Add $2,200 to your wedding bookings in 10 minutes

I'm going to show you how to add $2,200 to your wedding bookings in 20 minutes. I'm Marissa Grace. I took my wedding business from $20,000 a year to $260,000 in 24 months solo, without a team, doing weddings without me, running paid ads. After working with over 700 students in my programs who are bridal hairstylists, bridal makeup artists, I constantly see them leaking profit. So I'm going to show you five ways that you can tackle right now to add $2,200 to your wedding bookings. And no, we are not selling a hair Prep or a SK died for $7. And we're not selling a tutorial and we're not forcing tips on our brides. No time for you if you do. Okay, first things first is travel fee. Your travel fee. When I stopped charging per mile and started charging per half hour, I was able to increase my profit in an insane amount so fast. For example, I live 16 miles outside of center city Philadelphia. That ride without traffic is about a half hour. That ride with traffic is about an hour each way. The 16 mile ride round trip is going to be about 30 mil. The first mistake is only charging for one way of your time. You're going two ways. Always make sure you're charging round trip. But if I'm only charging $0.50 per mile, that's only $15 that I'm making for sometimes a two hour ride. So here's what it looks like. If I'm charging per mile 50 cents per mile for 16 miles at a one hour ride one way I'm only earning $15 versus if I'm charging per half hour and I'm charging $50 per half hour of my time, that one hour R round trip rate is going to be a hundred dollars. I've just added $85 of profit to your bank account. Let's go. Next is going to be having a booking minimum. My love. If you walk away with anything, let it be this. You turn away all other bookings for one bride. It is highly unlikely that you are going around working with multiple brides. Multiple weddings in one day. If you are power to you. I can never. You don't need to. We want to earn more working less. And this is how you're going to do it. Having a booking minimum instead. I see see you out here charging bride only. Taking a bride only. You don't offer her a trial. She doesn't need that for booking. You're trying to take any booking that you can so you will allow a bridal only to come in. And let's just say you're only charging her $300. Okay? So that's how much you're going to earn for that one bride. And you turned away all other wedding bookings for that one bride, right? Now let's say you have a booking minimum and let's just say it's bride plus three guests. That's going to look like is you're charging $300 for the bride. Maybe you're charging 150 per. You are also requiring a trial because it's a non negotiable for you, right? You want everybody to have a trial. Now your booking minimum is at a thousand dollars. I've just added $700 of profit straight to your bank, girlfriend. And on the flip side, you're missing out on $700 worth of profit. So now the total profit that we've added between the travel fee and the Booking minimum is 785. The third way that we're adding $2,300 to your bookings right now is charging for an assistant fee. Stop doing the entire bridal party solo ear. If you're just a hairstylist or you only do makeup services and you're still out here doing the entire bridal party. Let's just say a bride plus eight. Hi, I'm guilty. You could be earning more, working less by having an assistant. Okay? Over time you're not going to want to work with these larger bridal parties because it's going to be a lot on you. And you want to be a six figure earner. A six figure earner is all about working smarter, not harder. So the way to do that as an assistant fee. So if we look here, when you don't have an assistant fee, let's just say you're still charging 300 for your bride. 15054 guests and you have a bridal party of eight. What that's going to look like is about 1500 dollars. Now let's say you do have an assistant that comes on and you're paying them at a standard commission rate of around 70%. You're going to wind up paying your assistant 525. And what you're profiting is 975, which isn't bad. But this is why I see a lot of people so afraid to add an assistant and why you will do the entire bridal party because you want that fifteen hundred dollars, right? So here's what it's going to look like with the assistant fee. For you're still working the bride plus eight. You're still charging the same rates but you're adding on a $400 assistant fee for booking that assistant. Now it's going to look like a $1900 total. You're still paying out your assistant the same rate but you are now earning $400 more in profit versus if you are not charging this, you're out $400. So we've just added eleven hundred and eighty five dollars. Working smarter, not harder. Okay, we've done the travel fee, we've got a booking minimum. We're charging for assistance so we can earn more, work less. Now upsells, upsells are going to be additional services that your bride needs in addition to the bare minimum basics of the day of services that's going to look like touch ups. For a first look, touch ups till the ceremony, cocktail hour, hair extension rentals, premium touch up kits. Stop giving your touch up kits away for free. It is an amazing upsell that she needs. Instead of giving it away for free, earn more profit with it. So in these examples, when taking the exact same thing that we had in the assistant example, so you're working a bride plus eight. And