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Goal Setting

Q4 Strategy Session: Get Your Wedding Business Ready For Engagement Season in 90 Days

October 3, 2024

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Are you tired of setting big goals only to find yourself scrambling at the end of the year to accomplish all the things that you said you're going to do? What if you could make real progress in just 90 days, specifically, the last 90 days of the year? In this episode, I'm sharing why quarterly planning is key to making real progress in your business and how I think you can get your wedding business ready for engagement season in 90 days.

I know things might have felt unpredictable or chaotic, but now is the time to regroup, reflect, and prepare for what’s ahead. Whether you had your best season yet or struggled to keep up, this episode is designed to help you end the year strong so that you can start the next year ready to build the wedding business you truly want.

Image showing a podcast episode titled "Q4 Strategy Session: How To Prepare For The Final Quarter" with an image of a smiling person on a smartphone screen. Episode number 150 is mentioned.

In this episode about how to get your wedding business ready for engagement season:

  • [00:00]: Introduction to Quarterly Planning
  • [02:49]: The Importance of 90-Day Goal Setting
  • [06:08]: Strategic Planning vs. Goal Setting
  • [08:50]: Conducting a Wedding Season Debrief
  • [12:07]: Revisiting Marketing Strategies and KPIs
  • [14:47]: Gathering Client Testimonials and Feedback
  • [18:07]: Setting Sales, Revenue, and Cash Flow Goals
  • [20:53]: Evaluating Pricing and Services
  • [24:12]: Preparing for Engagement Season
  • [26:56]: Creating a To-Do List for Q4
  • [29:51]: Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Candice (00:00.174)

Are you tired of setting big goals only to find yourself scrambling at the end of the year to accomplish all the things that you said you're going to do? What if you could make real progress in just 90 days, specifically the last 90 days of the year? In this episode, I'm sharing why quarterly planning is key to making real progress in your business. And I'm even giving you a peek behind the scenes of my quarterly planning process.

everything that you need to do to prepare for the final quarter of 2020.

Candice (00:36.856)

You're here to grow a business, but not just any kind of business. You want to grow a profitable business with purpose, a business where you wake up every single day driven to serve your customers and make a difference in your own life. I'm Candace Coppola, published author, business coach, and your guide to building a profitable business with purpose. Join me here every single week as we explore how to build and grow your business with purpose.

Get ready to dig in and have meaningful conversations about the strategies and techniques that will help you build your dream business. This is the power in purpose.

Candice (01:22.894)

Hey there, friend. Welcome back to the Power and Purpose podcast. It's me, your host Candice, and I have a special episode for you today. If you missed the memo, we are releasing two episodes a week here on the show. couldn't be more excited about it. In episode 148, Survival Mode, How to Survive Wedding Season, I shared that I am releasing two episodes of the podcast each week in an effort to really help you build and grow your business in what is the off season for many. So you can expect two episodes.

during the fall and winter months here on the show. We're experimenting with this, trying to get you as much support as possible. And this is also a challenge for me to create more valuable content for you. So this is one of those special Thursday episodes. Episodes will continue to drop on Tuesdays and also now Thursdays during the off season. And as wedding season winds down and we head into this final stretch of the year, it's the perfect time for you to reflect.

to regroup and to prepare for what's next, to prepare for 2025. And while I know you're coming off of a wedding season that might've been challenging and might've been difficult, and you also might be a bit nervous about 2025 sales, the volume of weddings you have. And typically this time of year, it's also tempting to like take your foot off the gas, take a break, take a sabbatical, and I hear you on that, and you deserve that. I don't want you to do that until

you've mapped out a strategy for the quarter because now is the best time for you to actually focus on your next move. So whether 2024 was a bit slower for you and unpredictable or totally chaotic or even your best season to date, which many of you have expressed, this has been a great season for you. We're heading into the final quarter of the year, no matter whatever type of year you had. And that means two things, at least to me, when I look at my business and when I look at the women I coach.

We're ending the year hopefully strong. We want to end on a positive note. You always want to end on a good note. And we're getting ready for engagement season. Getting ready for our traditional sales season, which I'm actually quite excited to see what this engagement season has in store for us. Hopefully it's oodles and oodles of cash and good clients, of course. So in today's episode, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I do.

