From Overwhelmed to CEO: The Transformation Journey of a Wedding Pro

The Wedding Pro CEO Podcast: Episode 198 With Brandee Gaar and Julie Rupert 

Hey there, CEOs. Welcome to the Wedding Pro CEO podcast. I’m your host, Brandee Gaar, and my mission is to help you, the wedding industry entrepreneur. To build a profitable wedding business that you actually love.

On today’s show, I am chatting with Julie Rupert of Julie Rupert Events. She’s a planner in Virginia, and Julie and I are talking all about how to really invest in education even when you feel like you have less than zero time available to invest. Julie was listening to a podcast last fall and she heard me talking to Eddie Babbage on his podcast, and what I was saying on that podcast was completely resonating with her, but Julie was underwater. She was so busy. She had so many events and she really felt like she was at a place in her business where she wanted to kind of throw it all away.

Instead, she decided to take a leap and invest in her education, and she joined the Wedding Pro CEO Accelerator. What I would encourage you to hear from this episode is, that if you always say that you can’t invest because you’re busy or you’re overwhelmed, you’re always going to be busy or overwhelmed because you need the tools and you need somebody to kinda peel back the curtain and help you to see the light through the forest, right?

In this episode, that’s exactly what Julie and I are talking about! She is like a whole different human. She’s taking a two week vacation with her oldest daughter, and that’s something that she would’ve never been able to do last summer. She’s able to step away from her business and enjoy her family and build a business, that really helps her to see the joys in her life that she has.

“The journey from overwhelmed to CEO is not a straight path. It’s filled with challenges, but also with immense growth and transformation. It’s about taking a leap of faith and investing in yourself and your business.”

Julie Rupert

The hustling stage of a wedding business

The hustling stage of your business is just that, it’s when you hustle to grow your business. At this point in your business, the perfect client is one that will pay you. And we talk about that a lot, that’s like that hustler stage, right? You hear coaches, and I’m guilty of it, talk about “you need to know who your ideal client is. You need to be marketing to them. you need to make sure your prices are right” and let’s just be super honest to talk about that for a second, in that hustler stage of business, none of that applies! I would love to pretend that we should all start our businesses with this magical avatar and you know exactly how much you’re charging, but in reality, I feel like it is so much learning what kind of clients you like and which kind of clients you don’t like.

You’re also learning what you need to make, right? There’s so much that you just don’t even know when you start your business. So in that hustler stage like your ideal client is the one who will pay you dollars to do their wedding.

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How do you get from the hustler stage to the blooming onion stage?

When you’re in that hustler stage and you’re just taking anything and everything, almost to your own detriment, right? You’re just like so excited to get a client. Then all of a sudden you’re like, wait a second, I have an entire booked calendar. I don’t have a single date open. I’m overwhelmed. So you’re like, looking ahead, how am I going to enjoy life? All I do is work and I’m doing all of this work and I’m not actually paying myself. So it starts to be this realization where you go from that hustler stage to the blooming onion stage of what am I doing and how did I get here?

Julie always had people that were helping her like day of assistants but, essentially Julie Rupert events was Julie Rupert. That was it. So one day she was like, you know what? That’s all it’s gonna be. That was all she could handle. So she decided she was gonna do as much as she could do. And then she was like, no, I think I wanna hire a team and it was hard to make that decision. But you just have to take the leap!

Julie took the big step to ditch the overwhelm

When Julie entered the Accelerator she was at her wit’s end. She was like crying before every wedding and felt like there was no end in sight! Then she started listening to the Wedding Industry Insider podcast that Eddie does, through Timeline Genius, and she listened to every episode! In that moment, she just didn’t ever see herself ever being at that point in her business or her career where she would spend a big chunk of money and or spend any money on coaching. Why wasn’t listening to a podcast enough?? Then, she heard my “ditch the overwhelm” spiel. She was at the point where she didn’t know how to take the overwhelm out of the day to day!

I think that happens a lot because when I say I’ve been there. I’m not making that up. Like I can still remember sitting on my porch just bawling and just being like, I don’t know what we’ve done, but
this is not what I signed up for. From the outside looking in, it normally looks like everything is put together and it kind of look like you’re thriving when in reality, it’s the complete opposite on the inside. In Julie’s case, people wanted to be Julie Rupert Events. They were like look at her, she built her business so fast. She’s got this amazing thing going. But on the inside she was like, “I want to disappear, like I just can’t do this anymore” until she made the decision to build a team.

“The road to success is often paved with moments of doubt and overwhelm. But it’s in those moments that we must remember why we started and what we’re working towards. It’s about finding the courage to keep going, even when the going gets tough.”

Julie Rupert

Use free education to vet your next investment in a coach or educator.

Julie found me on Eddie’s podcast and I talked about this at the summit and I’m really passionate about it, the reason that I have a podcast and the reason that I go live so much, or I do so many reels, and go on people’s podcasts, is because I genuinely think before you pick a business coach, you should hear their free education first. Free education only goes so deep, right? It’s not gonna transform your business. It’s gonna give you a nugget or two.

But the reason for free education, I feel is so that you are almost like a test driving a new car, right? It’s like hey, I want to know, does this person speak to me? Has this person gone through what I have gone through? Or do they know where I wanna go? Do I have the same morals and values as this person does when they teach? Do I actually understand what they’re saying? So I think that there’s a lot of test driving to it! Julie heard me on Eddie’s podcast and was like, “okay, wait a second. Like she hears me, she’s in my head.

Julie’s first moments in the Accelerator

Julie’s first moments in the Accelerator were intimidating because you see all these other business owners and you don’t know them, you don’t know their story. But for her it was so welcoming and she always call it her group therapy because it just was exactly what she needed at the exact time. She was struggling. While it was like super intimidating to jump into it and just join she just had to let it go. She decided this is what she wanted and where she wanted to be. She wanted to be in the position that some of the other ladies are in their business. So she just let it all out and it’s really paid off. Overall, it was just was such a supportive group and, the initial like fear and intimidation was natural, but it went away pretty quickly.

Where is Julie’s business at a year after joining?

So here we are almost a year later, she has a team. She hired a lead planner that has come on board to take that will take weddings on her own. She also hired three other employees that are day of assistants. She’s letting go of things that were really hard for her to let go of. She was at the summit in June and it was the first time that she’s ever put her ‘out of office’ on and forwarded everything to her. One of my favorite things that I’ve loved watching with Julie has been learning how to become a leader!

Watch full episode on Youtube!

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