Financial Freedom in the Wedding Industry: A Guide to Passive Income
GET PAID MORE AND SPEND LESS TIME WORKING
In many businesses a single stream of revenue just isn't enough to make things work long term especially as we know that small businesses can operate in highly uncertain environments. We only need to look back on the past couple of years to know that!
Over time as your business grows and evolves you may find yourself with more expenses or finding that it's taking up more of your time than it did before. This is exactly what happened to us, we found that as our business was growing, our expenses were becoming more and more - additional marketing, staff members even replenishing stock was becoming more and more costly. Not only was our business taking up more money to run, it was also continually taking up more of our time to run too. Suddenly we didn't just have one changing room to book out, we now had 5. It's safe to say the pressure was on! We started to think about new ways of adding revenue to our business that wouldn't mean sacrificing anymore of our time.
Passive Income is the concept of working without you having to directly trade your time for money. Unlike selling your services or a product - where you receive a set amount for your services at their wedding or once the project is completed, with digital assets there is the possibility for you to sell hundreds, possibly thousands of the same thing. Diversifying your income is so important - if the wedding industry was suddenly shut again (not too difficult to imagine right?) or if Instagram lost all of your followers, what would you do?
Don't want to read our story? - no problem! Jump straight to the ideas section HERE
HOW THE WEDDING BUSINESS HUB CAME TO BE!
We discovered passive income at the start of our Wedding Business Hub journey, or The Wedding Industry Supplier Network as we were known then. As 2 people who love marketing and social media - we were often asked by other wedding businesses how we had exploded onto the scene and were appearing on shows such as Don't Tell the Bride and This Morning as well as reaching super large audience numbers across our platforms. Our most common question from other suppliers was about social media and how they could get their social media accounts reaching more of their target audience.
THE LIGHTBULB MOMENT
Lots of other wedding businesses from photographers to photo-booth companies at the wedding fairs we were going to were interested to know how we had grown our bridal shop accounts to over 10k followers in under a year and were getting views on our Facebook live videos of more than 40k people at a time. We started to give advice and tips to the businesses and loved sharing everything we had learned but in order to be doing this we were doing it in-between bridal clients in the shop or we'd be glued to our phones in the evenings helping other business owners.
Then came the idea - if I put everything down into an e-book we'd be able to help more people with their social media blocks and problems. That was the first passive income product that started the business that's now The Wedding Business Hub.
I then became a part of Lisa Johnson's world, she's the total queen of passive income.
PASSIVE INCOME
OK, so the word passive income is a bit misleading as nothing is ever totally passive. In there beginning there is work involved in creating whatever it is you are going to sell, defining your audience and getting established - however what it does mean is that once you have created a course, or membership, or digital downloads or e-book you can sell it over and over again - which IS passive.
We'd dabbled with passive income and done really well with our e-guide WEDSTAGRAM which taught wedding businesses how to make Instagram work for their wedding business but we knew we had more to offer. We wanted to offer memberships and had ideas for other courses and things we could offer our audience. Whilst we could have spent the next 2 years trying to figure it all out for ourselves we stumbled upon Lisa and through her training was able to learn how to implement all of the steps to make it work properly!
Yes it was initially a bit scary to be stepping into a space we didn't know too much about however we knew that when we started teaching marketing and business skills to our audience that we wouldn't be able to help the masses by solely doing 1:1 work.
All of those worries were taken away really soon with working with Lisa. She gave us all of the advice and tools and left nothing out! We're super passionate about passive income and the power it has to offer financial freedom whilst still being able to help others with knowledge you already have to offer. As soon as we saw the potential in it, we made it the sole focus of the model for our own business.
For us, our dream was to create a business we love, help as many other small businesses in the wedding industry with their businesses as possible, keep our trainings affordable and accessible and to be able to spend time with our families without having to sacrifice our income to do that.
THE EXCITING BITS
`
Maybe our story has sparked some ideas in your mind - we hope so! Or maybe you are sat thinking "ok, but how do I add passive income into my life too - what could I teach?" We have had exactly the same thoughts - but something Lisa has taught us - is that you are an expert in something (even if it's not something directly related to your current business) Whilst there are some of the obvious memberships such as cake making, photography or teaching a business skill such as website search engine optimisation - there's plenty of opportunities we know of people running passive income products and courses in dog training, parenting, relationship support, property developing. We know of someone selling knitting patterns passively - if you want her inspiring story just let us know and we'll send you the link. Honestly, the opportunities for passive income are endless.
So if you are looking to diversify your wedding business or if you are wondering what the future of your wedding business looks like.......do you really want to be setting up weddings and working every weekend into your late 60s? ...... then we would highly suggest thinking about passive income.
We have partnered with her on something you're not going to want to miss out on!
Sign up to our friend Lisa's Race to Recurring Revenue Free Challenge to help you start generating Passive Income and make an impact in your own life and others. It kicks off March 21st register now to secure your spot! We'll be doing it too as we always learn something new and it sparks new ideas in us! We'd love for you to join.
Keep an eye out too for something hugely exciting coming that you won't want to miss! If you'd like to discuss your ideas or anything about passive income jump into our inbox anytime - we'd be happy to help you figure it out!