Candice (03:47.854)

in my business to prepare for the final quarter of the year, what I teach the women inside my mastermind, Wedding Pro Insider, so that you can finish out your year, prepare for 2025, and set yourself up for success when all those new, juicy, amazing inquiries start to roll in. Now, first I want to talk about why we plan in 90 day intervals. I've been doing quarterly planning in my business for around eight years now.

And it really is a sweet spot for me. It totally works for me. It works for a lot of the women I coach because our mastermind business planning and coaching follows a quarterly season. We map our business out in quarters and it just really works. I think it is right because 30 days is not enough. It's not enough to get stuff done. It's just not. And a year, girl, that is a long ass time. Like a year, you set your goals at the beginning of the year and then you're like, all right, cool.

And then eight months goes by and you're saying to yourself, okay, it's August and I haven't done shit. We can procrastinate. We also get busy. We get sidetracked, things change. And so when it comes down to yearly goal setting, it's great to find your focus, but it's not necessarily the most effective way to actually get goals done. Now, with that said, you may have heard that all of this before. And so here are some other things I want you to consider when we talk about 90 day goal setting.

In the wedding industry, we really have cycles. And it may not line up perfectly with quarters, but chances are that your Q2 in your business looks a lot different than your Q4, both from the clients you're serving, where they're at in their journey of wedding planning, what you're focusing on with them. Q2 looks so much different than Q4. So it's important for you, and you can see how quarterly business planning can really help you zero in on what's currently existing in the lives.

customers, in the industry, and of course in your own life, in your own business with each quarter. Quarterly planning also gives you enough time to get stuff done and gather data. Meaning you can plan your marketing in quarters, you can plan your business goals in quarters, you can plan your sales goals in quarters. 90 days is a good measurement. It's a good yardstick in measuring how many inquiries did your marketing reveal? How much traffic did you build to your website? How are things moving? What are people saying?

Candice (06:08.206)

It's great to gather data. 30 days worth of data isn't going to tell you much and who's got a year to wait around to get the data if their strategies are working. 90 days is really a sweet spot. And gathering and using data is so important in this entire process. Now I use 90 day goal setting and 90 day strategy setting and marketing. And I actually taught this in a very recent episode of the podcast.

I gave you a marketing strategy, a six figure marketing strategy. If you want to make six figures in your business, you need a six figure marketing strategy. And I taught you how to do this in 90 day intervals. So scroll down for a few episodes and you'll see this episode. I think it's episode 145. I'm just, I don't have it in front of me. So that's what I think, but go and listen to that episode. You can hear more about data gathering and just marketing in general in that episode.

Now let's talk about the difference between strategic planning and goal setting because they're a bit different. And I think sometimes they get conflated. Goals really can help motivate us and hold us accountable to taking action in our business, which is really the only way your business is going to grow. You need to have some accountability. I mean, who are you accountable to besides yourself and your goals? So goals really help us to maintain accountability and to take action.

The idea here is that a 90 day plan will help you take strategic action on those big goals that you have. So you're not just saying, I want to make a million dollars. You're also thinking, how the fuck am I going to do that? What's the strategy behind that actual goal? It's so important that I even talk to the women inside my mastermind, WPI, almost daily.

and even multiple times per day about this. And I still go through this process with them every single quarter and have them fill out a form so they can have this planning on paper. We set 90 days strategic goals every quarter in their business so that they can have accountability just for themselves. And then also as their coach, I can make sure that we're making progress.

Candice (08:22.764)

Now, even if you think you're ambitious and you don't need help sticking to your plans, I promise you that this strategy is a game changer and it's only going to satiate that ambitious side of your character. You're going to love this. So now let me begin to walk you through your Q4 strategic process for growing your business and the things that you need to be focused on this quarter. Okay. Let me know if you'd like to see even to an episode on

each of these different sort of buckets I want you to focus on. The first is you need to do a wedding season debrief. And this isn't an every quarter thing. You can't do this every quarter. This is a Q4 thing. It's something that needs to happen in Q4. And a wedding season debrief is about going through your season and getting real about how it went. You need to be honest with yourself. You need to be honest with your team if you have one, and you need to walk through

How did wedding season go? For a lot of us, this was a weird season. There was probably a mixture of outside circumstances that you didn't have much control over and also inside circumstances that you did have some control over that contributed to the weirdness of your season. And if you're like most of the perfectionists and overachievers that I coach that listen to this podcast, you can actually start to name a bunch of things off the top of your head that you would like to do better.

