Latest / Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney / Shhh... the 5 mistakes I made when starting a wedding business!

Transcript

Shhh... the 5 mistakes I made when starting a wedding business! · Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney

• 0:02
  Today, I'm going to take you back to where it all started back to 2012.
• 0:06
  When I set up my very own wedding business, I had worked in the media
• 0:10
  and television and radio marketing, and I loved it, but I always knew that I
• 0:14
  wanted to work for myself one day after getting married in 2010, I decided the
• 0:19
  wedding industry was a place I wanted to work and using my skills in television.
• 0:23
  I set up my first business, the handmade film company, a wedding video business.
• 0:29
  Now this business doesn't exist anymore, but when I look back on
• 0:32
  it, now I'm so embarrassed about the mistakes that I made in the beginning.
• 0:36
  So I wanted to share some of those with you today.
• 0:39
  In today's episode, we're going to look at the five or six that I
• 0:42
  made when setting up my own wedding business in the hope that you
• 0:45
  guys don't make the same mistakes.
• 0:49
  I'm Becca Pountney, wedding, business, marketing, expert, speaker, and blogger.
• 0:53
  And you're listening to the wedding pros who are ready to grow podcast.
• 0:57
  I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies, and real life
• 1:00
  examples to help you take your one business to the next level.
• 1:04
  If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion
• 1:07
  and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business, doing what you
• 1:11
  love, then you're in the right place.
• 1:13
  Let's get going with today's episode.
• 1:16
  Now, the first mistake I made was actually setting up my business with a friend.
• 1:21
  It seemed like a good idea after a few drinks to set up
• 1:24
  this wedding business together.
• 1:26
  And we did have a lot of fun, but when I look back at it,
• 1:29
  it was a bit of a mistake.
• 1:31
  You know, I set up the business with a friend because I wasn't
• 1:34
  confident enough to do it on my own.
• 1:36
  I felt like I needed the support of somebody.
• 1:39
  But setting up a business with a partner comes with its own challenges.
• 1:43
  Inevitably, one of you is going to end up feeling like you're doing more work than
• 1:47
  the other one, and that can cause some.
• 1:49
  Also, you have to split the profits with the other person.
• 1:53
  So that means right from the start, you need to have double the amount
• 1:56
  of work to make that money because all of the time you're splitting
• 1:59
  half of it with somebody else.
• 2:01
  Now, after first couple of years in business, in the end, we went our
• 2:04
  separate ways amicably, and we're still good friends, but if I could do it all
• 2:09
  again, I probably wouldn't choose to set up a business with someone else, perhaps
• 2:13
  if it was my partner or someone in my family, but probably not with a friend.
• 2:19
  So my first mistake I think, was setting up a business with someone else.
• 2:22
  And perhaps it's because of confidence.
• 2:25
  And if that's you just believe that you can do it yourself, you
• 2:28
  don't need a friend to do it with.
• 2:30
  And actually it can make it.
• 2:33
  Now the second mistake that we made in that very first wedding business
• 2:37
  was not having a clear plan of what we were doing or who we were targeting.
• 2:42
  We came up with the idea of creating this video business.
• 2:46
  We came up with our logo, but we didn't bear in mind who
• 2:49
  we were actually targeting.
• 2:51
  We just thought we needed to set up a business and anyone would book us.
• 2:54
  It didn't matter what kind of wedding they were having or who they were.
• 2:57
  They would want our wedding video.
• 2:59
  And that was.
• 3:01
  As you're setting up your business, you have to get clear on exactly
• 3:05
  who it is that you're targeting.
• 3:07
  Because guess what, if you don't know who you're targeting, you just don't get
• 3:10
  the inquiries that you're looking for.
• 3:12
  So if you're listening to this and you are also feeling like you may be.
• 3:17
  Same mistake.
• 3:18
  Get clear on who it is that you're targeting.
• 3:21
  You cannot just say your business is for all people getting married, because
• 3:26
  that is such a huge amount of people.
• 3:29
  And actually, you're just going to end up with.
• 3:32
  So ask yourself, what kind of weddings am I wanting to work out?
• 3:35
  Who is it exactly that I'm trying to target?
• 3:38
  Where do they spend their time?
• 3:39
  What kind of wedding venues are they going to be looking at?
