Y’all, I’m gonna be real with you— owning a wedding business can be pretty lonely.
If you’re one of the few who is fortunate enough to work in your business full-time, that means that you are also eliminating that day-to-day interaction with co-workers, making the work days pretty quiet, unless you are meeting with potential clients.
What’s more, your work week is exactly the reverse of the traditional work week, so you will be heading into work the all of your friends are celebrating the weekend.
For the first year that I was full-time in my business, most of my days were filled with binge watching Netflix, sending emails, and of course, comparing myself to my competition on social media.
When it came time to plan our wedding however, I began to make a change. I had selected vendors for our wedding that I genuinely liked to work with, and wanted to be surrounded by on our wedding day. These were the vendors that I had worked with week after week on other people’s weddings, and felt as though they had seen me work, and would know what to expect from me as a bride.
While it wasn’t a conscious decision to begin stepping out of my comfort zone of basically being a hermit during the week— it began to happen. All of a sudden, I had formed a friendship with the vendors who helped with our wedding, and every wedding that I got to work alongside them thereafter was like a mini-reunion with friends.
Before long, I was reaching out to new vendors I had enjoyed working with and asking them to grab coffee or lunch— not because I wanted to pick their brain or obtain anything from them, but just because they were a part of this inner circle that actually knew what it was like to work in this crazy industry.
I began to see a change, not only in how I enjoyed my job, but in how valuable those friendships became to me.
It is easy to get overwhelmed or discouraged when you own your own business and are working from home, and I have come to appreciate that there is so much value in befriending people who are ‘in the trenches’ right there with you.
So if you are a wedding pro that is new to the industry, I would strongly encourage you to reach out to someone in your community who is also a small business owner. Maybe they work in it full-time, maybe it’s their side hustle— maybe they don’t even have the same job concentration or ideal client as you, but I can promise you that the relationship with fellow vendors who can become friends has a payoff far greater than anything of monetary value.