a weaknesses or strengths so
27:30
that we can make sure we change things.
27:32
Otherwise we can find six months later, we're still doing the same mistakes
27:35
and actually nothing's moving forward.
27:39
After we've looked at the numbers, the next thing we look at is connections.
27:42
So this is another thing I like to get my members to track is who
27:45
we're building relationships with.
27:47
So I encourage them to think about the kinds of people they
27:49
might want to build relationships.
27:51
Maybe it's venues, maybe it's press people, maybe it's wedding planners.
27:55
I don't know what it is for you, but by writing down one or two names
27:58
and targeting certain connections, and then looking at how many of
28:01
those succeeded over the months, I think it's a really positive thing.
28:04
I think networking and relationship building is crucial
28:07
to growing your wedding business.
28:08
And so by having it as a trackable KPI, it means we're paying attention
28:11
to it and we can see when we've neglected it a bit as well.
28:16
So as you can see, there are a few things in there that we look at,
28:19
which is slightly different to the things I look at on my KPI day, but
28:22
it's all really, really important.
28:23
And then we find finish those calls, looking at our wins.
28:26
So things have gone well, I think it's important that we celebrate and make note.
28:30
And I love it because now when people have got their planners, you can
28:32
flick back through over a year when you feel like you've had a year that
28:35
nothing really good has happened in your business and you flick back
28:38
through and read all of those wins.
28:40
It's a great feeling.
28:41
So we track our wins.
28:43
We then also track our learning.
28:44
So if things didn't go so well, or we made a mistake, we can track that as well so
28:49
that we can make sure we're not making the same mistakes every single month.
28:52
And then the final thing we do is we write down the three things we're
28:54
going to get done in the month ahead.
28:56
So as I said, those lounge calls are slightly different to my KPI
28:59
day, because we're not only looking back, we're also looking forward
29:02
and setting targets as well.
29:06
I hope that that's been a helpful insight, a little bit of a behind the scenes look
29:09
at what I'm doing in my business, what I'm doing with my members, the things
29:12
that I think you should be tracking.
29:14
And I think the big thing is I want to encourage you to start looking at
29:16
these numbers, stop putting your head in the sand and start making it fun.
29:20
Whether you need to be accountable and do it with other people.
29:23
If that's you, then I encourage you.
29:25
Become part of our wedding pro members lounge.
29:26
We'd love to have you.
29:28
It's only 37 a month.
29:29
Come on in.
29:30
And every single month you can come on one of these calls with
29:33
me and we will do these numbers.
29:34
We will go through them.
29:35
And if you can't make the call live, then you can go ahead and you can
29:39
watch it on catch up and still do it.
29:41
If you don't want to become a member, but you want to track these things, go ahead
29:43
and grab one of my planners on Amazon.
29:46
They're just 15 on Amazon.
29:47
Go and grab one.
29:48
And then you can get that delivered to your house and you can start
29:51
setting a note in your diary on the first of every month to get started.
29:53
Go through the planner and make sure you've got it written in there.
29:56
Or take a look at Engie.
29:58
If you like the visual thing as well, or if you're looking for a piece of
30:00
software that can help you track those things as well as schedule your social
30:04
media in a whole wide variety of other features, then take a look at that.
30:08
But the main thing is I want you to.
30:09
Courage you to just start.
30:11
You will know what will help you.
30:13
So find the thing that's going to help you the most and start doing it because
30:16
when you know the numbers, you can start making much wiser decisions and
30:20
you can see how healthy or unhealthy your wedding business is right now
30:24
and what you need to do to change it.
30:25
I hope it's been helpful.
30:26
If you've got any questions about any of the things I've talked about
30:28
today, or you want to know more, reach out to me on Instagram or drop me
30:33
an email and I'll see you next time.