here's everything you're charging for. You're charging for trial, you're charging for the guests bride day of services travel fee and the total is 1950. You're paying out your assistant with the travel fee and the five guests that they're working, 625. Your profit is going to look like 1325. Now when you add an upsell, let's just say you add a first look, touch up upsell. So that's going to look like maybe four hours and you're charging around $100 per hour. So here's what everything's going to look like when you have the assistant fee, the touch up fee, you got a trial travel and the bare minimum in there, we're looking at 2750. Still paying out your assistant the same of 625. But you've now increased your profit by $800. Because you've added this upsell. Your profit went from 1325 to 2125 dollars. And you are not working with more brides, you are earning more from the brides you already have booked. This is six figure energy right here. So overall with everything we've talked about so far, We've now added $1,985 to your bookings. I feel like I'm gonna cover this in 10 minutes, not 20 period. Okay. One of my personal favorites is gonna have to be offering two looks at trials. Yes. You can still do this as a makeup artist. How you would do this as a makeup artist, because I know you're already gonna have questions, is you would start off with a softer look and then you build up an add up and you might be like Marissa. That's what I do at trials. Anyway. You want to frame it as two looks because it's going to take you more time, Right. Let's just say you're doing different lashes. That's going to take you more time. Let's just say your standard one look trial is around a two hour appointment. That's what it was for me, but it's going to be an additional hour if I was adding on a second look. So let's just say my bride wanted to see a glam wave and she wanted to see herself with a high bun. That's going to take me about three hours. So you want to make sure you're charging for that time. So let's just say your typical one look trial is going to look around a two hour appointment and you charge around 250 for it. Now let's just say you do two looks and you're charging an additional 250 for that additional hour. You just add it on $200. And when you add all these up, when we do the travel fee, the booking minimum, the assistant fee, offering an upsell and offering two looks at the trial, you can now add an additional $2,185. If you round it up, it's going to be around $2,200. And we're not working with more brides. This is all from one booking. And that's how you can earn more and work less. And of course, I have a few honorable mentions because this is just some ways that you can increase cash flow that I've learned over time. The first one is going to be increasing your deposit. So let's just say you need cash flow right now. Typically you can go with a percentage for your deposit of the overall booking, or you can go with just a flat fee, meaning you need to pay this rate in order for me to hold your date. And if you're not doing deposits, jail time for you. I always did a flat fee because it was just easier for me on the back end. And that's just typically how I like to run my business. When I started out, I would do a flat fee of like 200, which was honestly so low. So over time I increased it and when I increased it to a $500 flat fee, that means every time somebody booked me, I would instantly get $500 of the deposit money. Right? If you're somebody who needs more cash flow in the meantime, right now you want to increase this so then you can get that instant cash flow. If you increase it from a $200 flat fee to a $500 flat fee, that's an instant $300 of cash to your bank account where you don't need to do more. And my last absolute favorite way for you to add more cash flow is going to be to increase your post frequency here, because I have data to back this up. Okay? The more you post, the more brides know you exist, the more traffic you have, the more booking opportunities you will get. Okay? The more I post it, the more brides were in my inbox and the more inquiries I got, it was the easier odds that a bride was going to book with me. Okay, so sales is a numbers game. This is how we're going to break down your 5k month just from booking deposits. If you want to book 10 weddings in a month, earning around $500 per deposit, that's going to give you a $5,000 month. Now to that, when we look at sales as a numbers game, you want to have around 100 conversations with brides. Now, if I lost you or you just spit out your Aulani nil, stick with me, okay? Because you're likely going to book at 20%, which is the average. So that's why increasing your post frequency, getting more brides in your inbox every single month is going to give you more conversations that you have with brides, AKA giving you more chances to book more brides. Now, let's just say you convert higher and you're converting better. You're having better sales conversations, you have a better booking process, and maybe you're converting at 30%. Well, then to book 10 weddings, you would only need to have 35 conversations. Either way, whatever one we're looking at, more traffic equals more odds that brides are going to land in your inbox and more brides to book with you, which is your choice. All right, let me know in the comments below which one you're going to add to your bookings today. And we did this under 20 minutes. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.