Optimize your slow season as a bridal beauty pro!

We are currently in December my friends. And before you go filling every single one of your empty calendar spaces and saying oh my God, I need to get a side business. Oh my God, I hate having Saturdays off. No, what you want to be doing is a slow season audit of your business. So that way your next year is planned and prepped and ready and super easy. So for today's video we're going to be going over my slow season audit that I do every single year, AKA the work that I don't have the mental capacity to do during the summer. So let's dive in every year during these months. Here is the slow season audit that I do during December, January, February as well as March. So before we dive in, this is the audit that I do. First thing I do is I go over all of my calendar weddings that I have for the upcoming year to see which ones I need. Second stylist for next I'll update my Google calendar with all the information that I want at a glance. Update my bridal dashboard with all of my clients information. So that way I have it easily readily on my phone as well as my laptop and I'm taking all the information from my CRM Dubsado and putting it into my bridal dashboard. Don't worry, I'm going to give you a walkthrough in a minute. Optimize my Instagram bio highlights as well as my feed content and I go over and do an Instagram audit. I audit my website, I audit my CRM, my Dubsado and I go through my contract proposals, update my workflows and make sure that my clients experience is really enhanced. Lastly, I create a Google Doc and I go through my entire previous year and I think about what were my hard times, what made my year hard, what were the friction points and I write out and brainstorm ways to eliminate those things for the upcoming year. So let's do this together. Dubsado is great. However, one of the worst things about it is you have to tab over to all the different things in order to get a full picture view of your client project profile. All the different things you have to actually manually go in and click tabs. So when you need things at a glance you actually have to go through and manually click things to figure things out. So that's why I created my bridal dashboard. Now let me show you what I mean. So when you are in dubsado and.

Most CRMs when you go and you click a client's project and you go into one of their projects, you have to click around on multiple tabs in order for you to get information that you may need. So in order for me to get client information, like to see if I need a second stylist for this, I have to go over to her invoice and see how many guests are on her invoice. This for me isn't really easily readily available to organize when I'm working 60, 80, 100 plus weddings a year. And I want something fast and at a glance.

So what I did instead was I.

Created my bridal dashboard. So let me show you what that is. This is my bridal dashboard. My bridal dashboard is essentially spreadsheets on style steroids. So I have a bunch of different views that you can do inside the bridal dashboard. But one of my favorite things that I love to do in here is I'm able to filter and organize by specific things that I need to find out. So one of the views is a gallery view. So what I like to do is put all of my clients photos here. So that way everything from their trials, I have it ready to go for the wedding morning. Another great thing is you can use it on your desktop as well as have it on an app on your phone. So when I click into a client's project like this, it's going to open a record where I keep all of her notes from her bridal trial. I keep everything here, anything that I need to know, her details. Is she getting a second look? Who's her makeup artist, the venue, the videographer? Is there an assistant with me now? Here's where it gets even better. So down here I can choose a status, I can put a status of is there an assistant? Did I hire somebody? Did I not? So that way I can go through on my slow season audit. And this is what I do. I pull up my bridal dashboard and I update all of their info for my 2024 brides. That's what I'll be doing. And I'll go through filter and I can go to add condition, I can choose assistant, need it. And then I'm going to select the option need assistant. So that way I know all of the projects, all of the weddings I have upcoming that need an assistant on. So now I can reach out to stylists and secure them for the upcoming year.

The next thing that I love to.

Track in my bridal dashboard is my invoices as well as how I'm going to be paying my second stylist or assistance that I have come with me on weddings.

So to make things easier for me.

How I pay my assistance is through Venmo. So on that day of instead of going into my client's invoice within Dubsado, your CRM, what I like to do is house everything in my dashboard. So what I'll do on my slow season is I go through every single one of my clients invoices and I input all that information into my bridal dashboard. So what it's going to look like is like this. So over here where I have my assistant details, I will go through and I go through here and I type out exactly how many guests are going to be working on that wedding, what the travel fee is that I'm going to be paying my assistance. So then when it's the day of, I easily come in here, I copy it and I paste that in the note over into Venmo so I know exactly how much I need to be paying them. I also go through and I put in all of the invoice total. So I'll do their invoice, their preview appointments, every single thing. And then I can actually go through and track and see who paid their balance and who didn't pay their balance. So then again, I can come up here throughout the wedding year and I can go to condition and I can go to assistant needed and I can filter by all these statuses and then at a glance I could see who paid their balance, who didn't. Yes, you can see this inside Dubsado, but this is just an easier way to see it. And one of my, my other favorite things is how I can track if I have a timeline. I put a little photo of the timeline here. So that way I know if I have, if I don't have a timeline over here on my spreadsheet and my bridal dashboard, I need to reach back out to my bride because she didn't fill out the questionnaire. So this is my bridal dashboard. Now let's get back into the slow season audit.

