Behind The Scenes Of Wedding Weekend & Lessons Learned

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories. It's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, Julie here. And today I am going to kind of do a personal episode. I just got married this past weekend and I I am thinking that I want to take you on the journey of my wedding weekend and also just kind of reflect on a few lessons that I learned. So I have been planning this wedding. I mean, AC and I have been doing it together for about 10 months, and it's crazy that 10 months of planning culminates in one 7-hour event and the pressure. And I, I knew that this was going to be this way, and I— in business, it's often the same way. You plan and plan and plan, and then you have a, you know, 2, 3-day event, and it's just a crazy push to that finish line. In wedding planning, like, societally, it's a big to-do, right? And there's a lot of specific cultural and societal rituals built in. And this was, you know, the, the second time that I really had to plan a wedding, and so much had changed, you know. And so we got engaged in December of 2023, and we set the date pretty soon after that. And so we had basically January to October to plan. And I, I think about what frame of mind I was in in January, and I, I knew that the year was going to be crazy busy because, you know, I have children and business. I've got two businesses. And like, how was I going to plan a wedding on top of it, even if that's like something super fun to do? I knew that I would spend a lot of time and energy looking for vendors and figuring out who's the right fit and who isn't and what details would I miss, right? And so this decision to hire a wedding planner, I had a lot of feelings about, and I, I kind of want to talk about it 'cause I think there's a lot of correlation between, you know, hiring a coach or a mentor And I felt this way when I hired the wedding planner. And I, I remember thinking like, I, I know how to do this. Like I host events, I've hosted events at my barn, you know, I have an executive assistant. AC has a lot of connections. Like, do we really need to spend the money on a wedding planner? And it was $13,000 for a wedding planner. So it wasn't like a cheap amount of money. And she offered, she said, I can do just wedding day management, right? Where she comes in and just kind of manages the vendors. Or she could do the full planning. And I really wrestled with the decision. I felt weird saying, okay, I'm going to do it because I knew that I needed help, but I also knew that I could, I was fully capable, you know, and we ended up hiring a wedding planner and it really worked out because she was able to get connections faster than I could get. She had ideas of what had to be done at what time, which allowed me to not have to think about that, right? So she would say, okay, now it's time to worry about this, or now it's time to think about this. And so, but it bought back a lot of bandwidth in my mind to not have to think about those things. So, you know, even though it was tempting to just go for like, oh, I'm just gonna hire her for the day, and I wrestled over the price tag of it, we went ahead and we hired a wedding planner, planner. And that made the whole process so much easier. And I would say that a lot of people probably didn't even realize I was planning a wedding because it didn't really impact my day-to-day life because she was managing all of those pieces. Um, so when we got to the week of the wedding, right, which was just this past week, uh, it was wild because I was like, oh, we're super organized, like it's gonna be great. But the home stretch was stressful. It was so stressful. And, uh, Kathy had come. I, I blocked off my calendar. I didn't have any, like, meetings or hot seats, and I decided, you know, I was just going to focus those days on all the things that had to be done. And it was still a lot. And by the day of the rehearsal, which was last Friday, there was still a to-do list much longer than you would have guessed. You know, like, the tiniest of details were just bubbling to the surface. He and I didn't even eat until dinner time. And I remember thinking like, gosh, why am I so disorganized? But then I realized, no, no, no, it doesn't really, doesn't matter like how well you plan, that last push is always gonna be stressful. And I think about that in business all the time, especially with funnel launches. It's like no matter how organized you are, no matter how much you're doing the project, that last couple days before you get that funnel out the door, that offer, that launch out the door, it's stressful. And I'm like, this is just what it is, you know? And that's really how it felt. I was thankfully much less stressed on my wedding day, but the day before, that Friday, I was not— was not my highest self. We'll just put it, put it like that. Um, okay, something else that I want to bring up in the wedding planning process, I think there's again business lessons to this, is the less exciting stuff. There's always the fun things in wedding planning, picking out the colors and tasting