We were lucky to catch up with Allie Shane recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Allie, thanks for joining us today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

I started my business on my own, using my name and built it the first few years on solely my own reputation. Many wedding planners and event professionals are one-woman shows- the hardest working people I know! However, I realized quickly that my business model was going to require more than I could physically handle myself…and that I might eventually want a weekend off!

As a small business owner who was basically making it all up as I went along, this was a daunting task….along with the fact that I by nature am a control freak (makes me a great event planner!)

My first crack at finding team members was to hire assistants with little experience, but the right skill set and attitude, and then to train them on the job. While this worked, it took a lot of time. Months of work went into training someone and even then, they were kind of starting from scratch when taking on their own events.

I then realized that there are a ton of event professionals that freelance. People who owned their own businesses but just weren’t that busy and lots of folks that hustle for many businesses! I could hire people who already knew how to do the job! Might sound silly, but for me it was a light bulb moment. Over the last 8ish years, that has been my most successful avenue for hiring new team members.

I have built my team very slowly and organically. Never wanting to rush and grow just to grow, as what we do is so special, so high-pressure! Once I realized I could find people I didn’t really have to train, it was more about personality. Finding a group of humans that have the same philosophies, work ethic and maybe just a little bit of crazy in them :)

Now that I have my team, its my greatest joy. Not only are they the key to my own success as a business owner, but I get to help support other women grow their businesses, make money. We’ve created friendships and support systems. And learning to take risks and trust other people has been a huge lesson in business and in life!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Allie, and my self-appointed title is “Lead Party Animal”. Events are my life! I have always been in hospitality and events whether it was bartending and catering through college, doing experiential marketing after graduation and then starting my own business in 2012- Pop the Champagne! Never knowing quite where the journey was going to take me, I have grown slowly and organically, branching off to to create a Podcast- F*ck Weddings, an event bartending company- Bottle Service, and even a pandemic-time solution – The Backyard Wedding Collective.

Pop the Champagne is my baby- and I am proud to have an amazing team of coordinators that make wedding magic every weekend. We are doing 114 weddings in 2022 and are growing quickly. I credit our success to the fact that we do things opposite what much of the wedding industry does. I try to be transparent about services and pricing – we offer one package and one price- and all of it is advertised (sounds weird, but most wedding professionals have kept pricing as some mysterious secret). I try to take a more real-deal approach to wedding planning, reminding clients that this is a party, not a performance. I try to create representation for weddings of all shapes and sizes and am a huge ally for the LGBTQ+ community. Oh, and I cuss a lot!

I created my brands around my personality and have been honest and transparent from day 1, and I think clients respond to that. You won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but THATS OK. Community over competition- there is enough business out there for all of us.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

It was 2019, and I was chugging along, preparing for the busiest wedding year in history- 2020! It was going to be my biggest year yet, my team was amazing, and I was full of hope! Annnndd……well, we all know what happened just a couple of months in.

The events business disappeared literally overnight. For me, it was a personal and professional nightmare. I am an extrovert to a fault, and my business is my life! Within a month or so, it became apparent that while events as we knew it were literally illegal, people still wanted to get married. They were fighting to get licenses from closed courthouses and getting married on zoom.

By mid-April, I had launched “The Backyard Wedding Collective”- when I look back now it’s kind of crazy I worked so fast to launch this pandemic-time solution. It was a mix of boredom, work ethic, and not knowing what the hell was going on with the world.

The BWC morphed and transformed all through 2020 and 2021 and we were able to help dozens of couples get married with real celebrations. Some were fully virtual! We had more vendors than guests at many. We got take out food, I played florist, DJ and coordinator all in one. We wore masks, we made plans A,BC,D and still had to wing it! It was wild but very rewarding and taught me so much.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

While doing the Backyard Wedding Collective, one of the biggest challenges was keeping the number of people on site as low as possible. Vendors multi-tasked and worked hard to create alone, when “normally” they would have a team. Pulling off parties without staff was difficult but we made it work!

As events got a little larger, we needed bar and staffing, so I decided it was easier and better to pull in my own team to fill those roles, which organically led to my bar company, Bottle Service! What started as a way to supplement income and help my clients, turned into a brand and business all its own.

Bottle Service is now a full fledged event bartending business, servicing weddings, large corporate events and small social gatherings. We aim to create “booze fueled experiences” as I bring a decade of event planning experience to the bar!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://popthechampagneevents.com/, https://bottleserviceevents.com/
• Instagram: @popthechampagne, @bottleserviceevents, @fuckweddingspodcast
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/pop-the-champagne-long-beach