What Will You Quit Next Year?
When most wedding professionals set goals and plan for the year, they think about what additional they’ll do in order to reach their goals. Maybe this year you want to embrace video marketing or get more intentional about your Instagram marketing strategy. This can lead to the crazy buffet problem.
You have a gigantic buffet of things you can choose from to grow your business and reach your goals. Everything you can imagine is sitting on that buffet waiting for you. Some people become the crazy person at the buffet filling their plate with a little bit of everything until it’s piled so high they can barely see past it to get back to their table. This is what happens when we keep piling more and more and more onto our plates.
Your plate only has so much room. You can only do so many things and focus on so many things in a given year. You can’t keep piling more and more on if you want to have a business that doesn’t overwhelm you. If you have ever felt like you’re drowning in your business, it’s probably because you’ve piled too much on your plate without realizing it. Instead of just piling more on your plate as you plan for next year, I want you to consider what you’ll take off of your plate.
Step 1. Evaluate what isn’t working
You’re doing a lot to market and grow your business but what’s actually working and what isn’t? It is well worth your time to sit down and measure this. When you measure your results, you don’t have to think about what to change or quit doing because the data does that for you. No difficult emotional decisions, just data.
Now if something isn’t working for you it may be time to change your strategy to see if you can make it work. I’m a huge believer in experimentation so don’t just ditch Instagram because it isn’t working for you when you could tweak your strategy and make it work.
For example, if you’re paying to advertise on WeddingWire or The Knot and it isn’t working for you, evaluate what you can change. Maybe you can change your description or photos to see if that would make a difference. If it doesn’t, you can confidently quit this particular marketing tactic.
To figure out what is and isn’t working for you, look at the data you have to determine where your leads and bookings came from. Don’t have that information? Set up ways to collect it now. This could be as simple as asking where someone heard about you on your inquiry form and setting up Google Analytics.
Step 2. Do more of what is working
Now that you know what is and isn’t working for your business you can find ways to make small changes that yield big results for you. For example, if you’re getting great results from doing 1 Instagram Reel per week, what would happen if you did 2? If you’re getting a lot of bookings from referrals, how could you use 30 minutes per week to nurture those relationships?
When something is already working for you, it’s easy to make it work even harder. All too often, we ignore the things that work for us and work on the things that don’t work for us but that’s not where your attention should go. Why not spend more time on the things that work and quit doing the things that don’t?
Step 3. Go beyond marketing
This is a great exercise to apply to your marketing but how else could you apply it to your business? What other things can you stop doing?
Maybe you’re spending way too much time in your inbox. You can decide to quit that by spending 30 minutes writing canned responses for your most common emails.
Maybe you feel scattered throughout the day and it drives you crazy. You can quit that by adding more structure into your schedule and using batches to schedule your week.
Any time you think “I am so sick of doing this” you have an opportunity to change how you’re doing a task and quit doing it the difficult way. That could be as simple as changing your approach, using particular tools, or outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant.
Step 4. Strategically add to your plate
Now that you’ve cleared some room on your plate, you can decide to do new things without overwhelming yourself. Carefully decide what goals, projects, and tasks you want to add to your plate and keep in mind how much time you have to dedicate to them. When you’re quick to clear space on your plate and careful to fill it back up you can avoid that feeling of having way too much going on.
Some may say that quitters never win and winners never quit, but I think that’s foolish. If something isn’t serving you or your business, why keep doing it? Deciding to quit something that just isn’t worth your time or energy is an incredibly freeing feeling and it’s something we should do more often as business owners. What will you quit next year?
Heidi Thompson is the best-selling author of Clone Your Best Clients and the founder of Evolve Your Wedding Business where she helps wedding professionals grow 6 figure businesses without working all the time. Her business & marketing expertise has been featured on several wedding and business outlets including The Huffington Post, Social Media Examiner, Wedding Business Magazine, Sprouting Photographer, Photo Biz Xposed, Honeybook, WeddingWire World & she’s an advisory board member for the UK Academy Of Wedding & Event Planning. She is the creator and host of Book More Weddings Summit & Wedding Business CEO Summit.
