3 Steps to Figure out Your Fully Booked Forecast & How to Maximise Profits.

Hello you fabulous wedding business boss! Jen Maynard here from the Boho Bride Guide.

As a Wedding Business Growth Coach, on of the first activities we complete on the Set-up To Success Accelerator, is to clarify your short, medium and long term business goals, and what business model will enable you to achieve a consistent monthly 4-figure income from your wedding business. As after all, if we don't have anything to strive for that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound, we are much less likely to reach our business goals. So let's get specific!

And so I thought it would be of value to you for me to share how we go about this! ​

We are going to look at the 3 Steps you need to take to:

• Get Clear on Your Profit Per Product
• Clarify What Your Fully Booked Capacity Looks Like
• Consider How Your Fully Booked Forecast Can Influence Your Business Activities

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This will be a great activity for you to complete, as we are now coming out of lockdown, a chance to refocus on what outcomes you want to be seeing from your business, over the coming months and next year. 

By committing them to paper (or Google Doc), massively helps to hold yourself accountable and doing the work to get there.

Step 1: Get clear on your profit per product

This is where you get clear on what profit you want to make from when weddings are back up and running from late June/ July 2021 - Dec 2021 Q3 + Q4 2021, or whatever time period works for you - taking into account all of our costs as a business. 

Activity 1:
List each of the products/ packages you offer. Under each fo those products/ package, make a list of the following:

Product xxx:
- Your labour cost (or a team members labour cost) involved in  creating this product/ package
- Materials/ wholesale products/ ingredients etc. needed to produce this product/ package
- Wider business costs should also be included by totaling up what you will spend in the time period on the following, and then dividing this number between each of the products you plan to sell in the specific time period. Items such as machinery costs and maintenance, business rates and rent, other business bills, subscription costs, etc.

​Here is an example spreadsheet:

Step 2: Clarify what your fully booked capacity looks like.

Activity 2 :
Create a grid that lists all of your products/ packages across the top, and then each quarter (Q3 2021, Q4 2021, Q1 2022, Q2 2022 etc. Decide within each Quarter Period, what is the maximum number of each of the wedding products or packages you want to take on?

Take into consideration here the wedding seasons and typically the quieter times. However that being said, due to Covid, I think the next year or two won't follow the traditional path, so I think you will have more control over how much you want to work into the colder months of Quarter 4 2021 and into next early next year.
Is it also important here that you really consider how much you ideally want to work to achieve your true life-business balance. As working all hours under the sun, is not sustainable and your love for what you do will eventually wain. There are other ways of maximising your profit, without running yourself into the ground! This will be covered in next week's Newsletter!
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I have included above an example from my wedding floristry business, Parker and Peony Flowers. This is what I project my fully booked would look like, without considering any additional ways to maximise my profit, where I am just trading my time for money as a skilled florist. We will go into more detail about how we then incorporate additional income streams into this projection next week!

Step 3: Consider how Your 'Fully Booked' Forecast can influence your business activities 

Once you come to the end of this activity, you are now clear on what your current fully booked looks like and now have something to strive for.

The results from this can now help to influence things like:

• your social media strategy, and campaigns you run throughout Q 3 & Q4 and beyond. What specific product/ package bookings do you need to increase, and how can you do this through a social media campaign? How are you going to get your message out to your ideal wedding customer community? What are their pain points around why they are not currently booking with you? How can you address this through your messaging?

 

• email list-building activities. Do you have one yet? How could an email list of potential wedding couples on their wedding planning journey, assist you to achieve your goal of so many wedding bookings in Q4 this year? How can you provide additional value to your audience through a weekly newsletter to further build that know, like, and trust element between you, your couples that are booked with you, as well as potential wedding clients. 

 

• your supplier shoot collaborations. What visual content do you need to be sharing with potential customers to market your specific products/ packages? and therefore how do you start the process to get involved in a supplier shoot?

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• your networking conversations with fellow suppliers. What relationships do you need to grow to increase your enquiries around your products? Who knows about your products, and who else is able to share what you do with potential wedding clients? Who are you a recommended supplier for and do they know about your specific products you offer?

So that is it for this week! I hope these activities have been useful and enabled you to refocus your thinking around how to get fully booked for whenever your timescale is!

​Much Love,

Jen x

​Wedding Business Growth Coach