How to Scale Your Wedding Business with Hannah Bjorndal
How to Scale Your Wedding Business is a podcast that explores how creative-minded entrepreneurs can build profitable, sustainable businesses through building strong, resilient and long-lasting businesses that are scaleable.
The conversations in each episode focus on how to be intentional and avoid all the common pitfalls when preparing for growth and hiring, training and leading a creative team. Host Hannah Bjorndal focuses on strategies that encourage thriving over surviving and working smarter, not harder.
How to Scale Your Wedding Business with Hannah Bjorndal
5 Things in My Business I'm Thankful For
OVERVIEW
You might not know this, but it was never my dream growing up to be an entrepreneur or small business owner. It also wasn’t my dream to be a photographer. Owning a small business has been an adventure more exciting and fulfilling than I ever could have dreamed!
On this week's episode, I'm sharing 5 things this year that I'm thankful for in owning my business. I hope this episode encourages you to be thankful for the elements of your business that bring you joy and fulfillment - because for me, gratitude is an essential part of feeling fulfilled within my own work. I hope it can be that for you, too.
You might not know this, but it was never my dream growing up to be an entrepreneur or a small business owner. It actually wasn't even my dream to be a photographer. Maybe you're listening and you feel the same way. You grew up thinking you might do something else for a career, and you ended up being a small business owner, and that was a surprise to you. I'm actually going to guess that for most of you that's the case. Owning a small, creative business. It's not really something that I even knew was an option growing up, and now that I am one, it's the best thing I could imagine, way better than any career dreams I had for myself when I was younger.
Speaker 1:So much of what I do now is so radically different than what I thought I'd be doing at this age and stage in my life, and I'm really grateful for that when I think about it. And so, as we approach Thanksgiving this week, I wanted to share a little bit about what in my business I'm thankful for, and I'm hoping that those things that I share are also things that you can be encouraged by and learn from, because I'm going to go into a little bit of detail as to why I'm thankful for each thing. These are the five things that first came to mind when I thought about what I'm most thankful for in my business this year. So these are things that I hope you are experiencing or have as well, but if you don't, hopefully you can learn a little bit about them, and if you do, hopefully you're encouraged to continue to pursue those things, or maybe you learn a little bit about how I utilize those things in my own business. Most of all, I hope this episode encourages you to be thankful for the elements of your business that bring you joy and fulfillment, because for me, gratitude is an essential part of feeling fulfilled within my own work. I hope it can be that for you, too. Let's get started. You're listening to Team Building for Wedding Pros, a podcast dedicated to helping you scale your creative business through building a team. I'm your host, hannah Bjorndahl, owner of LaVian Rose, an expert in all things team building in the creative artistic world. Over the past several years, I've gone from being a one woman show to leading a team of amazing people to serve more clients, dramatically increase our business income and ultimately make a much bigger impact in the world, and I'm passionate about helping you do the same. So let's do it, okay. So five things that I am most grateful for in my business or thankful, grateful, thankful I kind of see them as the same thing. These are the five things that I am most thankful for in my business this year. Number one I am thankful that my business exists. This might sound like a really weird thing to be thankful for and kind of like well duh, your business exists, there wouldn't be anything to be thankful for if your business didn't exist. So maybe to you this sounds kind of silly, like a throwaway answer, but let me explain a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Starting a business was a total mystery to me. I remember right after I graduated college I started thinking about photography and what a career in photography would look like, and I thought it sounded really great, like something that I would enjoy, but it didn't sound practical at all. I had no idea how to sustain myself and make an income where I could do that as a full time job and not have to have another job on the side. It really just didn't seem like something I could do quickly and really it didn't seem like something I could do at all. I remember saying that I had a five year plan to go full time with photography, and this was in 2014. Spoiler alert I went full time in 2015,. Did not expect that at all. But when I said I had that five year plan, I didn't have a five year plan at all. I didn't have a plan period, I just had I just had an idea that maybe in five years I could somehow figure out a way to make this a full time job. But if you had asked me, well, how are you going to make that happen? I had zero plans.