the food and picking out the dress. Like, these are all the really fun parts of wedding planning that I got to enjoy. But there was all the, like, less exciting stuff, uh, specifically around creating a prenup agreement. And I haven't hidden the fact that, you know, at this stage of life, AC and I decided and mutually agreed to go through the process of a prenup And it was not fun to hire lawyers. It was not fun to spend $20,000 between legal fees, business valuation fees. Um, basically we planned out a divorce in advance. Like, it was not fun on any level, and I did not want to deal with it. And I, I— but I had made a promise to myself that I would not neglect these things, and Sort of the lesson I learned is that number one, it gave AC and I a very unique opportunity to have discussions that we would not have had otherwise. And it actually brought us much closer together. We felt more, um, clear on where we were, more committed. And also we were able to then go forward with the planning, not having any fears or worries that there was anything about this that was other than love and affection and commitment. And I know, you know, people have a lot of personal opinions about prenuptial agreements and I've never done one in the past, but it was a promise I made to myself after the divorce I went through. And so it was not exciting and it was not fun. And I am so glad that I kept that promise to myself. And again, I think about this in business. You know, we, we focus on all the fun things and the, the cool stuff and the outside metrics, but there's all that like less exciting stuff that is really, really important. And meaningful in your business, whether it's, you know, working on your profit margin or forecasting operations, those things really matter and they need to be tended to even alongside the fun, you know, the fun stuff. Okay, so the actual day of the wedding, despite all of my worries, we had nobody sick, which was a big concern I had. That I absolutely cannot control. And I was worried about the weather and the weather was stunning. Absolutely stunning. It was like 65 and then like 55 at night. Perfectly clear skies. It was a beautiful day. We had our, our ceremony at 3:30 in the afternoon at this old white church on the historic Guilford Green. And the sun was like pouring in on where we were standing, right? As we like said our vows because it was like 4 PM, and then we had dusk to take all the photos. So the— I mean, the colors, the peak foliage, the colors, it was just an absolute, absolutely beautiful backdrop. We invited everyone back to our house. We had our barn fully decked out. We had a dance floor brought in and DJ, catering, you know, the whole nine yards. We We even had a mobile bar, like an Irish bar. You can go on my Instagram or my Facebook and see it, a mobile bar set up. We had two fire pits going and we had cornhole and like, it was just this amazing hangout area and it was, it felt super comfortable and I was so happy. I noticed that a few people changed, like, I don't know, like an hour or two into the reception. And I just, I felt so like awesome that that happened because they felt so comfortable that they like got outta their suits and they got in jeans and hoodies and they were sitting around the fire with a drink. And I just felt it was just such a special day. And AC and I danced the night away. Now if you follow me on Instagram, I had so much dress drama. You can't even believe it. I bought my dress in February and then I lost 25 pounds. So it was really way too big when it came in and it was too big for like 3 fittings. And then the 4th fitting, it was too small. It like, I mean, it wasn't too small, but it was just very, very tight. And I panicked 'cause I had like 2, 3 weeks to go and I thought, oh my gosh, if I gain any weight, like back, I'm gonna, I'm not gonna fit in this dress. My weight isn't stable because it's a new weight that I've not been at for a very long time. So I was very, very stressed. Well, in the back of my closet, I had bought a dress online. Like, it was $300. It was not an expensive dress, and I bought it before I had even gone dress shopping, and it was in my closet, and I had tried it on when it arrived. It was way too small. I didn't understand wedding dress sizing. And so, um, right at the 11th hour when I was panicking about the dress that was too, too now too small, I grabbed that dress out and I put it on and it fit. And I rushed down to the tailor's and I was like, is there any way you can make this ready? And she was like, absolutely. So she got it all ready and I just kind of had it as a backup. And so I, I wasn't sure what I was gonna do on the day of my wedding. And I showed both dresses to my bridesmaids and they all said, no, go with your original one. It's gorgeous. It's beautiful. So I was like, okay. So I wore my, my main dress, which by the way fit perfectly fine, uh, the day of the wedding. And I was, you know, I was— it was so pretty. Like, it was just so pretty. It looked so pretty in pictures. But when we got back to the barn and I was walking around, you know, my bustle is kind of