But I want you to pause for a second and try to come up with some wins too, because this isn't just about being reflective of the things that we should do better. It's also about acknowledging the things that went well. And sometimes we don't spend enough time acknowledging the things that are actually working or going right or that we enjoy. So I would love for you to do that and to really think through not only what could we do better, but what went well.

And I suggest you actually sit down and write this down. know that feels kind of like overkill, but really it's important that you reflect almost journal on your business and put your thoughts together. Think through what went well, what didn't go well. Nobody's going to see this unless you choose to share it. And you can even write some emotional things like I felt really stressed or

Candice (10:43.598)

Maybe certain aspects of your personal life fell to the wayside for work, or you worked weekends too much, you worked too late into the evening, or there were things that you didn't enjoy. You can just get really honest and real. What you might find is that as you really begin writing, a lot of things start coming up for you that you didn't realize weren't going so well, or that did actually go really great. Once you have just kind of word dumped and talked about the things that went well, the things that didn't, I want you to spend some time in this debrief.

thinking through how you will fix what's broken and how you will bring more structure to your business. And maybe this is scheduling your staff and further in advance. If you had some staffing issues, it could be revisiting your preferred vendor list, making some changes. mean, nobody loves to take people off, but sometimes some people got to go, girl. They're making your life harder. It may be time to reevaluate.

You may want to redo how you're onboarding your clients or even setting some better boundaries with them, creating more detailed questionnaires. A lot of things are going to come up for you. And this is going to reveal even a path forward of how you can spend some time revamping things in Q4 in your business, also in Q1 and Q2, where we tend to do a lot of business development work. I also want you to think about your intentions for Q4 while you're doing this and your intentions for

really your next wedding season. How do you want your next wedding season to be? How do you want it to feel? And what do you want your clients to experience next year in 2025 as they work with you and are off to get married and have this amazing experience? What do you want it to feel like for them? What do you want it to feel like for you? So a wedding season debrief is going to be so critical in your business. We walk through this every single year inside WPI.

So much comes up for the women inside this workshop that we do. And it's even fascinating to see what sort of hangnails persist in their business and then also what they solve and what new level problems they might be experiencing. And you will find it interesting too when you do it year over year.

Candice (12:55.438)

Now the next step in having a very strategic Q4 and planning and how to prepare for this quarter is revisiting your marketing and your KPIs. Now that you've started to think about your intentions for 2025, what you want next year to be, we can also begin to think about what we want to improve from a marketing standpoint. And the best way to do that is to look at data and information. We talked a lot about marketing on the

podcast lately a lot. And again, I had a whole episode on creating a quarterly marketing strategy. So definitely go and listen to that. But one of the reasons it can be so hard to do our own marketing is that we're so attached to it. If you feel like your reach is lower, it's taking a ton of time, Instagram sucks. These are all things to actually take note of and to look into the KPIs of how things are performing in your marketing first, because we want to rely on

facts over feelings. We do our marketing, our feelings are absolutely wrapped up into how we're marketing. And it's important at this stage of the year, as you're preparing for the next and you're preparing a marketing strategy for engagement season, that you start to look at facts over feelings. So it's time for you to look at the numbers and see if what we're really telling ourselves about our marketing is actually true.

I recommend Engie, not sponsored, but I love Engie. It was created by a fellow wedding pro. It's a marketing software that not only helps you post to Instagram, it has a scheduler, but it also helps you create a marketing strategy and it can help you track some of your key KPIs. And here's what I recommend looking at when you're looking at KPIs for the current year and looking forward and making decisions about the upcoming. Where are your leads finding you?

How are people finding your business? Which lead source is bringing you the most qualified people? How much money did you spend on your marketing? Probably not enough, but how much money did you spend? How much time did you spend on your marketing? And what isn't included here is the time procrastinating on it. So just take that out. This is actually implementing your strategy. And how consistent were you?

Candice (15:16.886)

Notice that we didn't say like, how many likes did your post get? How many, you know, people viewed your story? We didn't, we're not talking about that. We're actually talking about how people are finding you, what lead sources bringing the right people to you, how much you invested in time and money into marketing and how consistent you were. Now in WPO, we actually have this massive spreadsheet where we can track a lot of these things monthly. And these are all things that are focused on helping you grow your business.

