0:00

From ring to revenue is a place for all like-minded creatives to come together

0:03

and learn all aspects of a wedding business

0:05

I am your host Phil Beabout and with me

0:07

is my ride-or-die Brittany We are wedding filmmakers in New England

0:11

and love chatting about all things wedding business related

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We talk about not just the creative sides

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of our industry, but the business sides as well

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Brittany has a background in business marketing and in a previous life

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I led large-scale teams at nuclear power

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plants with multi-million dollar budget We love bringing on guests that are more

0:29

knowledgeable than us who can bring different insights to the table

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Sit back, grab a pen and get ready to take some notes

0:36

You might want to brace yourself too because we have some real raw candid

0:40

conversations with no filters Welcome to from ring to revenue the

0:44

wedding entrepreneur Academy. Let's get after it

0:47

Hey everyone and welcome to from ring to revenue I am your host Phil Beabout with my

0:51

beautiful wife and co-host Brittany We are so excited to introduce our next

0:55

guest Taylor Cusick-Holman

0:58

Taylor is a marketing consultant and a small business builder

1:01

You might already be familiar with one of her companies Taylor media

1:04

We have a great episode all about

1:07

creating a fail-safe guide to measuring

1:10

your wedding business success

1:12

So let's get after it Taylor. Thank you

1:15

so much for coming on today. I don't know why I just got so

1:17

demonstrative with my hands Let's start at the beginning. How did you

1:22

find yourself in the wedding industry?

1:25

It was totally unplanned. I think like a

1:28

lot of people who find themselves in the wedding industry

1:31

I realized that I was not

1:33

fit for the corporate world I had an honest go at it

1:38

and it just didn't work And so I left my corporate job without

1:43

having anything lined up and long story short

1:46

I got connected to a florist in San Diego

1:49

who is one of the most connected people that I've ever met

1:53

She's definitely like, you know, there's like personality types and

1:56

she's a connector for sure And she trusted me even though I had

2:00

never done any formal marketing consulting

2:03

And she brought me on to help her with some stuff. She didn't really exactly

2:07

know what she needed help with She's like I need help around the studio,

2:10

you know doing marketing and submissions

2:13

and social media and that kind of stuff And it worked and all of a sudden her

2:19

friends in the industry were asking her like who's

2:22

Why are you getting published all the time? You know, like how are you staying

2:25

on top of posting on Instagram all the time?

2:28

And she said well, I've got this girl. Her name is Taylor

2:31

And I'm very fortunate that she is one of

2:34

those people who is, you know, she's not going to hoard her contacts

2:37

And all of a sudden I ended up I was

2:40

like, I think I have clients now and I

2:42

think I need to start a business And so I started my marketing consulting

2:47

business and it just happened to be in the wedding space

2:51

And I'm so glad that that's the space that I've landed in because it's full of

2:56

fantastic people who are super driven and creative

2:59

And I personally really love the fact

3:01

that it's a lot of female owned businesses

3:03

That's always like a soft spot for me

3:05

that gets me up in the morning So the fact that I get to help just

3:08

people in general chase their dreams

3:11

But women specifically it's just like this is this is a great

3:14

space. I'm never leaving I agree. It's pretty awesome space

3:20

So why don't why don't you you have you

3:22

have three businesses

3:24

at this point, right? Yeah, I kind of chat about

3:28

Yeah, I rolled my eyes at that because it's like, you know

3:32

It's great and it's also the most

3:34

challenging thing ever And I think a lot of people can very much

3:39

relate to the experience of you know

3:41

If you're if you're someone who's inclined to take a little bit of risk and

3:44

start a business and you have ideas

3:47

Then eventually you're going to have another idea that you're like, this is

3:51

something that's worth pursuing Like there's always a bucket of things

3:54

that just doesn't seem worth your while But you know, so I've I've ended up with

3:59

with three businesses The the first one was the marketing

4:02

consulting business and that's definitely still kind of the core of my identity

4:07

The marketing space and copywriting but

4:09

then I ended up co-founding sourced co

4:11

because I was the original marketing

4:15

director at aisle planner from 2015 to about mid 2018 and in

4:22

During that time I my my job was to

4:25

create just the most obnoxious amount of content

4:28

That was really focused on the business

4:31

of being in the wedding industry And I couldn't find any visuals to pair

4:36

with the blog content that that I was

4:39

writing or the social media content that I was creating

4:41

And you know, even though I was asking

4:44

wedding pros, you know for access to photos

4:47

It was all tablescapes and couples and

4:50

it's like where's all this stuff that

4:52

shows what it's like to actually run a creative business

4:56

And so that's why we started source co

4:58

and so all of that stock photography and

5:00

done for you content creation is really focused on the business aspect

5:06

and all the things that wedding pros need

5:08

to communicate about their process and you know their client experience and

5:12

all the things that no one really has photos for unless you've

5:15

invested in a brand shoe So that's the the second company and then

5:20

the the third one is my new and I think

5:23

my greatest adventure because I'm about to launch a tech

5:26

startup, which I've been a part of tech

5:29

startups in the past but like being the founder of one is a

5:33

whole different animal and what Engie is

5:37

going to be doing is really taking everything that I've learned over

5:41

the past eight years of working with

5:44

small and creative businesses in the

5:46

wedding space and general creative space

5:49

and creating software that really

5:52

facilitates good marketing habits

5:56

something that's founded in a marketing strategy and all the bits and pieces that

6:00

hopefully are going to keep people on track because one of the things that people

6:04

tell me the most is Taylor like please

6:07

just tell me what to do, right? Because it's such a especially if you

6:11

don't have a degree in business or marketing

6:15

a lot of people feel unqualified to make

6:18

these decisions about their business and so they just don't make them but

6:23

clearly marketing is such a huge and

6:26

fundamental part of running a business that I just kind of got to the point

6:30

where I was like people need something like this.

