I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve considered closing my wedding business since 2020. This isn’t because I hate my job (in fact, I love it, which is part of the problem). It’s because my business is built on the ability to safely and legally host live events, which, it turns out, is a terrible business model to have during a global pandemic.
I’m not alone in wondering if doing weddings is worth it. I haven’t bothered to count how many of my friends and coworkers have chosen or, more often, been forced to shutter their wedding businesses in the past two years. Many of these folks left because they simply couldn’t afford not to, but just as many have moved on for an equally valid reason: They’re over weddings.
I applaud people who have made this choice from a place of self-awareness, who know that if they stay in the wedding industry much longer they will turn into jaded, empathy-drained, joy-starved zombies. My worst professional fear is to turn into one of those zombies. So, since I’ve decided to keep being a wedding vendor for the foreseeable future, I’ve made a few changes to my wedding business.
A lot of fellow vendors have been asking me about these changes so I wrote this piece to explain what I did and why. A piece like this is inherently steeped in privilege because who I am allows me to make choices that may not be available or beneficial to who you are.
Wherever I thought of it, I acknowledged this privilege. If I messed up and caused you harm, I would welcome learning about this so I can do better. You may contact me at elisabeth@elisabethkramer.com.
I also encourage you to please only take what serves you and leave what doesn’t.
Here’s what I changed about my wedding business to make it through 2022.
I got off Instagram (kinda).
In February, I was feeling really down about my job and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. As an experiment, I decided to do something I’d seen a few other people do: I took a break from Instagram.
This choice has been the no. 1 thing that other vendors have asked me about since I did it. Nearly always they add something like “I hate Instagram and would love to leave but…”
I understand that “but” because nearly always, these folks get leads for new clients through Instagram. I’m weird in that I have never once gotten a new client through Instagram. Couples find me through Google so changing my relationship to Instagram poses minimal risk to my paycheck.
That said, whatever your feels about Instagram as a wedding vendor, I think the results of my experiment are still interesting: I got off Instagram, and I felt better about myself. Not so much better that, after the break ended, I was willing to completely delete my account. I did not. But I did reconfigure Instagram so it better served me (vs. me serving it).
I still check the account and, in fact, am doing an Instagram Live next month but I feel much less pressure to post because I’ve set the boundary that hey, I don’t post anymore. Instead, the best way for you and for me to interact is to subscribe to another marketing tool I use: my newsletter.
Here are questions I asked myself before I made this change that may be of value to you:
Of all the tools I use to market myself, which do I most enjoy?
Why do I most enjoy that tool?
Are there elements of that tool which I could bring into my other less-fun marketing tools?
What’s the main thing I want people to do when they visit my Instagram profile?
When’s the last time I asked them to do this thing?
I changed my newsletter to send once a month.
The main communication and marketing tool that brings me joy in my wedding business is my newsletter. I love this thing so much — and was experiencing such a volume of questions from readers during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — that I’d fallen into a habit of sending the newsletter three or four times a month.
As I looked toward my 2022 wedding season, I had to come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t do that any longer. So, I shifted the newsletter to send once a month. (Barring, of course, any changes in COVID that will demand I ramp back up.)
My main fear when I made this change was that I would tell my subscribers and they would flee (a few always do whenever I send an email). Happily, when I announced the once-a-month change, only 1.2 percent of my subscribers unsubscribed. That feels like a worthwhile price to pay for more time in my work week.
I continue to include a health and safety question on my intake form.
Since receiving my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in May 2021, I’ve shared my vaccination context on my business website.
Sometime mid-2021, I realized that me doing this was a one-way street where, for now, I would like it to be a two-way street. I want to know what the deal is with any future bosses, i.e. the couples who hire me. So I decided to add a health and safety question on my intake form.
You can see that question halfway down this page. I have never received a hostile response and I have had people share they are choosing not to be vaccinated.
I don’t know how long I will continue to keep the COVID question on my intake form. Actually, I am brainstorming more questions that I can add to the form and/or ask in my initial consultation to learn about potential clients before I contract with them for multiple months or, sometimes, years. (If you have suggestions of questions you use in your own work, I’d love to hear what they are. My email again is elisabeth@elisabethkramer.com.)