As a small business owner, you want to track fewer things and keep them focused on the goals and objectives that you have. So these are some of the things that I'd love for you to dig into and do a KPI overall marketing strategy review. And of course, if you have other metrics that are important to you, like you want to look at the number of website traffic, I these are all important, but not necessarily where I would want to focus in this strategy today.

when we're looking at some of the higher level stuff that can reveal to you maybe your very next steps on how you can make your marketing strategy more engaging, more consistent, and reaching more of the right people. Hey friend, hear that noise? That's the sound of HoneyBook depositing cold hard cash into your bank account. HoneyBook is an all -in -one client flow platform that helps you manage your leads

send wedding proposals and sign more contracts all at the click of a button. HoneyBook also offers a variety of resources and materials to help you grow your wedding industry business. One of my favorite features of the HoneyBook platform is actually the community of creative entrepreneurs just like you. HoneyBook is offering listeners of the Power and Purpose podcast 35 % off any of their three plans for your first year. 35%, it's an amazing deal.

Use the code PURPOSE at checkout or go to CandaceCoppola .com slash HoneyBook to learn more. That's CandaceCoppola .com slash HoneyBook. And thanks to HoneyBook for sponsoring this episode of the Power in Purpose podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our partner, Flowdesk. Flowdesk is an email marketing software used by thousands of creative entrepreneurs just like you to grow their business and their brand.

Candice (17:38.36)

What I love most about Flowdesk is just how easy and simple it is to create stunning and effective email marketing campaigns in just a few clicks. It's perfect for the wedding industry and for anyone looking to grow their business with email marketing. Go to CandaceCoppola .com slash Flowdesk to sign up for your free trial where you can start designing beautiful email campaigns while I teach you about marketing here on the podcast.

That's CandaceCopla .com slash flow desk to start your free trial and use the code Candace50 at checkout to save 50 % off your first year. Check it out and see what's possible. And thanks to flow desk for sponsoring this episode of the podcast. Now let's get back to the episode. The next step in this Q4 strategy is taking a look at all the testimonials.

that you've received and gathering information from your customers. Now is the time for you to get feedback from your clients in this past year. That feedback is going to help you make decisions for 2025. And it's also going to help you really sell to the next generation of clients and decide what you want your marketing plan to be, what changes you might need to make to your website, to your brand, to your copy. So reviews are more than just putting a

testimonial on your website. I want you to spend some time looking at them and mining for data. What were people thinking about before they hired you? Take a look at their inquiries. What led them to you? What did they say? You can actually create a document. It's called Voice of Customer, and you can do this every single year. And you can begin to pull in things like inquiries, testimonials, little bits maybe that you got from a thank you card from a client or

in a conversation notes you took. And I want you to focus all of this information in one document and spread it out or organize it into these categories. What were people thinking about before they hired you? What was their initial impression? What were they worried about? And what was the biggest value you presented in their eyes? And all of this can be found in your inquiries and in your testimonials, all of this information.

Candice (19:59.054)

can be found either overtly. They're either saying, I valued working with Candace so much because, or before I hired Candace, I was so stressed out with, or covertly. You can read between the lines and kind of tell through their testimonial or their inquiry what they valued most about your services and what drew them to you in the first place.

You can gather so much information from just reading testimonials. And if you don't have a lot of testimonials right now, you can look at the testimonials of your competition and see what people are saying about them. And that can give you an inside look at what you should be focused on improving, especially with the client experience in your own business to attract those types of clients. There's so much we could talk about in testimonials, but I got to keep this

episode short and sweet, let me know if we should do a full episode on data mining. But testimonials and info gathering, your voice of customer is going to help you make better decisions. You're going to see patterns and trends emerge, and this is going to help you make incredible decisions about your marketing. The fourth thing I want you to focus on this quarter is revisit your sales, your revenue, and your cash flow goals. Maybe you haven't even set these yet. Maybe you're like, I don't

know what the hell you're talking about. We definitely need to be setting sales goals, revenue goals, and cashflow goals in your business. When I said setting goals for Q4 and Q4 planning, your mind probably went to all these things you aspire to do, your vision board. You probably didn't necessarily think about your cashflow goal for the year. But Q4 tends to be the season where more wedding pros are setting themselves to make

setting themselves up to make more money. Q4 is where Q1 sales are really made. And so in order for you to have a successful sales season or to increase your, I should say in order for you to increase your chances of having a successful sales season, because there are extenuating circumstances in the marketplace that are just fucking with your shit. And I get it. Okay. Economy, election year, all this crazy stuff. You need to set some goals. So here's what I want you to look at.