Speaker 1:So I'm really grateful that my business exists today because I didn't have a background in starting a business or entrepreneurship. Those weren't my majors in college. I didn't know anything about that. Really, what I did was I was passionate about shooting weddings and did everything I could to book weddings so that I could go out and shoot them, just because I thought it was so much fun and I really enjoyed it. And then that grew really fast. I pretty much was immediately successful with my business and I wasn't expecting it. So I shot just a couple weddings in 2015, but I was booking weddings for the next year like crazy.
Speaker 1:So I'm thankful that my business exists and, specifically, I'm thankful for the ways that I was able to jumpstart my business and make it full time so quickly. So I'm thankful for access to things like social media. Instagram was a huge way that I was able to get new clients and it was free, so I didn't have to pay anything, I didn't have to invest any money in that and I was able to book a lot of clients. Really, they were like a lot of friends of friends just by nature of showing up online and reminding people that I was now a wedding photographer. I'm also really grateful for the people that trusted me early on, even though I had, like, no portfolio. Like a lot of people booked me before I had shot any weddings, which just still blows my mind.
Speaker 1:I'm also thankful for the job I had before I went full time with my wedding photography. I was working at a wedding networking company and I was selling advertising to wedding vendors. You've probably heard me talk about this before and that taught me so much, not just about the wedding industry, but also how to serve clients in order to build connections and book new business. I got that job not because I wanted to be in sales at all. I knew nothing about sales. I got that job because I saw the word wedding and thought, okay, if I can get a job in a company that has anything to do with weddings and it's a full time job and it can support me while I'm trying to launch this business. With a bunch of question marks around it, I didn't know what I was doing. I thought if I could at least be at a company that's kind of adjacent to what I'm trying to do, maybe that'll help. I assumed that working at a wedding networking company. So I was working for a company that is very well known I'm not going to say the name specifically, but they have a very large web presence. I thought, well, they're a well known wedding company and maybe I'll learn about the wedding industry and meet people in the wedding industry and get to go to some weddings.
Speaker 1:It turns out that job really never interacted with couples or weddings that were happening in person, but it was much more working with wedding vendors. I actually was selling advertising to wedding vendors that weren't even in the DC area. Even so, that sales job taught me so much. I received an amazing sales training that taught me that selling didn't have to be icky. I had this idea in my head of the used car salesman, and so I was really nervous going into this job, thinking, oh, am I going to have to be like that? What I learned through training at this job was that you can really provide a service to in this case, other business owners. Now to couples getting married my potential clients. The people that are the very best at sales know how to serve their potential customer really well and how to inform them in a way that's helpful and puts them first. That's really the best way to sell. I learned a lot of different things about sales in that job, but that was something that I took away and felt a lot of confidence in selling myself because of my experience there. So, number one again, I'm just grateful that my business exists and I get to do something that I really love, because I really wasn't set up for success with starting a business. I had no idea what I was doing, but I put myself out there. It was scary and it worked out, and that's just something I'm really really grateful for, and I'm grateful for the things that supported me as I launched that business.
Speaker 1:Number two I am thankful for the organization tools that I use in my business, without the tools that we have and that we currently use to stay organized, my business would not even exist, at least not at the level that it does now. We use so many different organization tools to keep our business running like clockwork and also to make sure that we're serving our clients really well. The different systems that we have in place and all the different types of apps and tools that we use to support those systems make it much easier to run the business and also it makes the business that much better. So I wanna share some of those tools. First thing I'm gonna do is just list out a few of the tools that first come to mind that I'm most thankful for, and then I'll go into a little bit of detail about a couple of them and why I'm thankful for them. So here's the list to get started Honey book, zapier, asana, quickbooks, slack, gusto, which is our payroll system, buzzsprout, which I use for podcasting, dropbox and Google Drive. So those are just a few of the organization tools and apps that I use in my business that I'm really, really thankful for. Let me tell you a little bit about a few that are my favorites and then, if I think of any as I'm talking, maybe I'll add those too.