I asked for help from “my competition.”
My biggest fear for my 2022 wedding season is that I will test positive for COVID and thus not be able to go to work.
This would be particularly challenging as for many months this year, I have a wedding every Saturday for two to three weeks in a row so to find out I’m positive on, say, a Wednesday would seriously complicate a wedding week.
The fix I came up with was to ask my fellow wedding coordinators and planners for help. I created an outline of expectations that I sent to a select list of folks who do what I do for a living, work in my area, and whom I know and trust. I asked them to review those expectations and if they agreed to them, to fill out a Google Form with their name, pronouns, and phone number.
My plan is to use that list as a back-up if I test positive and need to find a sub. No one on the list is obligated to be available; it’s simply a tool for me to use in a moment of heightened stress and anxiety so that, together, we can find the best way forward for my couples, my sub, my team, and myself.
As of this writing, nine of my coworkers agreed (often very enthusiastically). The request also opened up some really honest, kind conversations with folks whom it would be easy to label “my competitors” but really, are my coworkers who want to help where they can.
The one downside to this plan — and one of the many reasons why I really, really, really don’t want to get COVID — is that to fairly compensate a replacement means that I lose out on a third of my payment since paid sick leave doesn’t exist for a small business owner like me. I am in a financial place where I can weather that storm (at least once or twice). That is different than many people who could not afford to lose that payment, particularly after the last two years.
I hired help (even though it’s hard for me to swing financially).
For the first four years of my six-year business, I only hired an assistant wedding coordinator when I had a two-venue wedding (i.e. where the ceremony was in one place and the reception in another). I did this because I have trouble paying myself what I want to make for my family but I also want to pay anyone who works for me equitably with a goal that I’m paying them more than my state’s minimum wage (so, more than $13.50 an hour).
Unfortunately, these two things do not easily go together in my business so, for years, my solution was to take on more labor myself rather than hire an assistant.
When I returned to in-person wedding work in fall 2021, I decided that I had to stop doing that because my reserves are not what they were before COVID. As such, even though I knew it would lower my paycheck, I brought on an assistant for every wedding I worked in 2021. I liked this so much that I’ve decided it’s worth me making less in order to have the help.
I pay my assistants $25 per hour with a usual shift lasting six to eight hours (or, $150 to $200). They are contract workers so I do not pay any benefits and I do not reimburse for transportation or gas. Here is the job description I created in early 2022 for this role; please feel free to use it, as serves you.
I’m taking one day off for every weekend day I work.
I often work Saturdays and for years, I would only take one day off (Sunday) before returning to work first thing Monday morning.
Part of me feels like I should still do this because only one day off allows me to close out the previous week’s wedding and get a jump on the upcoming week’s wedding. It is also ridiculous for me to make myself work six days straight with one of those days nearly always being a 12- to 14-hour day.
So, starting this year, I’m taking a day off for every weekend day I work. The way that my 2022 season is shaping up, this means that I’m out of the office nearly every Monday between May and September.
I don’t know how this will work with my client load and a very persistent voice in my head that keeps telling me to scrap the whole idea and “just go to work,” but I’m going to try it because I don’t make enough money to work 60-hour weeks. I also don’t want my body and mind to give out mid-July.
I capped how many weddings I book in a month.
This one has been one of the hardest boundaries for me to honor. In 2021, I promised myself no more than three weddings a month, which was already an increase from my long-term goal of two weddings a month.
Three weddings a month is not a lot of weddings in my line of work, and it’s barely enough for me to make more than minimum wage. I also can’t see myself going back to what I did in 2019, which was often four weddings a month with several double-headers (i.e. a wedding on Saturday followed by a wedding on Sunday).
How do I make this work for my paycheck? Great question. I’m quite literally building this boat as I’m sailing it. A key piece of this equation is that I live in a two-income home. If this wasn’t the case, I could not live the way I currently live on my paycheck alone. I acknowledge this privilege and share it with you in a spirit of not beating yourself up if your season has more weddings than mine and that thought exhausts you.
I’m getting (slightly more) real in my OOO messages.
