3 Efficiency Hacks for Wedding Venue Owners

3 Efficiency Hacks for Wedding Venue Owners
September 3, 2019 432 view(s)
3 Efficiency Hacks for Wedding Venue Owners

My venue, Haue Valley, hosts 85 weddings per year. That is the number at which we consider ourselves “sold out.” (I’m a firm believer that a certain amount of magic has to happen on a wedding day, and that becomes more challenging if I burn my team out with more weddings.)  At that volume of weddings, or really at any number over 25 weddings per year, time is an extremely precious commodity.

Instead of breaking my back working in my business, I’ve set myself up to work on my business. That’s given me the time and the headspace to focus more on systems and processes to make things easier for myself and my team.

Today I’ll share three with you.

 

1. Schedule Invoices One Day Per Month

Set yourself up to make accounting easy. Either implement a system that automatically sends invoices for you on a chosen date, or if you have a more manual process so that you can avoid paying credit card fees, try this hack.

Set up your invoices (all of them except the deposit or booking fee) to be sent out on the first day of the month. If you are sending invoices exactly 30 days before they are due manually it’s a total time-suck.  You're having to sit down to invoice multiple times each month.

Instead, batch all invoices to be sent out on the first day of the month, for whatever date they are due the following month.

I do this and it literally takes me about 10 minutes each month to send $22,000 worth of invoices. That’s a great return on my time invested AND I don’t pay credit card fees.

 

2. Pre-stage

We host three weddings a weekend about 6 months out of the year (one or two per weekend the other months.) That means that on Friday we prep for Saturday, and on Saturday we prep for Sunday. We offer tables, chairs, and décor to our couples.

For the first few years, we waited until the very end of the night of a wedding to start prepping for the next day. That meant the clean, flip the table and chair layout, and décor pull didn’t get started until about 11:30 pm most nights.

Instead of waiting until the last minute, we actually use the downtime of dinner service at a wedding to pull and prep décor for the following day. It shortens the time to prep for the next day down to only the clean and flip at the end of the night.

And trust me, this is still possible if you are extremely short on storage space like we are at Haue Valley.

One of my favorite time-saving hacks is we have completely eliminated the need for pre-wedding prep meetings. I don’t have one with my couples and I don’t have one with my team and we very consistently receive 5 star reviews. Crazy, right?!

The truth is, those meetings eat up a TON of time and can instead be systemized. Pre-wedding couple meetings can easily take one to two hours on average, and by eliminating the need for them, I’ll save myself at least 18 months this month alone.

A combination of regular open house events, and a tool I designed to capture everything my team needs to know about a wedding is all we need to feel 100% prepared. We just print the documents for the weekend, my team grabs the clipboard on their way into the venue on a wedding day, and they are prepped and ready to go. Win-win!

Do you have any efficiency hacks you’d like to share? Head on over to our Facebook page and let us know. We’d love to hear them!


Kristin Binford, Co-founder of Haue Valley and Wedding Venue Coach. Kristin has an undergrad in marketing, an MBA in strategy, and prior to opening a venue she worked for 13 years in mid-sized businesses in marketing leadership roles. During that time she had the opportunity to work with several major agencies and has leveraged that knowledge and experience at Haue Valley. To learn more about working with Kristin visit KristinBinford.com.
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