Speaker 1:So first one I wanna share about is Zapier. So I've gotta admit I was very skeptical that the app Zapier and if you haven't heard of it, that's Z-A-P-I-E-R. I was very skeptical about Zapier. I didn't think it could necessarily work within my business. It felt both really complex Like there were so many possibilities and each one was like really complex to program and then it also felt like it was incomplete, like there's no way that this can actually help me make my business more organized. So if you don't know what Zapier is, let me explain a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Zapier is an automation tool. You can build workflow automations within Zapier that connect a bunch of different apps. I think on their website it says they have like 5,000 different integrations for different apps. So it's a automated integration tool that allows you to build these automations across platforms, which means that if you use like HoneyBook and Asana, like we do, you can automate both of those systems through Zapier so that when something happens on one platform, the other platform responds or has something happen there automatically. It's really advanced. There's so many different things that Zapier can do. But it's also really user friendly because Zapier has saved a bunch of these workflow automations so that you don't have to come up with them from scratch.
Speaker 1:You can type in the different apps and tools that you use and they'll give you ideas for how you can automate. And then, if you actually already have a workflow in mind or an automation that you've been trying to figure out in a program, it can also help you do that, because it's very user friendly and easy to figure out. You don't have to be super techie to get it. You really just have to know what you're trying to do, or you can just scroll down the list of ideas of what it can do for you. And the best part is is that there are free accounts, so you can't have like tons and tons of Zaps. Those are automations within Zapier. You can't have tons and tons of them for free, but you can have a handful, which we used for free for quite a long time until we realized how much Zapier could help our business in other ways, and then we upgraded more recently so that we could use all their features. But honestly, the free version is still really advanced. You can do a lot with it.
Speaker 1:It has radically changed our workflows in our business. Previously, we were using workflows through different systems and they just weren't working for us. We needed, like, multiple platforms to do what we needed to do, but they weren't connected, so Zapier was the perfect solution for that reason Just to give you a little bit more information on how we use it. We actually use it in a lot of different ways, but I'm gonna share the main way that we use it and the way that has been most helpful to my business, and that is connecting Honeybook with Asana.
Speaker 1:Previously, I had been trying to figure out a tool that would work for me and my team whenever we booked weddings. I wanted enough customization so that when a couple booked Cassie as their lead photographer for their wedding day, she would automatically get a set of tasks assigned to her. But I also wanted a few of the tasks in that task list to be assigned to other team members. Like my executive assistant, allison, I wanted to assign some of the social media tasks to her whenever someone would book a wedding, and Honeybook didn't quite have the complexity and customization needed in order to do that, and so it kind of became a frustration for our team that if you were on the Honeybook project which I was on, all of them I would see this really long list of tasks within the workflow system of Honeybook. If you use Honeybook and have tried out their work, I think they're still called workflow. They might be called flows now or automations, but that section of Honeybook if you've used it before, you know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:You can create a list of automated or semi-automated tasks that can happen when something else happens first, like a client signs a contract or pays an invoice, and then this set of tasks is set off, and so we were using that, but there was no way to distinguish whose tasks were who, and since we have a growing team, that was quite a problem. There were a couple other customizations to that that were a little bit tricky for us and just weren't working. So we tried a lot of different systems, and I also was using Asana off to the side, just for my personal life. My husband and I we're using Asana, which is a task management tool, just to remember to do things in our personal life, which is kind of funny that Evan and I used that, but we did, and I thought, man, asana is so great for task management.
Speaker 1:I really wish that there was a way to pull our tasks from HoneyBook into Asana, and then there's a way that's really easy to assign tasks to individual people within Asana, and so I thought, wow, that would just be so great if we could use that, but I'd have to add everything manually every time a client books. That seems really complicated. I might make a mistake here or there. It would throw us off. And so when I found Zapier, I realized that I could program Zapier to do exactly what I wanted in Asana, but it didn't have to be manual and it also left out user error, like I wasn't gonna make any mistakes because Zapier was gonna do it for me automatically and I could program it in advance to make sure that it always did the same thing.
Speaker 1:So now when a client books us in HoneyBook, so they sign a contract and they pay an invoice. Once those two things are complete, zapier automatically sends a list of tasks into Asana and, depending on whose project it is within HoneyBook, that person gets a task list and those tasks are all assigned a due date and the due date automatically is chosen based off of a few different things. It's chosen off of a timeframe when the client booked and paid. So, for example, the first task in that task list is a task that says send a welcome email and that task is always due at the moment that the client signs the contracts and pays. So they get that task in their task list and it says it's due immediately. There are also tasks that are associated with the wedding date. So two months out from a wedding, whoever has that wedding and whoever's client it is will get a task that says it's time to schedule a wedding consultation.