If you want to grab my bridal dashboard, there is a link down below for you. So once I update all of this during my slow season, it makes my wedding season that much less chaotic. So instead of going through everything inside my CRM, I will simply pull out my phone on a wedding morning and then I just go over to my Air Table app and on my Air Table app is where I'm going to go through my bridal dashboard and I have everything that I need at my fingertips instead of having to sift through all of my CRM info I can just go in here so if I have my assistant with me, I can go into assistant details. I can go and I can find if she paid her balance and then I can also go in there and see all of the notes that I wrote. So that way I'm able to do her hairstyle. I can see if we use a hair accessory, if she has a veil, who her makeup artist is, where the location is, any details that she gave me. And then I can also go through and see all of her hair trial photos right at my fingertips. I like to keep my bride's phone numbers in there so that way I can text them on the wedding morning as well. That's the first step in getting prepped and planned for an easy breezy lemon squeezy year ahead for you. Next thing I want to do is optimize my Instagram and audit my feed content as well as my bio and my highlights. So during chaotic wedding season, your Instagram can kind of feel like it's running on autopilot, which you kind of want. However, when you're looking at your year ahead, you want to make sure that you're going through and optimizing your Instagram. You want to look through your Instagram highlights and make sure Are your highlights up to date? Is there anything that you want to remove? Is it aligned with the brand and the business and the ideal client that you want to use inside your business moving forward into the new year? If not, you want to remove any old highlights. You also want to go through your Instagram bio and make sure that it's speaking to that ideal client you want for the year ahead. So things you want to ask yourself does my current bio highlights, Instagram feed align with the brand and the business business and the vision that I have for my current year and the year ahead? How can I audit my bio highlights and feed to better attract the ideal bride that I want for the upcoming year? What feed content does my Instagram actually need? So if you're changing up your signature style, if you're moving away from one style and you're going to a new one, does your Instagram need new content? If so, you're going to want to make sure you remove any old content and make sure that you plan content days for your off season so that way you can get that content. After you audit your Instagram, next thing you want to to audit is your website. This can also be something that throughout the year you kind of set it and forget it. However, what you want to do at the Top of the year is you want to audit it. And again, the same thing we did with your Instagram. You want to make sure that it's aligning with where you want to take your business, that it's aligning and attracting that ideal bride. You want to update it with professional photographer photos as well as any new reviews from clients. Currently I use the website host Squarespace which is super user friendly because I am not a tech savvy girly. However, I will be moving over to a new website host called Show Show. It looks not that much user friendly when I've been looking into it. However the reviews are saying that it is and I will give you guys an update once I move over to that. Because the one thing that I hate about Squarespace and that is just so frustrating to me because I'm not a tech girly is that the mobile and the desktop versions are super irritating to update. The desktop version never clearly transfers on the mobile version. They look totally different. And you think that Squarespace would have it together by now, but they do not. And for me personally it's just super irritating. And there's other things that I want to have updated and I want to start adding more video onto my website, which I found when researching the website hosts Showit. You're able to easily do that. I also found some really great templates for Showit that you can easily plug and play and just drop in your photos and your colors on a site called Tonic. So that's what I'm going to be using moving forward and when I create a website for Bridal Boss Academy. Now for you, when you're auditing your website, here's the things you want to be asking yourself. Whether you're auditing your website or you are creating a new one. Is it clear who I'm talking to to on my website? Are my packages clear and simple or are they overwhelming? And am I packing in too much verbiage which is going to leave my clients confused and overwhelmed and not want to take action? Is my website clear and concise with the verbiage? Are the designs clear and concise or is it too overwhelming and I have too much going on? Again, going to leave my client overwhelmed and not be able to take action. The next audit I'm going to do is my CRM which I use Dubsado. Maybe use something like honeybook or 17 hats. This is a CRM system. So again, another thing that we said it and we forget get it. However, at the top of the year you want to make sure. That your client's experience on the back end is seamless and frictionless. So I like to take this time and go through my workflows, go through my packages, proposals as well as my contract and see if there's anything I can update in there. Based off of the past year, I'll review and see if there's anything I can make easier for my clients. Specifically, what I will do is I'll go in my contract and I'll think through the past year and all the experiences that I've had and I'll think to myself, is there anything I want to update into my contract now that I've gone through that, that experience? For me personally, my contracts really come from experience to protect myself as well.