6:33

So I'm going to I'm going to try to build it. So is it kind of like a plug and play

6:37

like you they give you or incorporate

6:42

what they have with their business and

6:44

their brand into this Engie

6:48

and then it kind of just populates I

6:52

don't know branding material or just like

6:57

marketing like social media.

7:03

I don't know. Yeah, I know. I know you're

7:05

going with the question. I definitely get

7:07

you what you're pitching. Okay. So the core of what we're building

7:10

is a marketing strategy tool. And so because that's kind of like the

7:14

fundamental piece that people don't have when they're running their business.

7:18

And so we're going to ask people to

7:20

basically play a game of 20 questions with us.

7:23

They're very simple like yes, no select type answers.

7:26

So you don't have to spend a bunch of time like I don't know what this question

7:31

means or how to answer it. So super straightforward and then Engie

7:35

is going to spit out a customized marketing strategy that's

7:39

tailored to the answers that you you gave

7:42

us and from there it starts to auto

7:44

populate marketing tasks on your task calendar.

7:50

And you also have a marketing campaign

7:52

tool where you can plan out what are you

7:55

going to do for for booking season or what are you going to do to kind of do a

7:58

let's say you want to build your email list out like let's plan everything out.

8:03

There's a whole performance section that

8:05

dives into KPIs so that people can

8:08

actually start tracking their metrics and

8:10

seeing if what they're doing on the

8:12

marketing side of things is actually turning into money because

8:15

isn't that the point of it all.

8:18

And then there is a whole brand asset

8:20

library where you can put all of your

8:22

logos, create color palettes, headshots,

8:25

all that kind of jazz. And then you can create a brand style

8:29

guide to send to your creative partners

8:31

that they can just easily download things right from there.

8:34

And then same thing with media kits. If you're someone who's kind of out on

8:38

the speaking circuit or pitching to media

8:40

then you can send this one digital

8:43

document that the recipient can easily

8:47

download everything from. So that's kind of our MVP or minimum

8:52

viable product that we're going to be launching with.

8:55

And there's obviously like so many ideas

8:57

that we've got for where we can take things from there.

9:01

You know, we're launching at this very interesting time where artificial

9:05

intelligence has always been in our product roadmap.

9:08

And I'm going to sound like a total nerd

9:11

here with all these like what's a product roadmap.

9:14

It's basically our plan of what we're going to create and when. And AI has been

9:20

on that roadmap for years, like since we,

9:23

me and my partner started talking about what NG would be.

9:26

And now it's like, well, as soon as we

9:29

launch, we kind of need to jump into that space, right?

9:32

Because AI is just totally blown up. And

9:35

so it's interesting where and I think a

9:39

lot of wedding business owners have

9:41

similar experiences where you have this plan.

9:44

Of what you're going to do and when. And

9:46

then there's this external force that just kind of like forces you to make

9:50

different decisions. So, you know, COVID obviously was like

9:54

the big one that none of us or basically

9:57

all of us are like slightly traumatized over. But that's it's just been an interesting

10:02

point in time to think like, oh, we've

10:04

got a couple years probably to

10:07

incorporate AI into what we're doing.

10:10

And now it's like, no, you got to figure

10:12

it out like yesterday. Yeah.

10:17

Yeah, I mean, I so I love me some chat

10:19

GPT. I can a lot. I'm on it all the time.

10:23

Just asking, get just random questions and just all kinds of stuff.

10:27

I have friends that use it for helping

10:30

them like draft medical opinions.

10:32

Like it's it is wild at what the AI can

10:36

do. I did see a really, really funny meme

10:39

a couple of days ago, but I'm not going to talk about it.

10:42

Well, you're going to have to at least talk about it. Yeah, yeah, I will. But it was it was

10:49

really funny. It was just about the difference between like Bing and Google

10:53

AI how they're integrating. So I do think that I think that I don't

11:01

know if you have you looked into the way that Bing has actually we're going to go

11:04

down a real dork path now. But we have you looked at the way that

11:08

Bing has integrated the AI into their search engine.

11:13

It's eliminated. So, you know, if you Google like, I don't know, best wedding

11:16

videographer on Cape Cod, it's going to

11:19

show like five or six ads. Then it might have a

11:24

result. Then it goes to the map.

11:27

So it shows you who is ever close to you. And then it goes to a

11:30

couple of more results. And then that's the end of the first

11:32

page. And then you're back to rinse and repeat each go around. Bing has whatever

11:38

witchcraft they're using in that AI model.

11:42

It's giving you an answer. It's not

11:45

giving you a list. It's kicking back

11:47

with, hey, you know, be about exposure is rated this.

11:51

Their reviews state this. And this seems to put them in front of the competition

11:54

because of X, Y, and Z. It's not like here's the closest result

12:00

to you or here's an ad from umpties.

12:03

You know, fuck films. It's look, this is

12:05

what Bing thinks is.

12:08

So my first thought is, how do I get on Bing's list?

12:11

And but it's there's a ton of

12:15

consternation when it comes to news.

12:19

Because if you said, um, like if you, if

12:22

you Google right now, what's going on in

12:24

the Ukraine, it's going to bring up

12:27

articles from, oh, I'm choking to death all of a sudden.