Candice (22:20.622)

These are the numbers that are important to you. What are your sales year to date? How much have you sold? And sales are the total value of goods sold at the time of the sale, not the amount of money you collected. It's the total value of goods sold. So if you sold a $10 ,000 photography package, that's a $10 ,000 sale at the time the contract was signed, regardless of how much cash you collected, okay? Next, I want you to look at how much revenue you generated.

When all's said and done, how much revenue has your business brought in this year? And what does your cash flow look like for the rest of the year? How much money is due to you? Then you can start to get even more kind of crazy. And you can look at what were my sales in Q4 of 2023?

Oftentimes we compare month over month and that is perfectly fine, but I love to compare quarter over quarter too, because a good indication of future behavior is past. So if you can take a look at what happened last year in Q4, that could be a good indication of what you should expect this quarter. And it can even give you like a goal to set. can say, well, I want to at the very least hit my revenue 2023 Q4 sales. I want the right cashflow. I want all of these things to line up and maybe do 10%.

5 % better, 50 % better, depending on what your goals are. Now, all of these numbers are important, but there's also a number that's equally important, and it's your expenses. How much have you spent this year? How are we doing on expenses? Are you a cash eating machine? Are you just blowing money? Or have you been conservative this year? How are you doing with expenses? All of this is going to help you

set good goals for this quarter, but also get you thinking strategically about 2025. A lot we can talk about when it comes to setting goals for sales, when it comes to revenue goals. This is something I teach extensively inside my mastermind. talk numbers, we set goals, we build strategies. We don't just say, want to make a million dollars. and nobody's actually said that.

Candice (24:39.246)

We're in the six figure neighborhood. People are like, I want to make 250 ,000. I want to make 400 ,000. I want to make $100 ,000. We don't just set the goal. We build a strategy to get us there. And that's the part that's missing a lot. We talk about this extensively inside my mastermind. So just a plug. If you're interested in doing this with me, you want me to help you do this personally, I recommend you go and sign up for the wait list at weddingproinsiders .com.

The final step in your Q4 planning preparation strategy for engagement season for 2025 is to evaluate your pricing, your services and make adjustments as necessary. This is the time where you need to sit down with your sales deck, with your pricing guide. And it's just, it's a normal time for you to look at your pricing because I know you're saying to yourself, girl, they are not paying me enough to do this job.

And they're not. If you feel that way, it's likely true. It's normal to go over your pricing annually and maybe even more than once a year, depending on where you're at in your business. This is the time where you see a lot of book now to secure this year's pricing. And I don't mind this message. I I think it's fun to experiment and see if that helps to bring in any people who've been watching you closely or they're like, they just haven't pulled the trigger.

hiring you and they need that jumpstart. But it doesn't always work. This messaging doesn't always work for the wedding industry, depending on the clients you want to attract. whatever, it's neither here nor there. It's something you can experiment with. It's definitely something we see. What we need to do is take a look at your pricing and your services and ask, does this align with my business goals? Are these things that I want to do? Does my pricing model align with

how I'm building and growing my business. For instance, if you're a wedding planner, maybe it's time for you to switch to percentage pricing, or maybe it's time for you to rethink your pricing model. You can also remove some services that are just not working for you. Bump them over to Alacarte or get rid of them completely. These are energy vampire services. They don't help the client. They don't help you. They might be things you hate doing. They might be something that, quite frankly, clients should pay for if they wanted.

Candice (26:56.686)

that all clients want it, that all clients need it. Maybe it's a service people are like, could you remove this from your package? And so you're like, all right, removing it, lessening the price. This is a good time to just do a lot of housekeeping with your services. And you can even think about creating a more premium package if you feel like your peeps want that from you. Or in the opposite end of the spectrum, a smaller package, if that's what the market is demanding, like what we saw in the pandemic.

a lot of elopements and smaller weddings and micro weddings, just teaching you to be flexible with your packages and your pricing and listen to what the market's saying and also experiment. This is also where we get to rewind and look at data. This is where we get to all that legwork that we just did, testimonial gathering, information gathering, KPI gathering, sales goal gathering, looking at your books, looking at your cashflow, looking at your revenue goals.

This is where we get to implement that information. And now we're making decisions on our pricing and our services that is backed by data and facts rather than just feeling. So if you were ghosted a lot this year, or you got a lot of pushback on your price, or people were booking elsewhere, this can be a sign that you might need to make some changes. You might need to experiment with your pricing. You might need to bring it down a little bit. You might need to make a little bit of a change with how you're positioning it, how you're marketing it, what's included in packages or services.

what's excluded. It could also mean that you're just not attracting the right clients. And so you need to adjust your branding or your marketing. A coach or an expert can definitely come in and help you make some of these decisions, but also your gut, your intuition, which we're going to be doing an episode on very soon can help you in this too. We need to trust our gut and our intuition more. love facts, but I also believe, I do believe in feelings, believe it or not. And I think your gut or intuition,

is often downplayed a lot. If your gut is telling you, your marketing is absolute shit, it's not consistent, it's low budget, you look cheap, then you probably do. that might be a sign that you don't need to raise your price, you need to raise the bar and other aspects of your business to meet the price you're charging. And if you're not willing to do that, then it might be time to actually lower your price to meet where your brand actually is in reality. But that's a tangent that I'm sure.

Candice (29:21.612)

You want me to go down, but in an in -depth episode. I also want you to think, what do I want to walk in to engagement season offering? Like beyond the numbers, what gets me freaking excited? What makes me feel excited in my business? How can I follow my highest excitement? What do I absolutely love doing that I want to create a package around that I want to create a service around? Because when you're excited about something, talk about it. When you're excited about something, people can see it. They can feel it.

They want to buy it from you. And I think that in this interesting sales season, you need to be excited about selling something. So what do you want to walk into engagement season offering this year? Okay, the final step in this whole strategic planning, and you can see we did a lot, is to prep for a sales season. We have covered a lot, but all of this is helping us prep for sales season.

And now it's time for you to turn these observations and these intentions into a to -do list. What do you need to update on your website in order to attract the right people, in order to filter out the wrong? Do you need to update your website with fresh portfolio photos? Do you need to add new content? Do you need to rearrange some things? Do you need to remove some things? Do you need to update your packages and your pricing on your website?

What does your sales process look like? Is it effective? Does it need some tweaks? I guarantee it needs some tweaks. Your sales process hasn't changed in the last two years, and it's no longer working for you. You need to change it. And what marketing changes do you need to make? What do you need to get into Q4 and into sales season doing? Because remember, the sales you make in Q1 and Q2 of next year actually are made in Q4. They're actually made right now.

It's the seeds you plant. It's the marketing strategy you implement. It's the consistency you bring. It's the vision. It's the strategic planning you do that actually gets you the clients in the next season. I also want you to be a little careful here about giving yourself long and unattainable to -do lists. That's going to have you discouraged by tomorrow. So as much as I love a big list, I don't love

Candice (31:39.746)

when we overwhelm ourselves. So as you grow your business in this quarter, I want you to ask yourself, how can I make this easier? Where can I get more support? Could there be something as small as grabbing Candice's sales scripts or her pricing guide or a template from another educator that I know and trust that can help me actually just fricking take a couple steps forward, just kind of like leap forward a little bit?

Could it be bigger, like actually hiring a coach or hiring a VA or hiring a brand designer or hiring somebody to come in and do this? And should I be delegating to someone on my team? Is it time for me to get a team? Do I need help here? And where do I need the help? Very important, because you can write down a long ass list of your wish list of all the things you want to do. But when it comes time to doing it, it's another story.

And so I personally always start with, can I make this easier on myself? What am I over -complicating and how can I get help? Who can I hire? Who can I ask for help from? Even if it's just asking your partner to help you one night a week, maybe if you have kids, help you with the kids one night a week so that you can focus on business work or if it is a friend that you need help with, hiring a house help, hiring somebody to come clean your house once a week so you don't have to do that.

free up more time to be strategic and work on your business, ask for help. There's nothing wrong with it. And in fact, working with someone who's been where you want to go or asking for somebody to come in and help you do something that they can help you do in your business or in your life helps to free up time. And time is a precious resource. Now, as we wrap up today's episode, I hope you're really feeling inspired and ready to take action during these final months. I want us to recap.

really quickly, okay? We're talking about strategic goal setting and planning for this quarter that's going to set you up for success this quarter and next year. First things first, wedding season debrief. You need to debrief your wedding season. Second, you need to review your marketing KPIs and any KPIs in your business that are important to you. Look at the data.

