We were lucky to catch up with Clay Kyle recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Clay thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you scale up? What were the strategies, tactics, meaningful moments, twists/turns, obstacles, mistakes along the way? We’d love to hear the backstory the illustrates how you grew the firm

In its infancy, my couples counseling practice was slow and quiet. Months would often go by without any inquiries for prospective clients. I decided to take advantage of a connection I had made with a wedding planner whose kids went to the same school as mine. I thought I could attract more couples counseling work if I also offered wedding officiating and pre-marital counseling. Many years prior when I was a yoga teacher, some longtime yoga students asked me to officiate their wedding, and I always remembered how joyful those experiences were.

When I broached the idea of dipping my toe into the waters of the local flourishing wine country wedding business to Lauren Miller, my wonderful neighbor and lead planner of Lauren Miller Events, encouraged me to try officiating weddings. So while I waited and waited for more couples counseling business to magically appear, Lauren started to give me wedding clients who needed an officiant, and she also connected me to a handful of other wedding planners and wedding venues.

Little by little, I started to build up my couples counseling practice. But even though it started as a way to grow my couples counseling services, my wedding officiating business continued to grow at a faster pace than my counseling practice, and I found myself often telling new callers that I was at capacity. We never know how the creative decisions we make to develop one idea might overtake the initial idea and become more of the focus.

Clay, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I was born and raised in southern California, played sports and music, and I loved to write. I played bass in a punk band in high school, and did my undergrad at UC Santa Barbara where I played in another rock band. At the same time, I dove into yoga to take care of myself. Soon I was teaching yoga, which I did for the next 12 years all over LA while leading yoga and meditation retreats.

All along the way, I devoured books about consciousness, psychology, and transformative practices, and I found a great therapist that I worked with long term. Professionally I continued to develop skills to work more multi-dimensionally with people. In 2004, to learn how physical or emotional trauma can respond to body-based interventions, I studied bodywork . In 2007 I received an MA in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University, and I gradually worked toward licensure as an MFT in 2013.

To be closer to family, in 2014 I said goodbye to my Los Angeles yoga community and took up psychotherapy full time in Napa and Santa Rosa, CA, focusing mainly on couples work. But I needed to build the business practically out of thin air. Since I had already officiated some weddings for yoga students and had a great time doing it, in 2018 I decided to help build my couples counseling business by offering pre-marital counseling and wedding officiating. This was a great way to provide counseling and coaching services to couples at any stage of their relationship. Plus, being in the heart of wine country where couples swarm every year to get hitched, the location was key for me to attract a much bigger pool of potential clients.

After Lauren — that wonderful neighbor/wedding planner down the street from us who had kids the same age as ours — generously helped me get my foot in the door of wine country weddings, I started cold-calling other wedding planners and venues. I created an Instagram handle (@winecountryofficiant) and created any content I could think of even though I had only done a couple wedding several years prior, sometimes using the maximum of 30 hashtags. I followed, liked, and commented on wedding vendors content on a daily basis.

I updated my website to include my new wedding business, gradually adding more and more photos and testimonials, while more reviews began to trickle into my Wedding Wire profile. Planners and venues added me to their “preferred vendor” lists. I performed 8 weddings that first year, 2019. With the pandemic starting in early 2020, like so many other wedding vendors, my business shrank. I only conducted 6 ceremonies that year. But in every year since then I have booked between 15 and 18 weddings. Many of my couples request pre-marital counseling, and some couples have returned to take part in couples counseling in the years since I officiated their wedding.

I never expected to be conducting weddings. It started as a fun, meaningful way to build my couples counseling practice. But over time it was become an equally important service that is incredibly rewarding.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

The most effective strategy for growing my clientele has been fostering relationships with colleagues, even if they might be considered competition for business. Most of my weddings in those first couple years came from other wedding officiants who were already booked. I owe an incredible debt to wedding officiants like Kimberly Thompson and Stevi Hanson. I am always thrilled to reciprocate, referring couples to my fellow officiants when I am already booked on a certain date. I also developed professional relationships with wedding planners, so they felt comfortable sending couples my way. The same holds true in the field of psychotherapy. As with any profession, therapists need to get to know and trust other therapists, so we can make targeted referrals to each other when we are unable to take on a particular client. More importantly than simply having a date available, this kind of work is about finding a good match. I am happy when a couple or a client find a better fit if it does not feel right with me.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

When I moved to a new locale and began building my clientele, I was fortunate that there were not many wedding officiants or couples counselors, and to my knowledge there was no one else offering both. For couples looking to get married and wanting to build a stronger relationship, unless they are wanting a traditionally religious ceremony or they already have a beloved minister lined up, the couple will often want to book me as their wedding officiant. Or couples will book me for both a handful of pre-marital sessions at the same time they book me as their officiant. And in some cases, couples will return later on for some couples counseling in the coming months or years after I officiated their wedding. Most of the time, couples only book me for their wedding.
But when it is desired by the couple, while I am not the only non-religious officiant in this part of the country, I do bring a psychotherapeutic lens to my approach that many other officiants may not. Last, at risk of tooting my own horn, I have been told throughout my life that I have a nice sounding voice, and that I should have gone into radio or podcasts etc. So I’ve been lucky, I’ve been in the right location, and this work has been a labor of love in more ways than one.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.claykyle.com
• Instagram: @winecountryofficiant
• Other: Wedding Wire:
  https://tinyurl.com/v74spye

Image Credits

Image credits are already embedded in the photos where applicable.