12:29

It's going to bring up articles from CNN,

12:32

the New York Times, Wapo. It's going to have this like list of stuff for you to

12:35

click on, you know, and then read a

12:38

newspaper article from the New York Times. Bing is giving you an answer.

12:45

Bing will straight up give you a paragraph of this is what's happened in

12:48

the last 24 hours, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

12:51

And where a lot of concern comes from is

12:53

where's Bing getting that data? Yep. Yeah. Like how was, how was Bing

12:58

pulling that up? Because that, you know,

13:01

if you're getting that from some crackpot website, that's not actually

13:04

what's going on in the Ukraine. Yep, totally. And that's a huge part. My

13:10

husband actually works in artificial

13:12

intelligence and he's been doing that for quite a while now.

13:15

And so, you know, I'm smarter than your average bear when it comes to this stuff.

13:20

But yes, there's a, there's a lot of

13:23

conversation, at least at the corporate level.

13:26

I think conversations that, you know, we as a general public are not privy to, but

13:29

about responsible AI. And, you know, AI is really just a data

13:35

set and, you know, you're teaching an

13:37

algorithm to do something with that data. But it's very easy to have

13:43

biases or skewed results.

13:47

And so thankfully, there is a, there are

13:49

people on this planet who want to make sure that, you know, the data set that

13:53

artificial intelligence is making decisions off of is a

13:55

good, responsible set.

13:58

But it's, we're definitely at like this

14:02

point in time where we're basically going from, I think Bill Gates said, you know,

14:06

we're going from like DDoS to an actual

14:08

like user interface in

14:11

like, you know, tech growth. And that's kind of what we're all

14:14

experiencing. And people are going to be

14:16

listening to this, like, what the fuck does that even mean,

14:18

Taylor? You can look it up later. I'm old enough to know what DDoS is. So

14:23

I'm old enough to know what it's like to

14:25

have to go into a root file to find Wolfenstein to go play that damn video.

14:29

Oh my gosh. I love this. So, you know,

14:34

like, it's, we're just like very much in

14:37

a huge, like, period of change.

14:41

You know, the way that NG, the way that

14:43

we see us using artificial intelligence

14:46

is, yeah, there's going to be some stuff on the, on the copy side because that's

14:49

such a huge crux for small business owners, right?

14:52

I've yet to meet one that's like, yeah, I love writing. Please,

14:55

like, give me more to write. So I definitely want to be taking care of

14:59

some of that for people. But also, you

15:02

know, if we are, if we're talking about like the kind of data that we're going to

15:06

end up having as our,

15:09

our user base grows, we're going to start to understand what

15:12

is working for videographers in Cape Cod

15:15

versus what's working for wedding planners in LA.

15:18

And so we're going to be able to start making better suggestions based on what's

15:24

actually working for wedding pros who are

15:26

putting effort into their marketing. And, and that's where I get really

15:29

excited. I'm like, that's really fucking

15:31

cool if we can pull this off because

15:34

it's, I think one of the, the biggest

15:37

challenges that business owners have is just

15:40

threading the needle and being as efficient as they can with

15:43

their time, money and effort. And that's one of the ways that we can

15:47

responsibly leverage artificial

15:49

intelligence to like really just put you

15:51

where you need to be with less trial and error.

15:56

Yeah, I mean, I, so I'm in, I'm wrapping

15:59

up my last semester of community college.

16:02

It's nothing like having a master's degree and then going

16:04

to community college. But the, uh, such an awkward thing to me

16:11

sitting there talking to people in their

16:13

twenties, they're like, why are you here? I'm like, that's a good question.

16:18

No. And so I'm doing a website coding

16:21

class and we had to develop, we had to

16:24

just make an e-commerce website, make a long story short.

16:26

So I had my kids pick and they were like,

16:29

oh, like, let's sell children's toys. So I said, okay, I'll make an e-commerce

16:32

website about selling children toys. Well, I'm not going to write the copy for

16:36

that website, especially for a homework assignment.

16:40

So I just went to chat GPT plugged in all the variables hit enter and watch that

16:44

thing spit out all of it, including FAQs.

16:49

Like it did, it had an FAQ section and

16:52

had the question and then the answer and

16:54

it's all fictitious. Like this is all just a made up thing for

16:57

this, you know, because the website's fake.

16:59

I'm just doing it in visual studio code and bootstrap.

17:03

But, um, no, it was just wild just

17:06

watching this thing just spit out all

17:08

this stuff that just, it was fluff that

17:10

would have taken me forever to imagine

17:13

that this thing did in like 12 seconds.

17:16

Yep. Yep. It's, it's, it's quite mind blowing.

17:20

I've, I've, yeah, no, it created my tag lines.

17:22

It created the name of the website. Like, I just was like, here you go.

17:26

Tell me, tell me what I need to do. And I think I would try to

17:28

think of what it was called. It was like planet awesome was the name,

17:32

was the name of the children's store. Yeah.

17:34

It was like something a kid came up with.

17:36

Yeah. No, because I, well, when I asked my kids, I was like, what should we do?

17:39

And they were like, oh, toys. And I was like, okay, well, you tell me

17:42

what your favorite toys are. And that's, those are the products as I

17:45

punch my microphone for some reason. Uh, those are the products

17:49

that we'll list on the things. So like there's Star Wars, Lego, it was

17:52

like, it was just a, it was just a cool assignment, but I also have a life and

17:58

I'm not going to sit there and write. That stuff, especially when I have a tool

18:01

at my disposal that could pump that out

18:03

and literally less than a minute.