Candice (33:58.862)

and that will help you make better decisions. I want you to gather testimonials, inquiries that came in, all of ideal clients. Review them, create a voice of customer. What are the parallels? What are the common threads? What are people saying about you? Don't have a lot of testimonials right now? That's not uncommon. It's getting hard to ask people to leave you reviews. It's so annoying. Look at your competition. What are they saying about your competition?

I want you to revisit your sales, your revenue, and your cash flow goals. If you didn't have any goals, go and look at the numbers. How did you do? How much did you make in sales? What's your cash flow look like? What's your revenue look like for this year? How are you doing financially? Evaluate your pricing and your services. Make adjustments where necessary. And don't forget to ask yourself, what do I want to walk into wedding season offering, engagement season? What do I

want people to buy. What am I fired up about? And make sure you do all of this and prep for sales season. Make adjustments to your marketing, to your website, to your online presence, to your team. And don't forget to ask yourself, how can I make this easier? And where can I get support? I know you've probably heard this 100 times before, but it's really true. The work you put in now is going to set the stage for 2025.

And while we talk about setting the stage for 2025, if you're looking for more support, I've mentioned this a few times and I mentioned it almost every episode because I want you to know there is an option available for you. I would love for you to check out my mastermind, Wedding Pro Insiders is for women in the wedding industry. It's my high touch group coaching program. And inside of it, you get personalized advice, accountability and access to a community of women who are like -minded.

but all very different, growing different businesses, and it is a game changer. Go to weddingproinsiders .com to learn more. Make sure you get on the wait list. And when a spot becomes available, I will let you know. All right, friends, thank you so much for listening to this bonus episode of the Power and Purpose podcast. I will see you here on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I wanna remind you, there is so much power in your purpose. I am rooting for you.

Candice (36:22.38)

in this quarter and next year. I'll see you next time.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Power and Purpose Podcast. If you enjoyed the show, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and consider leaving a review. Head over to powerinpurposepodcast .com to access all of the resources and links mentioned in today's episode. That's powerinpurposepodcast .com. I'll see you next time.

Thanks for tuning into today’s episode of The Power in Purpose Podcast. I want to know– what was your biggest takeaway? Head to my Instagram to join the conversation!

Explore More Wedding Industry Resources

For more business tips and a look into my island life, follow me on the ‘gram

As a former wedding planner, time management is practically in my DNA. 🤣 

So imagine my surprise when I was on the struggle bus trying to get all the things done and manage my client work.

Today, I want to talk about the biggest time management hack I implemented that changed everything for me - how I manage my energy. Comment 160 and I’ll send you the link to this episode!

#thepowerinpurpose #powerinpurposepodcast #candicecoppola #weddingpros #weddingpro #timemanagement #timemanagementtips #timemanagementhacks #weddingpodcast #weddingindustry #weddingindustryexperts #weddingplanning #weddingphotography
What if I told you that, in just your first seven days inside The Planner’s Playbook, you could knock out a list of impactful changes that will push your business forward in a big way?

Here are some things you could do in just your first week inside the program...

→ Update your pricing to percentage before engagement season hits and finally understand how percentage pricing works (this is a GAME CHANGER). Imagine booking your highest priced package EVER?

→ Refresh your website pricing and services page to convert at a higher rate with some of my pricing page techniques. 

→ Create a wedding design service, learn how much to charge for design, and then implement the design process + techniques I teach you inside our design course.

→ Boost your sales process before engagement season hits by understanding each stage of the sales cycle.

→ Get a blog post up that ranks on google and drives traffic to your site, instead of letting that ‘blog’ tab on your website be just a post that says “hello world!” 😛

→ Feel more confident answering objections that come up during the sales process, like “can you give us a discount?” 

→ Refresh your email templates with sales copy that converts (I’m giving you my extended sales scripts for wedding planners as an added bonus).

→ Create fun and compelling Instagram content using our gorgeous Canva templates.

→ Finally set up your Pinterest account and start generating leads from Pinterest.

😱😱😱😱

honestly, that list is light! There’s tons of support, short cuts, and processes waiting for you. Comment PLAYBOOK and I’ll DM you details on how you can get started 🙌🏼


Some of the links used in this blog post are affiliate links. When you purchase something, our company receives a small compensation at no cost to you. This compensation helps to maintain the cost of creating helpful content, like our podcast, so you can build a profitable business with purpose.

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