Before COVID, I prided myself on hiding my humanity from my clients. I wanted to “blend into the background” and always be the person with the solution, even if the solution meant extreme (and often unacknowledged) sacrifice on my part.
I still do this. I am, after all, a wedding vendor with a (questionably deep) love of helping people. I’m also challenging myself to be a little more real with my clients and fellow vendors. One tool I’m using to do this is my out-of-office (OOO) message.
I set an OOO up every time I’m away from my computer for more than a couple of hours. The one exception is weekends I’m not working; I assume people understand that I’m out of the office on Saturdays and Sundays.
I’m also using my OOO to tell people why I’m away from my computer. For example, when I’m out on a final tour, I say:
I will be slow to reply today [insert the date] as I'm attending a final venue tour.
If this message is about that tour, please know that I am monitoring email and will be in touch. You can also contact me directly via text or call (you should already have my phone number).
If this message is not about that tour, I'll be in touch as needed upon my return to more regular programming [insert the day I’ll be back in the office]. Thanks for your patience!
I’ll be using this same strategy when I’m working a wedding. So far, results have been extremely positive.
One recent example: I had a final tour with one client on a Thursday and a final tour with another client on a Friday. The Thursday client wrote to me on Friday asking for a phone call ASAP about a non-urgent issue. They received my OOO message saying I was at a final tour.
Because I knew they received my OOO message, I felt more confident to not split my brain in two and call the Thursday client while I was with the Friday client. By the time I was back at my desk and in a place to more fully respond to the needs of the Thursday client, they had answered their own question. They were not upset with me because I had communicated where I had been and why I hadn’t responded immediately.
I changed how often my clients pay me.
I changed my payment structure so that my clients now pay me three times (previously, two times).
I made this change because in 2020, I had a whole lot of clients who (understandably) canceled but, because of my payment structure, they were not obligated to pay me for the labor I had done for them between when they booked me and two weeks before their wedding (when their balance was due).
Several clients still paid out a portion or, in a few instances for which I will forever be grateful, all of their balances but many did not. To be fair, they weren’t contractually obligated to.
This sucked for me so I changed it.
The upside for the client: They now owe one large payment + two smaller payments vs. two large payments, which seems to work better for their budgeting anyway.
I raised my prices.
In 2021, I based my in-person coordinating rates off of a $50 per hour metric with each wedding I take on using about 40 hours of my labor. This meant a base price of $2,000 with a sliding scale of up to $2,300 (I charge more depending on the location(s), season, and complexity of a wedding).
Unless I want to take on even. more. weddings., $2,000 to $2,300 a pop is not enough to pay myself at least minimum wage. (For easy reference, in my state, minimum wage is about $13.50 an hour or $540 a week or $2,160 a month.)
So, I gave myself a raise. I now base my in-person coordinating rates off of a $60 per hour metric so my sliding scale is $2,400 to $2,700. This is still not enough for me to achieve my long-term goal of taking on two weddings a month but it has gone a long way toward me regularly and more constantly paying myself at least $2,000 a month (or, at least $24,000 a year). (Note: This number already has taxes deducted.)
In a spirit of full disclosure: What I charge remains a sensitive subject with me because people regularly tell me that I should charge more for how much work I do. “You’re a full-scale planner” is a common response from other vendors about my services, which means that, based on market averages, I should charge a minimum of $3,000.
I haven’t done this yet for a number of reasons that I won’t get into here but here’s one reason that may be relevant to your own work as a wedding vendor: Equitable pricing is important to me; I also don’t know how to rectify what I need to charge in order to pay myself much more with the fact that not everyone can afford to pay me that price.
This same struggle is one of the top concerns I hear among my wedding vendor friends. Nearly always, we default to paying ourselves less to serve the client. I don’t believe there is one easy answer to the big bad of capitalism so I share this context so that you feel less alone if you’re grappling with a similar push-and-pull.
The most important message: You’re not alone.
This article is very long. It could be much longer because really, the changes I’ve made to myself and my business since 2020 could fill a whole book.
If the same is true for you (and even if it isn’t), I wish you well. If nothing else sticks with you from this article, please remember the most important fact as a small business owner in the wedding industry: You’re not alone.