Speaker 1:So hopefully it makes sense what I'm saying. If you've worked with workflows before, this will make a lot of sense. I think If you've never programmed an automation or workflow before, maybe you're thinking what is she talking about? Hopefully you're thinking, wow, this sounds really cool. I need to check out Honeybook and Zapier and Asana, or maybe just one or all of them.
Speaker 1:But hopefully you can tell by the enthusiasm in my voice that this has been a huge game changer for us. It saved me not just hours, but I would say weeks and weeks of work that I used to be doing throughout the year. It also has prevented things from falling through the cracks. Our systems before were much less perfect. This one still isn't absolutely perfect, but it's a lot closer, and so things were falling through the cracks because our previous systems weren't working well for us and they were overwhelming the team in general each of the team members. So this new system is a lot smoother and I'm just really thankful that Zapier exists and that I finally swallowed my pride and gave it a try, because it has really changed the game for us. And, by the way, zapier did not sponsor this. This is not an ad for them. I don't get any kind of reward or kickback for talking about Zapier. I just really love it and I hope that you'll try it out too, because I think it could help you in your business.
Speaker 1:Okay, one more tool I want to tell you about that I absolutely love and I use for free is Slack. So, if you aren't familiar with Slack, slack is a communication tool. Essentially, it's a messaging app, kind of like texting, but it's an app that allows you to organize conversations a little bit better. It also allows you to have a work-life balance, because you can keep all your work messages in that app. Now, this is specifically really helpful for me, because I do have a team and it's important to me that my team feels like they're not always working, but if I want to communicate with them and send them a message.
Speaker 1:Email is kind of clunky and calling sometimes just doesn't make sense because we all work different hours and we'll have ongoing conversations that are happening, that maybe one person sends a message at a time of day where I'm not working but then I'm going to respond at a time of day where they're not working, and if we were doing that all over text or phone calls then that would be really interruptive to the parts of the day where one of us is taking time off or not working. But to do that over email, again, it's just kind of clunky, it's harder to organize, it's not as fast. I mean, I'm sure you know this Texting is way easier than sending an email. So Slack was our solution to being able to communicate in a way that still has boundaries and also that conversations stay organized without being over email, which is not very organized, not very easy to communicate back and forth quickly and also not an interruption to our personal lives. So here's how Slack works.
Speaker 1:Slack is its own app that you can put on your phone or the computer and then it really is just a text messaging system. You have different channels that's how it's organized and you can have individual one-on-one channels that work, just like texting back and forth to anyone who also has the app, and then you can also have channels that have labels on them. So, for instance, if you had a team member that you were working on a client project with, you could have a channel specifically dedicated to that subject and then you would just title that channel with that subject and then it kind of becomes a group text and you add in whoever you want to be a part of that conversation and then you also can just message in that channel when you want to talk about that thing. So my team has about 20 different channels and these channels are everything from a channel for our weekly team meeting, where we can post recaps from each week, to funny wedding photos, which is a channel where we just share screenshots of wedding photos that maybe are kind of like bloopers or outtakes or oops, didn't mean to take that photo or even just someone making a funny face, and we like to share that with one another and have a good laugh.
Speaker 1:If we put all of that stuff in a group text, well, that would get very overwhelming, and if I wanted to go back and reference something, I wouldn't be able to because it would just be way too many different types of messages. It would be really complex. It also would mean that our phones were blowing up all the time with text messages, and what's nice about Slack is that you can turn Slack off at the end of each day without having to turn off notifications to everything. So Slack has been a really great solution to communication for my team, particularly because we all currently work remotely and don't work in person together very often. So this is a great way to communicate and make sure that we keep track of our conversations in an organized way that doesn't impose on our personal lives. So I'm getting a little bit long-winded about the organizational tools that I love and that I'm thankful for, but I hope that's given you a little bit of a glimpse into how we're using apps in our business and how they are really making a difference and are something that I'm grateful for every single day.