heavy, the dress is very heavy. And I said, you know what, I grabbed Kathy, I said, I want to go change into the other dress to dance. And so we snuck out, we didn't tell anybody we were, we were leaving. We went back to the house, I changed into the dress, and and I came out and everyone was dancing, and I just like waltzed onto the dance floor, and like everybody's face was like, oh my God, you changed, you know? And AC's face, it was, it was so awesome. So I ended up wearing both dresses, and I loved it. So that was something that I would say I would recommend to brides. Like, if you have a dancing dress versus like a, like a wedding ceremony dress, absolutely do because it, it makes a huge difference. Okay, sorry guys. Um, the last thing I want to talk about is, um, money. So let's talk about money for a minute. Learning where to spend and where to save. This is a business, uh, problem as much as it is a wedding one, right? If, if we weren't careful, like, weddings would like cha-ching our butt all the way to bankruptcy. It was wild how expensive everything was. And so it took us a little bit of time to figure out like, where do we drop the money and where do we cut back? And you know, I find that people will say, well, I'll cut things that don't have like a justification. The problem is that everything comes with a very logical explanation. It's very easy to justify everything. And so if you're waiting for a lack of justification to prove that you don't need it, you're gonna be waiting a long time. And so we decided to start thinking about both impact and long-term return. Return. So for example, flowers, high impact but low long-term return, so we cut back. Wedding band, high impact and high long-term return, okay, we're gonna splurge. So that's kind of how we made our decisions, but it's always going to be more expensive than you think, like in business and in life and in wedding. I went through every stage of grief about the spending, from like, okay, we're going to be reasonable, to this is out of control, and At the end of the day, I finally just accepted what it was and didn't attach any moral value to how much we spent. It was an expensive, well-planned, thoughtfully executed, reasonable, amazing day. So how much did it cost? I don't actually know because it's really hard to calculate what it all truly costs because there's the general wedding budget, right? The dress, the venue, the food, the alcohol, right? But then you had things like the prenup, Or the wedding planner? Do you count the honeymoon? Do you count the wedding bands? And then I'm like, well, well, do you count the fire extinguishers we bought the morning of the wedding just to make sure the barn didn't burn down? The $800 million last-minute Amazon and Staples purchases? What about the $350 we paid the leaf guy to come and suck up the leaves before they all just fell again on the driveway? So like, How do I, where do I start and stop the budget? I think if we were to like do a true wedding budget, it was probably around $50,000, you know, a $50,000 wedding. And you know, we thought, oh, we're gonna save money by having it at home, which is absolutely not true. And that was a problem with our expectations because when you have your wedding at home, everything has to be rented, everything has to be brought in, right? When you have it at like a venue, it's all, A lot of that stuff is baked in. But if we include business valuation, prenup, honeymoon, leaf guy, fire extinguishers, you know, we easily, easily spent $100 grand. So that's a crap ton of money. And if you had told me that at the beginning, I would've been like, no way. But that is how life goes, right? That is how business goes. It's always going to be more expensive than you think. To run a business will always be more expensive than you think. I'm really grateful for the entire experience. I had a few people ask me, like, are you having the post-wedding blues? And I am not. I don't know if this is a function of maturity or age, but I am not having the post-wedding blues, which I'm really, I'm really happy about. No, no shade to anyone who does. Of course, I'm actually quite relieved. I'm relieved that I don't have to wonder if I'm going to fit into my dress. And the pressure to really get the house ready was a lot. And I'm so satisfied with how the event went, how I experience the day, and then we've got video footage and photos and like it's going to be crystallized and memorialized and we can like look back on those memories. So I am very, very content and I'm excited. I'm excited to close the wedding planning chapter and now I get to look ahead to 2025 and set my eyes on what future projects and plans are coming. You know, this was a very big year for me personally, and I'm excited to, you know, see what comes for me business-wise in the upcoming year. So anyway, I hope that was a fun listen and thanks for being along on the journey. I'll talk to you soon. And there you have it, folks. Another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey. With resolve. Remember, until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.