18:06

Yeah. So it's shocking and mind

18:08

blowing all at the same time. Yeah.

18:12

No, I got it. It's, you know, every time I get on

18:15

there, like they should just play the Terminator theme when you log in, it

18:19

should just say, like, that's all it needs.

18:21

Just as soon as you, once you click go to bump, bump, bump, bump,

18:24

bump, and then it fires up. You need to talk to

18:27

one of their dev guys. Sounds like your next to do.

18:34

Yeah, I know. I should put that on my list. So you, you've

18:37

consulted with a lot of people. I'm going to guess since Brittany put in

18:41

the notes, hundreds of small businesses. That's probably low.

18:45

Um, what, what have you found to really

18:48

have been what's driving

18:50

those businesses to be successful? I mean, the first thing is like being

18:56

okay fundamentally with taking some risk

18:59

and experimenting because, you know, the,

19:03

the landscape of business in general is

19:07

just constantly changing. And if you're just going to stay in your

19:12

comfort zone, like you're not going to

19:14

grow, you're not going to adapt. And then eventually you're just going to

19:17

like stagnate and die out. I mean, that's brutal, but

19:20

that's the reality of it. And so experimentation and a willingness

19:25

to do that is super important.

19:29

The other thing that I think gets in people's way is their own ego.

19:33

I mean, we all have one, we all have feelings that can get hurt.

19:38

But just because something didn't work,

19:41

like you don't have to take it personally. Because when you do take it personally,

19:46

that kind of puts you into that bucket

19:48

where you're not going to experiment or take risks anymore.

19:52

And then, you know, they're that slippery slope we've, we've already talked about.

19:55

So I think that people need to not have an ego about failure.

19:59

And then lastly, I don't think it'll come

20:02

to as a, come as a shock to anyone to

20:04

hear me say that you need to have some grit, like shit's hard.

20:08

You know, you're going to have days where you're like literally

20:11

wanting to throw things. And quit because it's not

20:15

going the way you want it to go. And it's, you know, you're like, I've

20:19

tried 14 different ways to accomplish

20:21

this and it's still not working. But grit and perseverance, quite

20:25

honestly, like that's so clutch because

20:28

the sooner you give up, the

20:31

sooner you're going to fail. So I think that those are kind of the key

20:34

characteristics that small business owner

20:36

or wedding pro needs to really have to

20:38

succeed in the long run. Yeah.

20:43

One of the things when I was in the military, we had this expression that was

20:46

a check your ego at the door. Cause there was, you know, like there was

20:51

always somebody that knew more than you.

20:53

It's like when we, when we first started,

20:55

there was this, he was young, probably

20:59

early twenties names, Jake Weisler, was

21:01

really, really talented wedding

21:04

videographer, but he was super young.

21:06

So everybody would just like gaff him off

21:09

because they were like, Oh, you don't know what you're talking about.

21:11

You're like 22 years old. Do some making six figures doing wedding

21:14

videos, but doing it for like five days. Yeah.

21:17

I was like, fuck y'all. I'm going to listen to what this kid has

21:19

to say because he's doing something right. What are we talking about here?

21:24

So yeah, no, I think, I think it's, it's

21:27

really crazy at how people get in their

21:30

own way because they just, they think

21:33

that they know more than somebody else. They think that they're the smartest

21:36

person in the room, you know, that kind of stuff.

21:39

Like it's ridiculous. Yeah. I also think that it's important to what

21:44

you had said about, you know, you have 14

21:47

times, you fail it all these times and

21:49

the next time it's successful. We're, we were actually going through

21:54

this like right now with as trivially as

21:58

trivial as it sounds with Facebook ads.

22:01

Phil's working on launching a web course

22:05

and just the amount of

22:08

money and trial and error.

22:13

That's it. That's it. It's just, here you go. Just take it, take it.

22:16

Like I pretty much, I know bullshit. I just handed Facebook

22:19

$200 without one click.

22:23

Like I was like, here's some free money. Like here you go, Mark.

22:26

I've done that. I mean, I'm full transparency.

22:30

I basically blew thousands of dollars in

22:34

2021 on Facebook ads because just like

22:37

kept tweaking, kept tweaking. And six months later, it's like I still

22:40

wasn't getting the results that I wanted. So after that point in time, I was like,

22:44

okay, six months is a good, long experiment.

22:47

I've done my due diligence. I can't figure this out.

22:50

I'd worked with, you know, some consultants on it and it

22:53

just like it wasn't clicking. But yeah, I literally gave Facebook

22:56

thousands of dollars for Jack. Yeah.

23:00

I mean, so luckily I just, I started, I

23:04

was doing a bunch of testing, bunch of testing anyways, and I switched over to

23:09

the in app Facebook lead form.

23:16

And we've had significantly better results with that.

23:20

Yep. So the ad is currently going right now

23:23

and it's, you know, it tends to be, it's

23:25

working, but it took that like.

23:29

Final, like that was the final step. Cause you know, I'm not, I'm over here

23:34

balling on a budget and I'm not trying to

23:36

spend that much money. But it's also like a never,

23:41

like we're always learning. We're always trying to adapt to the new

23:45

technologies, the new algorithm.

23:48

And Facebook changes that shit every 12 minutes. Yeah.

23:51

Like I got a quote on how to do Facebook ads and I was watching the course and was

23:55

like, none of this looks like anything of what

23:58

Facebook has on here now. Yeah, it's really frustrating.

24:02

And I mean, that's what, that's what's frustrating about marketing in general is

24:07

that it is changing. It's changing all the time because like

24:11

there are still some traditional marketing tactics that still work for

24:15

some people, but the bulk of

24:17

marketing is happening online.

24:19

So it's digital marketing and technology

24:21

is changing super fast and we

24:23

all got to get on that train. Otherwise, you know, you're just like,

24:27

okay, I don't know what the fuck's going on here.

24:30

Yeah. I mean, it's sometimes it's the 15th time

24:34

where it finally clicks and you finally made the change and people just, they

24:40

become too impatient. They become too uncomfortable with how

24:43

much money they've, they've burned. And granted there is a, everyone should

24:47

have a number of like, I can't spend more

24:50

than this because I'm not advising anyone to just like spend money.

24:54

You might as well just put your money into a metal can and burn it.

25:00

Like, please don't do that. But, you know, try to, I do want to

25:05

encourage people to increase their tolerance for experimentation and failure

25:10

because, you know, I don't get everything

25:12

right with marketing all the time. You know, and I'm a marketing

25:15

professional, but that's, so why would

25:18

anyone expect for someone who's not like

25:20

living and breathing and eating marketing all the time to do it right?

25:23

100% of the time. Right.

25:27

Yeah, I definitely think there needs to be, so we, I, we used to call it a

25:31

continuous process improvement to where

25:33

you were, you know, we, we had so many buzzwords and nuclear.

25:36

It was great. You entered into the cycle of decline and

25:40

you would, you'd have to like recognize,

25:43

you know, just, it goes back to when

25:45

you're saying like, oh, you know, Facebook ads is changing left and right.

25:50

And you have to keep up with it. And I think that all too often, too many

25:54

people get just rooted in this, like,

25:57

this is a way that we've always done it mentality.

26:01

And they just, their business just sinks

26:04

and sinks and sinks and sinks and.

26:07

Yeah. You know, yeah. That's, that's one of the things that I

26:10

think causes people to fail is that like

26:12

they're just stubborn, right?

26:15

Yeah. They're stubborn. They have an ego. They think they're the smartest person in

26:18

the room that, you know, for whatever reason, like they're better than everyone

26:21

else and they don't have to. Adapt. It's like, no, that's a surefire way to

26:26

just shoot yourself in the foot. So stubbornness and thinking that the way

26:31

we've always done it is the, the best way

26:33

to do it is a terrible approach to marketing.

26:37

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You'll never look back. We didn't. And now back to the show.

28:11

Yeah, I have a, um, I've experienced in

28:14

like going through and I have a six Sigma black belt.

28:19

Yeah. And the, uh, I was talking to somebody

28:23

about it and they were like, well, what do you do with that?

28:26

I was like, well, you know, like I would go in and kind of tear the process that

28:31

somebody was doing apart and look at just

28:34

each individual step and then figure out

28:37

like what changes we could make inside of

28:40

that step to increase. Either the way that that, you know,

28:45

machine was making a component or increase the way that your people are

28:48

productive, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, well, nobody needs to

28:52

tear apart, you know, my business or whatever.

28:54

And I could tell they were one. We weren't talking about their business at all.

28:58

It was just a very like generic conversation, but I could see like how

29:02

offended they were getting it just shut down.

29:06

Yeah. Just at the, the thought that there were

29:08

people out there that would come out and be like, Hey, you know, you're a soup

29:12

sandwich and we should probably do some things to fix it.

29:15

And it was just, it was wild. Like, I was like, Oh my God, like it had

29:19

nothing to do with that person whatsoever. But people take their, their, their

29:23

businesses and themselves are like inextricably attached.

29:28

And again, the ego thing,

29:31

like we all just got it. That's the biggest favor

29:34

that we can do for ourselves. It's just like compartmentalize ourselves

29:38

as humans and ourselves as business owners.

29:41

And our business actually sits outside of our bodies, right?

29:45

Yeah, no, it's a little woo woo, but honestly, no, I 100% agree.

29:51

I think that people, like you said, just

29:53

like it's their arm and they, you can't

29:58

do anything whether, you know, it's personal.

30:02

They can't take vacation. Like it's so intertwined and so much

30:07

bigger than just, you know, this small

30:10

aspect of it, but people do take their

30:13

businesses and make it out to be that

30:16

it's part of them and they get offended.

30:19

And like you said, it's also paralyzing

30:22

in the sense that like, there's no progress or growth.

30:27

If they think about it in that way.

30:29

Yeah, I mean, it's that, that I'm the

30:32

only person that can do this mentality.

30:35

Yeah. Like you couldn't, you couldn't have taken like two weeks and just trained

30:38

somebody else on how to do this. So you could take a vacation.

30:40

Yep. Like what, what?

30:43

Very old school. That's actually, yeah,

30:46

it's, it's miserable. And funny enough, that's one of our,

30:49

like, our kind of user personas that we

30:53

have a couple for, for NG that are more

30:55

generic and a little bit more fun. We have like actual user personas that

31:00

the public will never see, but from a

31:02

public perspective, we

31:04

have a bottleneck, right? And we've got this cute little graphic,

31:08

this cute little person who sits in a bottle and like just is preventing things

31:13

from happening because they feel like they're the only person that can do it or

31:16

they're going to do it the best or no one's going to do it as well as I am.

31:19

Then we have the hat wear, you know,

31:21

which is most of us, in the procrastinator.

31:25

So those are kind of, you know, we have the core and consistent

31:30

business owning personality types that I

31:34

see and some people are squarely one.

31:37

And some people are a mix of a couple. A lot of us are a little bit of all three

31:41

depending on the day, but yeah, being a

31:44

bottleneck for your business is a terrible, terrible thing.

31:48

Yep. Nothing like being your own single point of failure.

31:50

Yep. So what, so we were talking about

31:55

indicators of success. What do you think are some common like

32:01

indicators of failure? Like, what do you, what are you seeing

32:04

across the board that a small business,

32:06

you're like, oh, you know, you suck.

32:12

You suck as like a business owner or

32:14

you're like, business is failing. No, the business, the

32:17

business is failing. I was like, getting about that. That was the only way.

32:20

The only way that my 1980s childhood

32:23

could articulate that sentence. It sucks.

32:28

So, you know, a lot of this comes down to

32:32

profit margin for a lot of people.

32:34

And I would go as far as to say that most

32:37

wedding pros don't know what their profit margin is because they're not tracking

32:42

their time, which is, you know, really

32:45

like the biggest expense from a, like, an

32:48

operational perspective. And so a lot of people think, oh,

32:52

charging $1,500 for this service, like

32:56

that's $1,500 in my pocket. That, that feels right.

33:01

But then they, it takes them a hundred

33:03

hours to deliver that $1,500 service.

33:08

And you've literally worked for like a

33:10

dollar 50 an hour and you probably still

33:13

had business expenses on top of that.

33:15

So you worked for free and you didn't

33:17

realize it because it felt good to have that $1,500 land in your bank account,

33:22

but it didn't really. So I think that that's kind of the, the

33:27

most common thing that I see people do is

33:29

not knowing how much time actually goes

33:33

into providing their service. And then just like, I think that feels

33:37

good for how much it's going to be priced at.

33:40

Yeah. I just want everybody to know how good my

33:43

math skills are because when you said 1500 and then a hundred dollars or than a

33:47

hundred hours, I was like, yeah, it's like 20 bucks an hour.

33:50

Like now it's like a buck 50.

33:55

I'm not going to lie. I mean, I'm terrible at mental math, but

33:58

I strategically was like number. And then if it's a hundred, you just

34:01

moved the decimal point two times. I was like, I could do this in my brain.

34:06

Nope. Not me. Not, not at all.

34:09

I came up with such a random number. I almost said $12 and 50 cents.

34:14

Oh my gosh. I didn't even try.

34:17

I was like Taylor knows, you know, you

34:21

would, you would hope I'm glad that you have the confidence to think like if

34:23

Taylor's showing out numbers, she's going to, she can do this math in her head.

34:27

I was flying by the seat of my pants and I landed in the right spot.

34:32

Yeah, man. So what, what kind of tools

34:35

are you using to track success? Like what, what do you, what would you

34:38

recommend people kind of? I mean, I know that we were just talking

34:41

about profit margins. So I guess did you

34:44

want to keep with that? And then what, what are you

34:46

using to track that, that? I mean, when I'm tracking metrics

34:50

currently, I'm just using an Excel

34:53

spreadsheet or like a Google sheet.

34:55

That's the thing that up until this point

34:58

has made the most sense. But I say up until this point because

35:02

that's one of the things that I wanted to

35:04

build for NG because you know, you even

35:07

if you are doing a pretty good

35:09

job of tracking your numbers, like most

35:13

things, people don't feel qualified to make decisions about what,

35:16

what they should be tracking. So they're just going to go to the

35:18

Internet and end up with like this mishmash of things.

35:21

But also an Excel, looking at something

35:25

in an Excel spreadsheet, it's really hard

35:28

to see correlations and trends, right?

35:31

Because unless you've put metrics next,

35:35

like right next to each other that you think are related, I mean,

35:39

most likely you just like went down a column and started typing in like, I'm

35:43

going to track my website visitors and my

35:46

ad clicks and like it just free flowed out of your brain.

35:49

So then you can't actually see what's

35:52

going on outside of just looking at a sheet of numbers.

35:57

And so what we're building, I

35:59

mean, it's pretty much done. We're launching in like 31 days.

36:02

It's pretty much dead, but our

36:05

performance tools are going to be a chart of charts.

36:09

And so you're going to be able to see

36:11

your upward trends or downward trends on

36:15

what you're tracking. But I think what's really cool is like so

36:20

much of marketing is an experiment. And so you need to set a hypothesis if we

36:25

all go back to our high school, maybe

36:27

middle school science class. That is a scientific method coming up.

36:31

Yep. Yep. So you need to have a hypothesis about,

36:34

okay, well, this is what I think is going to happen. You know, here are two or three metrics

36:39

that I think are related to one another.

36:42

Like a good example would be, you know,

36:44

maybe I think that if I start email

36:48

marketing and I send email newsletters

36:51

out on a weekly basis, that that's going

36:54

to drive more traffic to my website. And then I'm going to

36:57

see an uptick in inquiries. So what Engie is going to let you do is

37:02

put all three of those metrics on one

37:05

chart so that when you're entering the

37:07

data, you're going to see, you know, if

37:09

there's a positive correlation between the three numbers.

37:14

So I think that that's one of the biggest

37:17

tools that's missing for wedding business

37:21

owners and small business owners in general.

37:23

It's like, again, the world just assumes

37:26

that we all know what the fuck we're doing and how to do it.

37:29

Yeah. We don't, right? Like we literally don't know when very

37:33

few people are well equipped to like

37:37

start a business in a way that like ticks all the things off.