Speaker 1:All right, number three the third thing that I am most thankful for this year in my business is having a clear vision of where my business is headed. I am definitely a big picture thinker. I am a dreamer. I am that type of person that has big, big, big goals and dreams and just kind of is always talking about the next thing. And if you are like that, you know I'm gonna guess that the execution side of things is a lot harder. At least that's how it is for me. And in the past, before I knew how to clarify a personal vision for myself, a business vision, making a business plan, before I was able to do all of that I would often feel like I was spinning my wheels or floundering, or some days I'd wake up and I'd have like a hundred different ideas I was excited about but ended up not working on any of them because I was so overwhelmed by which one to even do and I also would get distracted by stupid little things like sitting in my inbox for three or four hours. So when I clarified my personal vision for my life and then also got clear on what I envisioned for my business, both in the short and long term, created a business plan and just in general had a clear vision of what was coming next and what I was working towards, that really empowered me to dream big and not feel stressed out by those dreams or not feel overwhelmed by those dreams, but to actually harness those ideas and then give them legs so that we could move forward.
Speaker 1:Now again, I didn't major in business or entrepreneurship or even marketing. I didn't know anything about business when I started my business, and so this idea of making a business plan I kind of just thought that sounded like something I didn't need to do and that was overwhelming. And well, my business seemed pretty successful so I didn't think I needed that. I also just didn't understand what it meant to have a plan for my business, and so I'm really thankful that about four years ago, when I started working with my business coach, the first thing he had me do was get clear on that vision statement, the personal vision for my life, and then he also helped me create a strategic plan for my business. Having someone guide me through it was totally different than just kind of guessing and saying I should write a business plan. I actually had a framework to go off of and someone to guide me along the way and coach me, and that made a massive difference in my business. Everything began to change in my business when I started working with a coach and I got clear on a vision and a plan for where my business was headed. I was really able to enjoy my business more as well, because the things that I was really excited about, I was able to pair those things down and I had a lot more motivation behind the things that stayed on my goal list because I knew how they were gonna impact my business long-term and why that was important to me and that just was so much more exciting and motivating than having a long list of crazy cool ideas but not really being able to envision exactly where that would lead and why it was important to me.
Speaker 1:If you listen to this podcast regularly, you know I talk about having a vision statement all the time because I think it's so essential as a business owner if you want to have a successful business on your own terms. So I'm thankful for it now. I was thankful for it then and I'm gonna continue to be thankful for that. I already know because that is my guiding light, my Northern Star, on a daily basis. Having that clear vision allows me to work with a purpose and to feel fulfilled and really enjoy my work. So, like I said, I talk about having a personal vision statement all the time.
Speaker 1:I talk about having a strategic business plan a lot, but if this is something that's new to you or maybe you're thinking it's close to the end of the year. You want a refresh, you want a reset to your business. You're feeling maybe burnt out. This is where I'd suggest you start, and I do have a free resource for this. If you're like mid 2019, hannah, and don't really know where your business is headed, you feel like you're floundering a little bit and you've found yourself regularly going through cycles of burnout, but you also have no idea where to start with getting clear on a vision for your life and your business, making a business plan. I have a free workbook that guides you through the process of making a personal vision statement and you can download that for free at hannahbjornedollcom slash vision. I'll link it in the description for this podcast episode so you can access it there. So if you haven't done this before and you go ahead and you fill out the workbook and create a personal vision for your life or maybe you have another resource that helps you do that I can pretty much guarantee that a year from now, having a clear vision for your life and your business is going to be on your top five gratitude list.
Speaker 1:All right, let's move on to number four, the fourth thing on my top five things that I am thankful for this year in my business is flexibility. Now there is the obvious side to flexibility in being a small business owner. You can choose your own work hours. No one can tell you what vacation days you do and don't have. You can work from home. There's a long list of those kind of practical scheduling related flexibility elements to owning a business that we all know and love and, yes, I am very grateful for those things. But the reason flexibility is on my top five list this year is actually kind of a different type of flexibility.
