We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brandee Gaar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brandee below.

Hi Brandee, thanks for joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I started my wedding planning business in 2007 and paid myself less than $20k/year for years! I worked all the time and for barely any income. When we had our 3rd daughter in 2012 I wanted to throw the business away because I couldn’t work so much for so little anymore. Instead, my husband and I went all in, he quit his job to help with the kids and I focused on creating more profitability in the business.

Fast forward 11 years, I draw a full time income from our planning company and work less than 5 hours/week in it (thanks to an INCREDIBLE team!) and now I teach other wedding pros and creatives how to ditch the overwhelm and build a profitable business they actually love!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

The wedding industry (and service providers in general) wear burned out and overwhelmed like a badge of honor. The more you work the more successful you must be! But in reality, most of us don’t charge enough to actually pay ourselves to grow a team so you end up on a hamster wheel of work more make more. The problem with this is that there’s no way out. No way to take a break or a vacation or even have an exit strategy.

I teach creatives how to price for profit and how to build a business they can scale. Removing themselves from the day to day and building a business that can truly run without their constant oversight!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

When the pandemic hit, the wedding industry was flattened. Our revenue went to 0 and we had payroll to keep up for our employees. It was maddening but my team is resilient and we all went to work creating virtual planning tools for our clients to use, creating new ways to connect with leads virtually, and try to just keep enough money in the bank to get by each month. While I never wish another pandemic to roll through, I loved seeing our team work together to ensure our couples we would help them through this crazy time and now we are a stronger brand than ever!

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

Almost every summer for YEARS (slow season) we would barely be able to make payroll each month! We dreaded summers because our kids were out of school and we wanted to do vacations but money was SO tight and we didn’t understand how to make the money from high season. One year in particular I can still remember my husband and I sitting in our living room looking at the bank account and we just knew we couldn’t make payroll. and even if we could, we definitely would’t be able to pay ourselves. I’ve never seen my husband so stressed and he said “if this is how our business works, I don’t want to do it anymore”. And that hit so hard. Part of our growth was learning how to know and understand our numbers so well that we could balance slow season with high season so the bank account never got that tight again. It’s still always much lower in the summer but we’ve never had a summer like that since!

Contact Info:

• Website: brandeegaar.com
• Instagram: @brandeegar
• Facebook: @brandeegaarofficial
• Youtube: https://urlgeni.us/youtube/channel/bran

Image Credits
Kristen Weaver Photography Rachael Osborn Photography