As protect my client.

So if I've not experienced something, it's unlikely that I'm going to put it in my contract because I've likely not dealt with it. Now, after working hundreds of weddings, years after years at the top of the year, I usually like to review my contract and make sure, does this align with me? Does that not align with me? I'll remove some things as well as add some things. Next, I want to audit my hair kit. So I very first started doing this last year and you guys may have seen me totally transform my haircut. And this was literally a game changer for me. So I wanted to make sure I included this inside the slow season audit. So for you, ask yourself, is there a better, faster, easier way that you can unpack and pack when you are on location, as well as what is the ideal setup location for you? Because oftentimes, sure, the kit that you have right now is working for you. She's doing a good job. But don't we want it to be better, faster, easier? And don't we want it to be cute and aesthetic and functional? So here's what I did. Last year, I looked at my entire kit and realized she was ugly af. So I wanted to update literally everything in it. And I wanted to add my brand, I wanted to add my personality, and I wanted to be proud of my kit. So what I did was I did a total overhaul. I got new organizers as well as I got one bag that houses everything instead of multiple separate bags. And what this did was by converting all those separate bags and putting most of my tools and my products inside a makeup case. This was way easier when I was setting up on location because all I had to do was bring out that one bag instead of set up multiple different bags. So for you, what you can ask yourself, when you're going through and you're auditing your kit, you can say, am I using this product? Am I not? Did I use this product at all this year? Then you can get rid of them. Did you use this tool? If not, you can get rid of it. Ask yourself what would make my packing up super seamless and super easy? Also ask yourself, what was the absolute worst setup ever and what would be the ideal setup? How can you make that ideal without having to lean on your clients and being able to fully bring everything yourself? If you want to know everything that's in my kid, I'll link a video down below where I break down down every organizer that I use inside of my haircut. After you do your hair audit, your website audit, as well as your Instagram audit, now you want to open a Google Doc and you want to think about the past year, maybe even the past few years, if this is your first time doing an audit during your slow season of your business, and you want to write out everything that was hard for you that year. So what I like to do is review my past year and think about the setups that were hard for me, the locations that were hard for me, the personalities that were hard for me, any experiences that were hard for me, anything that was friction in my business that made it harder for me to show up. That way I can brainstorm all the different ways that I can eliminate these problems. Because what ends up happening is when you're looking back on those past experiences and then you find a solution so that way you can eliminate that from happening, it's going to make you that much more planned and prepped for the year ahead so that way it doesn't happen again. And that's actually how I created my bridal dashboard, because it was a huge friction point for me. And I actually ended up not hiring a stylist that I needed a second stylist on for a wedding where I had about 12 guests that I needed to do because in my CRM I wasn't able to track when I need a second stylist. It was a huge friction point for me. So I created my own system to eliminate that from ever happening again. So for you, what you can do is go in the Google Doc and write out everything that was hard that you experienced this year. So, for example, for me, what I realized when I was looking at my past year, I no longer like working on Sundays because my husband Brad now has all Sundays and Mondays. So when I was taking a wedding on a Sunday or I was taking trials on Sundays. That takes me away from time that I can spend with my my family. So for the years moving forward, because that was such a hard friction point for me and I'd rather be at home than working, what I decided to do was eliminate Sunday weddings and only do trials one Sunday a month. Another friction point for me when I was brainstorming this out was I thought to myself about the times where I was so exhausted doing trials and those times were when I would overbook myself. So typically I like to stick to around four trials a day. However, after doing that over the past year, that exhausted me. So now I'm only sticking to three trials a day. And that's going to be my max and that will be it. And it'll eliminate me from feeling exhausted in the upcoming year and my future self will thank me for it. The other thing that made this current year hard for me is packing and repacking and packing and repacking and packing and repacking. Specifically when I'm coming from a weekend to my studio to do trials. So I know it's a bigger investment and I've always wanted to do it. But I'm going to be investing in getting two kits. One that I can leave in my studio for trials and then one I can leave at my house for when I'm on location. Then in between, I'll just fill up on care products and stuff when I'm here for trials and add that into my kit so that way I can eliminate that stress of packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking. Getting these things done throughout the year when your brain is solely focused on working with brides and making them happy and making them have the best day ever is really hard. That's why for me, I crave slow seasons when I have Saturdays off and I have the time to go through and do all these audits. So that way my year ahead is prepped and easy and my future self thanks me and so are your future self. Comment down below. Slow season audit if you're going going to be doing this inside your business and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye.