Why Your Wedding Business Needs a Year End Review
I love the holiday season and as a wedding professional, I was always so glad that the holiday season usually coincided with the slowest time of year for my wedding business. It also meant that I usually took some time at the end of the year and the beginning of the new year, to get a lot of back-end things done in my business that I simply couldn’t get to in our crazy Summer and Fall seasons.
However, I didn’t start doing a proper year end review until about 6 years into having my own business. I just never was told that I should do one and frankly I didn’t really see the need for one because I figured that I knew everything that was going on right? I mean I was in the middle of it every day. Wrong. There was so much that I was missing by not doing a review! And I want to make sure that you are taking advantage of this powerful tool in your business, so read on to see what we review at the end of each year in our business and what I recommend for wedding pros.
First and foremost, there are no rules to a year end review, so feel free to cherry pick what data you want to track and you think is going to be the most helpful in your business. There are many things that other companies track that I don’t and things I pay attention to that may not mean much to you because of your specific type of business or market, what is important is to figure out what to track and to try out a few different things.
The goal of a year-end review is to see where your business is coming from, learn more about who your couples are and see where you are with your revenue goals.
In order to grow, or even to maintain the same level of business you currently have, you need to understand where your business is coming from and if your bookings are on track for the following year.
So, here are some suggestions on what we track in our business and what you can track to have a better understanding of what is working and what might not be;
How many inquiries are you getting each month?
What are the top three places your inquiries are coming from?
How old are your couples and where are they from?
Where is most of my website traffic coming from?
How many new weddings/events are you booking each month?
How many weddings/events are you doing each month?
How much you are making per each wedding/event and what is your yearly average?
What are you booking the most of?
What are you booking the least of?
By tracking these numbers, you are going to get insight into the following;
You are going to be able to see where you should spend your time and resources in getting leads.
You will know how many leads you need to be getting each month to get the number of bookings you want.
You can gauge how your calendar fills up with a pattern over time on busier months and slower months, plus your ideal average number of events each month.
You can determine how much money you make on each event and how that relates to your bottom line, growth efforts, hiring decisions or any other big business decisions.
You can determine your most popular service or what is making a better profit margin for you and focus on promoting more of that or expanding on that.
You can determine things that are not really selling in your business and move those efforts to things that are better producing.
See how much you can learn just by doing a review of your business and how much that would affect your decisions for the next year? It completely changed how I approached each year because I knew how many more bookings I needed, how much I was on track to make and what that meant for my team. But, even if you are a soloprenuer - you absolutely need to know basic things like how many inquires you get each month and how many of them book. That means you know your booking rate and can understand if you are going to have slower or bigger months before they even happen! It also means that if you want to get more bookings, you know how many more inquiries you need and can work towards an exact goal and not just “more inquiries”.
If this is your first time doing a year-end review you may not know where to get some of this information and some of this you would need to build into your workflow. We ask our couples where they found us and information on their ages and where they are from that helps us to fill in these boxes. If you don’t yet do that, I would encourage you to add that in because it is so helpful to know for your marketing and/or advertising efforts. The rest of the numbers you should be able to get from your email or website and of course your profit/loss reports.
If you have a CRM in your business like Honeybook, that is going to make this even easier to do since you are going to be able to just pull automatic reports that will help you determine how many bookings you had a month and your profit information.
If you don’t yet have a CRM and want to try out the one I would recommend for wedding pros, here is huge discount on a Honeybook trial for the new year!
Is there anything that I missed that you like to track in your biz or do you just want more info on how to set this up? I would love to hear from you over at @morganmchilds!
Photo Credit: Jayleigh Flood Photography