Speaker 1:I am really grateful that owning a small business gives me the flexibility to try new things, gives me the flexibility to fail but be able to get back up again and try again. It gives me the flexibility to learn a bunch of different new skills and I get to choose what those skills are. I get to try out different things and learn on the job. I love the flexibility of creativity that I have in being a small business owner. I've learned so much from the struggle of small business ownership, which I'm sure you can relate to. There are always gonna be ways that we fail. As a small business owner, you kind of have to have thick skin in order to be an entrepreneur. You will fail at things I know I failed at a bazillion things before but it's also allowed me to learn from my mistakes without the fear of getting fired or being told I can't do something anymore or whatever. That trying and failing and then getting back up and trying again or doing something a different way. That's something I've really enjoyed and that I'm thankful for in owning a business, and I consider that flexibility. And one more thing to add to that is that I'm thankful that I've been pushed to be flexible as a business owner, to pick up new skills quickly, to think on the fly, to pivot when I wasn't expecting to. That's a skill that I've developed over time as a business owner, that you really have to be flexible if you wanna be successful, and I'm grateful that I've learned those lessons along the way and built those skills. And so flexibility lands at number four on my list. These are in no particular order, if I didn't already say that, but flexibility is in that top five and I think I'm ready to move on to the fifth thing on my list, number five I am very thankful for the people who support my company.
Speaker 1:Now, that's a lot of different groups of people. You have my team of people that work with me. I'm so incredibly thankful for them. I'm thankful for my business coach, who I talked about a little bit earlier. I'm thankful for wedding vendor friends who support me and encourage me along the way and send me new business. I'm thankful for our clients past, present and future who entrust us to their wedding day and tell other people about us and bring us new business. There are so many different people to be thankful for, and really, when I put this on my list, I was reminded just how important relationships are when you are a small business owner.
Speaker 1:In general, I really believe that relationships we build in life are kind of like the building blocks of life. They're the most important things in our lives, and that's true as a small business owner, too. The relationships you build within your business whether that be a team member that you work with every day, or a client you're working with or industry professionals people are at the core of what we do, and so I'm really grateful that we have some really wonderful people that we get to interact with and work with. I have some really wonderful people I get to interact with and work with, and, in particular this year, I am really really, really grateful for my team members. I have the most amazing group of people that work with me and that have trusted me as their boss.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of pressure to manage people and know if what you're doing is right. I certainly didn't have any experience being a boss before I started growing my team for this business, and so I'm really grateful that I have such a fantastic group of women that work with me, who have trusted me, who have supported me and been really, really kind to me even when I make big mistakes, and that also have enabled the business to grow so much more than I thought was possible. I also have enjoyed being a business owner so much more now that I have a team than I did before. I had my team, and also I just didn't dream that a job could be so exciting and have so many dimensions and be so fulfilling. I've grown so much, both professionally and personally, through having a team and supporting a team and mentoring and managing team members, and that is something I am so beyond thankful for. I know I said the list was in no particular order, but if I were to pick one thing that was number one on this list, it's absolutely people. I am so, so thankful for the people in my life who surround me in my business.
Speaker 1:If you've thought about potentially growing your team, but you feel hesitant about it, maybe you think this sounds too complicated or like it's too much work, or maybe it's just the financial side of things that's intimidating. Let me give you so much encouragement that building a team will be the most crazy, exciting and fun adventure you will take within your business. At least, that's what it's been for me, and I probably wouldn't have believed someone if they had told me that before starting my team. If you ever wanna talk more one-on-one about growing your team, I obviously love talking about this topic, so shoot me a message on Instagram at Hannah Bjorndahl, or you can email me info at hannahbjorndahlcom. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk more about this with you, because it really is something that I'm passionate about and that I have a lot of thoughts on, and also I'm happy to answer your questions. So with that I'll wrap up.
Speaker 1:Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you can practice gratitude this week in your business and in your personal life, and I hope this episode has been an encouragement to do that, and that's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening to Team Building for Creative Business Owners. I hope you learned something new that you can use to grow and thrive. If you're interested in getting in touch, send me a message at info at hannahbjorndahlcom, or you can always shoot me a DM on Instagram. I'm at Hannah Bjorndahl. I'll see you back here next week.