• 3:42
  What are the other supply types that are going to be looking
• 3:45
  at to get booked as well?
• 3:46
  How much money are they going to spend in their business?
• 3:49
  If you get really clear on those things, then you can start to
• 3:52
  work out where you should be marketing to, to reach those people.
• 3:57
  And not only did we not have a clear plan of who we were targeting, we
• 4:01
  just didn't really have a plan at all.
• 4:03
  We didn't know what it was to start a business.
• 4:05
  We didn't plan where we were going to market ourselves.
• 4:07
  And what happened was a bit of a spray and pray approach.
• 4:11
  So we essentially just tried a bit of everything.
• 4:13
  We were not consistent in our marketing.
• 4:15
  We try to set up social media accounts.
• 4:18
  We did some magazine advertise.
• 4:19
  We did a few wedding fairs, but there was nothing consistent about our approach.
• 4:24
  And when I look back at it now I'm so embarrassed because it's exactly
• 4:27
  what I say to people not to do.
• 4:30
  If you're setting out on your wedding business, or even if
• 4:32
  you're five or 10 years in, you should always have a strategy.
• 4:36
  You should know who you're targeting, and you should know what your
• 4:38
  marketing plan is for this year.
• 4:40
  What are you going to do?
• 4:42
  Where are you going to get in front of your customers?
• 4:44
  How much money are you going to spend on it?
• 4:46
  And then once you've gone through three to six months of that marketing plan, you
• 4:50
  can review it and see, well, what worked, what didn't work and what do we need
• 4:54
  to be doing differently in the future?
• 4:56
  So not having a plan was a really bad idea.
• 4:59
  So if you're listening to this and you, haven't got a plan, get yourself
• 5:02
  a plan, get some pen and paper and start writing some of this stuff.
• 5:08
  Now, the third mistake we made was our very first wedding show.
• 5:12
  We were so excited to go and book a wedding show and get in front of couples
• 5:17
  and tell them about our business.
• 5:19
  We spent hours planning for the show.
• 5:22
  I remember it very well.
• 5:24
  We baked cupcakes and then we put it.
• 5:27
  Logos to go on the top of those cupcakes so that we could give
• 5:31
  out cakes to the couples as they were going around the show.
• 5:34
  Now I'm not sure this was a great idea, but it did attract
• 5:36
  a lot of attention to our stand.
• 5:38
  I mean, we were not bakers, but the cupcakes went down well and they look
• 5:42
  good cause they were well-branded.
• 5:44
  But the mistake that we made, and again, I'm embarrassed to tell you, this
• 5:47
  is, as we collected people's details to find out if they were interested
• 5:51
  in our services, we didn't ask them when their wedding was going to be.
• 5:56
  We didn't ask.
• 5:57
  What their wedding date was or where they were having it or anything like that.
• 6:01
  And we didn't take that information.
• 6:03
  So we walked away from that wedding show with, I think, over a
• 6:06
  hundred names and email addresses.
• 6:09
  But we didn't really know what to do with them.
• 6:11
  Not only did we not have a plan of how we should contact them after the show,
• 6:15
  how are we going to keep up with them?
• 6:17
  But it soon dawned on us.
• 6:18
  We didn't even know when those contacts were going to go out of date.
• 6:22
  We didn't know when they should drop off our email lists.
• 6:25
  We didn't know when their wedding date was going to have happened.
• 6:27
  And so they were no longer a warm lead.
• 6:30
  It was a disaster.
• 6:32
  Essentially, we just had all of these email addresses, no information and
• 6:36
  no plan with what to do with them.
• 6:38
  I'm embarrassed telling you about it.
• 6:40
  And although we were two fresh faced young entrepreneurs excited about
• 6:44
  our wedding business, we've really did waste money on that opportunity.
• 6:48
  We spent money on the wedding show.
• 6:49
  We spent money on the cakes.
• 6:51
  In fact, I spent more money buying things from the other suppliers in the
• 6:55
  room that I made from that wedding.
• 6:57
  On that first day.
• 6:58
  So if that's you and you're looking forward to a wedding
• 7:01
  show, when they're allowed to get.
• 7:02
  Do not make that mistake.
• 7:04
  If you're going to collect email addresses, be really,
• 7:06
  really intentional with it.