37:41

So unless you have an MBA or a business degree and all those things, most of us

37:44

are just flying by the seat of our pants and googling our way out of things.

37:48

And so our performance tool is going to I

37:50

think really empower people to make super

37:53

smart decisions because the numbers are

37:55

like right in front of them and we're

37:57

making it as like clear as possible. That money out here or effort out there

38:03

is actually bringing clients to you or maybe it's not.

38:07

Maybe it's proving the opposite. They're like, I think a lot of people are

38:11

going to be pleasantly surprised. Maybe they're going to experiment around

38:14

TikTok and then they're going to be like, oh, cool.

38:17

I don't have to be on TikTok because it's not bringing me leading customers, right?

38:21

So there's experiments you can do like

38:24

that as well to kind of like take things off of your plate.

38:27

So both are both are important.

38:30

What are you going to lean into and what

38:33

are you going to lean out of and the numbers are going to show you that?

38:37

It's really exciting because it's

38:40

empowering to just be able to like kick

38:43

things off of your plate and focus on the

38:46

things that really make you money. And that's why everyone feels spread thin

38:51

is because we all just like we think we

38:54

need to be everywhere all at once. All the time and that's not the case.

39:00

And so it's like we all just feel like we're doing a shit job.

39:04

Everywhere in across seven different

39:07

marketing platforms are like, you know, marketing channels and not being able to

39:12

tell which ones are actually worth our time and effort.

39:16

So that's a big part of just who I am as

39:19

a person is I'm a realist.

39:23

My husband will say I'm a pessimist. I'm like, no, I'm a realist.

39:26

You know, like I'm not I'm not being sad about this stuff.

39:29

It's just like this is the way it is. And if if you have too much on your

39:33

plate, you're going to do a crap job and

39:35

then emotionally you're going to start shutting down and then you're just going

39:38

to do even more of a crap job about it. So I want people to feel, you know,

39:42

empowered and motivated and essentially

39:45

kind of like rewarded by seeing the

39:47

progress of and like the rewards of the

39:52

effort that they're putting into things. Here's something pretty random for it.

39:59

I'm here. I'm here for it. When he talked about being a

40:02

realist, I always liked it. So there's there's three

40:05

there's three vials, right? They're all filled

40:07

with like a yellow liquid. First file is the optimist

40:11

and he says I'm half full. The second file is pessimists and he says

40:15

I'm half empty and the third file is the

40:18

realist and he goes pretty sure this is full of pee.

40:21

Thank you for that visual.

40:27

Yep. That would be suspicious.

40:31

I'd be like, what is that?

40:36

So, what was I gonna say that completely

40:41

broke my entire train of thought right there?

40:44

What? So you have this tool coming out in NG in

40:50

the next month or so for

40:52

people that don't have that. What do you think is a good like KPI that

40:58

they should be monitoring? So, you know, because my brain is all

41:04

about marketing, right? I like to look at my KPIs as part of I'm

41:08

doing this because I'm like my funnel. Just because I like to sit

41:13

here with my arms out like that.

41:15

I should explain my body language.

41:19

I don't know what to do with my hands.

41:26

So, yeah, so I like to think of things as the marketing funnel and you know, one of

41:30

the most important things to really

41:33

realize is that marketing is what you're

41:36

doing to even have a shot at selling

41:39

something to someone, right? And so I want to know that what I'm doing

41:44

to get people into my ecosystem into my

41:47

booking process, you know, my sales

41:49

funnel that I'm putting the right number.

41:53

Yeah, I'm putting the right number of people in it, right?

41:56

Because we're most of us unless you're

41:58

like a very bespoke service provider.

42:03

Most of us are not going to have a batting average of like a thousand.

42:06

Most of us are going to be booking somewhere probably less than 50% of the

42:11

inquiries that we get. If you're a volume based company where,

42:15

you know, catering and rentals and all that kind of stuff, like you're probably

42:18

not even booking 30% of

42:21

the inquiries you get. But so you need to kind of know in order

42:26

for me to book the 10 weddings that I

42:30

need to book this year that I should be

42:33

getting X number of

42:35

inquiries to even have a shot at it.

42:38

So I want to know how many people are

42:42

hitting your website. How are your ads performing and whether

42:46

it's, you know, Facebook, social media, Google ads or your

42:49

advertising on a marketplace.

42:52

What are those things doing to put people

42:55

into your ecosystem? Is social media even doing that or is it

43:01

more of just like a brand building thing

43:03

and kind of like portfolio highlight? So those are some of the KPIs that I like

43:07

to track that are kind of at the top of the funnel.

43:11

And then in the middle of the funnel, I

43:13

like to know, OK, how many inquiries am I getting?

43:16

How many proposal or consultations and

43:18

proposals are going out?

43:22

And then once you get to the bottom, it's like how many contracts are going out?

43:26

How many inquiries are actually booking?

43:30

What's my average booking value?

43:33

Because that's that's always an important thing to know, like am I under or

43:37

overbooking in general? Like do I want to be booking the five

43:42

thousand dollar package or the ten thousand dollar package or for some weird

43:45

reason, it's my average like three thousand.

43:50

So those are kind of how I like to look

43:52

at KPIs, which are key

43:54

performance indicators. More from a marketing perspective, if

43:59

you're someone who's super into sales,

44:02

there's going to be a whole another like can of worms that you can open in that space.

44:06

But to me, it's just making sure that you're having the right flow of people

44:10

from the things you're doing to market

44:12

your business publicly to booked clients

44:16

when push comes to shove.

44:20

So let's kind of change gears here.

44:24

Why don't why don't you talk to us about I know that we've talked about.

44:27

We've talked about source. What's what's kind of fun?

44:32

What's coming up? What do you got going on other than

44:34

obviously you're launching a tech startup company in 30 days?

44:38

Oh, that's what it's an G. I'm skiing a lot.

44:42

That's that's that's always like the

44:44

highlight of my day or week. I think I mentioned do you

44:48

normally look like a ski bum? It's because I could be a ski bum.

44:52

I think that even watching the Gwyneth Paltrow trial.

44:54

Oh, little bits of it. But the bits that I have seen it make

44:59

they make it seem like she got run into

45:03

because the skier who is uphill.

45:08

Yeah, is the person that's supposed to

45:10

make sure they don't run into the skier downhill.

45:13

So like the skier, the downhill skier has the right of way essentially because they

45:16

don't know they're fucking behind them. Right. Right.

45:20

But I always I have not ever hit anyone.

45:23

I have not been hit by anyone. It's always my goal.

45:27

But yeah, I mean in other than that, I am

45:30

a kid free pet free person.

45:35

So as I like to call it responsibility free adult.

45:38

So if I'm not working at my laptop, I'm

45:42

I'm outside playing. So that's always good.

45:45

There's there's an economic term for that by the way.

45:48

Thanks. Yeah, it's dual income. No kids for anybody that was wondering.

45:52

That's literally the term. Yeah, that would be me.

45:57

But you know, I do put in ridiculously

46:00

long days most of the time, but I'm I do get out.

46:05

This is got 43 ski

46:08

days this season already. So nice.

46:11

I'm not doing too bad a job at balancing things out.

46:14

No, I don't think I left the house in 43 days.

46:18

I would encourage it. I would encourage you to stay.

46:23

Now we're launching a course right now.

46:25

Like there's I've actually have a lot of stuff going on.

46:28

So it's been buried down here in the basement.

46:32

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's exciting. Launching a course is no small feat.

46:36

Like that's been on my, you know, someday

46:39

I'll get to it list and because it's just

46:42

such an enormous project that like you

46:47

start with like, oh, it's going to take these 10 steps. And it's like, no, really each each of

46:50

those 10 steps has like 50 sub tasks that

46:53

you need to get through. Yeah, we're we're almost done.

46:57

I've got got 11 modules. There's 46 lessons inside of it.

47:02

Plus like handout by the time this errors, the course will be out.

47:05

So people will have already suffered through the ads of the course as they

47:08

were listening to this podcast. So yeah, no, it's it's exciting.

47:14

I got a film. Six.

47:18

No. Yeah, either four or six more lessons

47:21

probably Saturday morning. So that's exciting.

47:26

Yeah. So weekends have been real fun around here.

47:28

Yeah. Yeah. But any speaking engagements, did you

47:35

were you at caterer source? That was just a sweet wasn't it?

47:38

I think caterer source is still going. I think it's yeah, it's still going.

47:41

I have the only one that I have on the

47:45

calendar so far is in late July for a

47:50

group of DJs in an entertainment focus in Charleston.

47:56

I'm kind of I'm definitely like heads

47:58

down like I'm not allowed to unless I'm

48:00

going out for a ski break. I'm like not allowed to leave my house

48:03

until it gets off the ground. So yeah, yeah, but after that, I'm super

48:09

excited about, you know, kind of being on

48:12

the road for a little bit because I've missed that.

48:15

Yeah, because of COVID like a lot of a lot of people and it's just such a

48:20

fantastic way to really see like have

48:24

your ear to the ground. Yeah, get a pulse.

48:27

Talk to people, right? Like I'm very fortunate that I have a lot

48:30

of friends who own wedding businesses and

48:33

small creative businesses and who are all

48:35

brutally honest with me about their experiences.

48:39

But you know, they're my friends and I

48:41

have to take everything with like the tiniest grain of salt because I'm like,

48:45

are you really really telling me or what?

48:47

So I like to kind of validate the what

48:50

I'm hearing from my friends with just the general population.

48:54

Yeah, everyone's kind of banging their

48:56

head against the wall over the same thing or not.

48:59

Yeah. Yeah, I feel that.

49:05

Well, Taylor, thank you so much for coming on today.

49:08

You guys have to keep up with Taylor on Instagram.

49:10

It's at NGENGI_CO at

49:15

sourced_CO at tailored_design.

49:20

So we're excited for the launch of NG.

49:22

I'm pretty sure that's going to be pretty rad. Sounds amazing.

49:26

You know, you guys have to be keeping an eye out for all the details with that.

49:29

All of the links that I just said are going to be in the description.

49:32

So nobody has to worry about physically typing it in as well as

49:35

all three of the websites.

49:38

So NG.CO, Taylor.CO, sourced_CO.com.

49:43

So Taylor, thank you.

49:45

That was awesome. Thank you so much for having me on.

49:47

This was such a fun conversation. Yeah, no, I had a lot of fun.

49:52

As always, all of the links will be in the description of the episode.

49:55

Make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

49:58

Don't forget to join our Facebook group and we have two openings

50:01

left in our mentoring schedule. So don't hesitate to reach out.

50:04

You know, we really love helping others grow in their small business.

50:08

So please reach out before those fill up because those will fill up quick.

50:11

We hope everybody is staying safe and healthy and we will see you

50:14

in the next couple of weeks. All right, out.

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