We recently connected with Courtney West and have shared our conversation below.

Courtney, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you got your first non-friend, non-family client. Paint the picture for us so we can feel the same excitement you felt on that day.

My first client came to me right when I was about to give up on running on my own wedding business. I was working for a wedding designer full time and when I wasn’t working for him, I was working on my own website for Peachy Keen. Peachy Keen at that moment was just a website with collections of photos of my work from running a wedding venue with my family. I was spending time writing blogs trying to find a way to get people to find me on google. I was buried in a google search and I knew it, so I blogged. One night after leaving work and picking up my daughter from daycare, I got a call on my cell phone. When I answered my phone, the person on the other line asked if I was Peachy Keen. No one had ever asked me that before and I didn’t know what to say at first. After hesitating for a second, I responded, YES this IS Peachy Keen! What can I do for you? Her name was Jenny and she was a flight attendant, living in Oklahoma and planning her wedding at the Trolley Barn in Atlanta. Jenny proceeded to tell them that she found me in a deep google search and she fell in love with the photos of weddings that I had done in Buford and my BLOGS. Her next question, how can I hire you? I told her, to be honest Jenny, I’m just starting my company and I have never sent out a contract or estimate before. Without hesitation, Jenny told me to type one up immediately, and she would love to hire me. That night I wrote my first contract and estimate and emailed it over to her. Jenny entrusted me to be her wedding coordinator and florist. There were many firsts when planning her wedding, but all of those firsts led to many referrals and many more weddings and opportunities. In the beginning all I wanted was for everyone to be able to find me and no one could only Jenny, and that was all that I needed. Running a business has many ups and downs, many closed doors, but all it takes is one open door.

Courtney, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Around these parts I am known as the Peachy Keen Lady, I offer wedding coordination/planning, design and floral services in Georgia. I have been doing weddings for over 17 years and started doing weddings with my mother in Buford Georgia. After helping run a family wedding business, I worked for The Manor Golf and Country Club and Utopian Events. I help clients plan and coordinate their wedding days, as well as design and decorate their wedding vision. I offer everything from a la cart flowers to full-service flower orders and try to be as accommodating as I can be to all budgets. I love working with all kinds of people with all kinds of visions, from simple to grand. I love helping clients whether its at the Grand Hyatt or their parents backyard, I have done it all.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I think at this point in time we can all agree that the past few years have been very difficult. The pandemic threw many curve balls to business owners big and small. Running a wedding business in the pandemic was the most stressful time of my life, even more stressful than losing my mother to terminal illness. Clients were postponing dates on average 3 to 5 times and most times after postponing a few times, clients would decide to cancel all together. It was really hard to make any plans, and that is hard to deal with when your job is planning. The future didn’t look bright, and I couldn’t see an end in sight. The postponements were just one part of the pivot/curveball, another part was the increase in prices/cost of goods (flowers, supplies, labor etc). Price estimates based on price of good before the pandemic were not accurate anymore and with everything going on in the world clients couldn’t afford to pay more and didn’t want to. Clients didn’t want to pay postponement fees and stress levels just seemed to keep rising. In my world everything seemed to be falling apart not just in my business, but in my personal life. Finacial stress takes a toll on any marriage. The biggest pivot for me wasn’t just shifting to more elopements/smaller weddings, but it has been rebuilding my business and my life since 2020. They say hindsight is 2020 and looking back on that year and the 2 years that followed, things have become clearer than ever for me and what is most important on this journey of rebuilding my life back. The past has been dark, but the future is very bright.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

My goal and mission in all of this is to make wedding planning/design fun and easy. For the past 3 years I have been developing a planning portal for my clients to be able to plan and design their weddings with all of the knowledge that I have, and they have access to all of it with just a log in. Simplicity has become my mission, making things easier for my clients in turn makes things easier for me. I want to make this process fun because it can be very stressful, and if I can help remove some of that stress in anyway, that is my goal and my mission.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.peachykeenlady.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peachykeenlady/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peachykeenlady/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thatspeachyaf

Image Credits
Mark Tioxon Krisandra Evans Photography Cindy Brown Photography