• 7:08
  No way you're collecting them, know what you're going to offer them in return
• 7:12
  for that email address, know how often you're going to follow up with them.
• 7:16
  Are you going to send them an initial email straight away?
• 7:18
  Sign up at the show.
• 7:20
  Are you going to follow up with a couple of other emails?
• 7:23
  Have you offered them a special discount as part of the show or an upsale?
• 7:27
  Know what your plan is?
• 7:28
  Know what your strategy is, and please make sure you get their wedding date.
• 7:33
  Find out that they're serious about getting married.
• 7:35
  Find out that they're planning their wedding.
• 7:37
  You know, it dawns on me after my first couple of shows.
• 7:40
  How many people just come around the shows, especially
• 7:43
  the free to access wedding.
• 7:45
  Just to get the free stuff, just to get the cake or just to be
• 7:48
  nosy, they might not even be getting married in the first place.
• 7:51
  So qualify your leads, ask the right questions and make sure you
• 7:55
  definitely have a plan of what to do with that information after the show.
• 8:00
  Now my next mistake again is so embarrassing when I look back on it.
• 8:05
  And it's so different to everything that I teach and tell people
• 8:08
  to do and very different to anything I do in my own marketing.
• 8:12
  Now, all mistake.
• 8:13
  Number four was trying to be too cool.
• 8:17
  When we set up our business, we felt like we had to pretend
• 8:20
  to be bigger than we were.
• 8:22
  We weren't a big business.
• 8:24
  We'd only just got started.
• 8:25
  It was just two of us wanting to go and make wedding videos.
• 8:28
  But for some reason we felt like we had to pretend that we were a lot
• 8:32
  bigger, a business than we were.
• 8:33
  So we never referred to ourselves by our names.
• 8:36
  We always talked about ourselves in the third person, our business,
• 8:40
  you know, we, we weren't personal.
• 8:43
  And it was a huge mistake because nobody thought that we were that
• 8:47
  big and nobody got to know us.
• 8:49
  Our personalities did not shine through in that business.
• 8:52
  And less people met us at a wedding show.
• 8:55
  I wish we hadn't have done that.
• 8:57
  And if you're listening and you feel the same because you think, well,
• 9:00
  I'm now I've got my own business.
• 9:01
  I need to appear bigger than I am.
• 9:03
  Just get rid of that belief straight away.
• 9:05
  You do not need to be anything other than.
• 9:09
  People buy from people.
• 9:11
  People wants to have people at their wedding that they
• 9:13
  know they like and they trust.
• 9:16
  And the sooner you can build that kind of relationship with potential
• 9:18
  clients, the more likely the artist wants to work with you and to book.
• 9:23
  So don't try and be something you're not, and don't pretend
• 9:26
  to be much bigger than you are.
• 9:28
  Just go out there and be yourself.
• 9:30
  You need to be visible in your business.
• 9:32
  You should show up as you put your face out there, tell people about your life,
• 9:37
  go on Instagram stories and tell them what you're up to help people get to
• 9:41
  know you as a person, you as a business.
• 9:45
  Uh, wedding day is the biggest day of someone's life.
• 9:48
  And they want to have vendors, wedding pros, wedding, business
• 9:51
  owners at that day, who they can relate to, who they can trust, who
• 9:54
  they can get to know and who are fun.
• 9:57
  And if you can let your personality shine through you and your business
• 10:01
  on your social media platforms, in the email she sends in your website,
• 10:05
  then people are much more likely to want to work with you in the future.
• 10:09
  So don't make that mistake that I made.
• 10:12
  Don't try and be too corporate, just be yourself.
• 10:16
  Don't try and be like anybody else, just be yourself.
• 10:18
  And don't be ashamed of that because you will attract the couples that like you
• 10:22
  for who you are now, the final mistake that I'm going to share with you today.
• 10:28
  And I've really opened up my heart today to tell you these things I've
• 10:32
  never really spoken about before.
• 10:34
  The final mistake that I made was starting a blog on our website.
• 10:40
  Well, we didn't really know why we were doing it.
• 10:43
  So again much like most of these other mistakes we were just
• 10:47
  reading around in the dark.
• 10:48
  For some reason, it didn't Dawn on me to go back to all my marketing
• 10:52
  experience, to go back to all the years I'd had in the media.
• 10:56
  Instead I seem to be doing.
• 10:58
  Just off the cuff with this new business.
• 11:01
  And we had heard at a networking meeting that blogs were a good
• 11:05
  thing on a wedding business site.
• 11:07
  So we truly went home and set up a blog page on our website offers.
• 11:13
  Was embarrassing.
• 11:15
  In fact, our first blog was talking about that first wedding show that we went to.
• 11:19
  I do not know why we thought that we needed to blog like a diary
• 11:24
  that is not the way to blog.
• 11:26
  If you own a blog, you should not be using it as a diary, because guess what
• 11:29
  your customers and potential customers are just not that interested in your
• 11:33
  business and what you've got going on.
• 11:35
  Nobody wanted to read about our experience at that wedding.
• 11:39
  It was dull.
• 11:40
  No one needed to know how long we spent making cakes for that wedding show.
• 11:44
  And guess what?
• 11:45
  No one really read it.
• 11:47
  And then the mistake we made next was we just didn't really know what's
• 11:51
  what data with, because guess what, we hadn't got any more wedding shows
• 11:55
  in the diary to write about, and we hadn't really got any bookings.
• 11:58
  And the bookings that we did have was so far in the future that
• 12:01
  we couldn't really write about.
• 12:03
  It didn't Dawn on us that we weren't just supposed to write with about
• 12:06
  what we were doing in our business, on our wedding business blog.
• 12:11
  So it just said.
• 12:13
  Untouched with just that one terrible blog posts.
• 12:18
  And it's so embarrassing when I look back now as a professional blogger,
• 12:22
  as someone that teaches other people, how to blog for their website, how
• 12:25
  can I make such a ridiculous mistake?
• 12:28
  And that blog posts out there.
• 12:29
  And I think we only ever added one or two more blog posts into it in that.
• 12:34
  You know, having a blog on your business website is a great thing.
• 12:38
  I'm going to do a whole episode of this podcast on how to make a good blog is
• 12:43
  great for your search engine optimization.
• 12:45
  It's great to get across that know like trust factor.
• 12:47
  It's great to position yourself as an expert at what you do.
• 12:51
  But if you have got a blog, don't make the mistakes that I had.
• 12:54
  Don't use it as a diary because no one's interested in your business
• 12:58
  and the behind the scenes of your business, really, other than.
• 13:01
  And possibly your family and definitely don't make the mistake of starting a
• 13:05
  blog and then just leaving it there.
• 13:07
  It looks terrible.
• 13:08
  I'm embarrassed that people would have gone to our website, look to
• 13:11
  our blog and seen that we hadn't written anything for a year.
• 13:14
  And the only piece of content that we'd written was terrible.
• 13:18
  So please don't do that.
• 13:19
  If you don't have the time or energy to write a blog every month,
• 13:23
  then maybe a blog on your website.
• 13:25
  Just isn't a good idea.
• 13:27
  If you are going to blog, you've got to be consistent with it.
• 13:29
  You need to choose a blog every week, possibly every month, even every two
• 13:33
  months, but don't just blog once and then let it sit there forever and a day.
• 13:40
  I hope you've enjoyed hearing about the mistakes that I made when I first
• 13:44
  set up that wedding business, trust me, it did get better over time and
• 13:48
  we stopped making the same mistakes.
• 13:50
  And now I would never make those mistakes again, but you
• 13:53
  know what we live and we learn.
• 13:55
  And hopefully by opening up today and sharing those mistakes with
• 13:58
  you, I'm going to stop you making some of the same mistakes in your
• 14:01
  wedding business, in the future.
• 14:04
  I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
• 14:06
  If you did, why not hit subscribe or tell a wedding industry friend,
• 14:10
  because perhaps you can help them not to make the same mistakes as I did.
• 14:14
  I'll see you next time.
• 14:18
  One thing I love about the wedding industry is the other amazing
• 14:21
  people you get to work with.
• 14:22
  If you want some nice like-minded wedding pros, just like you, then
• 14:26
  why not join my free Facebook?
• 14:28
  Wedding pros who are ready to grow.
• 14:30
  Come meet some new connections, hang out with me and hopefully
• 14:33
  learn some new things too,, just search for us on Facebook.