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

Gabby, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Once the idea was formed, I had, what seemed like endless pages of notes, ideas and questions that I knew I had to sort out prior to launching The Busy Bride into existence. Becoming a wedding planner in the growing Nashville market requires a lot of patience and I planned to do my due diligence and start at the bottom of the ladder in order to learn the industry and perfect my business model. I set up coffee meetings with any and every vendor who worked in the wedding industry that would meet with me, to not only introduce myself as a future colleague, but also to hear about their experience, their hustle when they first started their business, and really dive into the ins and outs of weddings. As I’m sure the same is true with every industry, working on weddings gives the appearance of glitz and glamour, with very minimal acknowledgment of the work it actually takes to pull off an amazing event. My goal was to deep dive into the unknowns of the wedding industry. While I was crazy setting up vendor meetings, I also reached out to a handful of seemingly successful planners that would consider giving me a shot to assist and really get that hands on experience that I lacked. After assisting for quite some time, I knew it was the opportune moment to bring The Busy Bride to fruition. After first deciding on the name for my business, I took a leap and put together marketing materials, basic packages and pricing and went to town advertising on social media. Of course, as a beginner, my pricing was set low in order to give myself the opportunity to build and make a name for myself and as my experience and knowledge grew, I adjusted my pricing and tweaked my packages to reflect that.

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.

We are The Busy Bride LLC, a team of wonderful, hard working ladies, ready to assist with all aspects of pulling off a successful event from start to finish. We specialize in month-of coordination, with emphasis on set up, clean up and timeline management. While there are a multitude of amazing companies out there who offer services similar to ours, we’ve worked extremely hard on shifting our focus on the marketing front to highlight what makes us unique as a business.

First and foremost, that MONTH-OF coordination part. There are plenty of businesses that offer the day-of coordination services, but if you really think about every nitty gritty detail that goes into planning a wedding, we all know that it takes much, much more than a day to execute. We’re firm believers that a great event starts with the behind-the-scenes work. Ensuring that you have a fantastic, detailed timeline, confirming with vendors, planning layouts and tablescapes – all aspects which cannot be done in a day’s work. Spinning off of that, we’ve also built our pricing model to ensure a stress-free experience from start to finish. It’s almost an irony to put a limit on service hours for coordination. If you limit your hours on wedding day, there’s bound to be something that your coordinator won’t be able to accomplish, based solely on time. That means it falls back on the couples to figure it out. And on one of the most important days of a couple’s life, we don’t want them to have to figure it out! We put in the work it takes to execute an event from start to finish, in as many hours as it takes to successfully do so, with no couple, parent, or friend left to pick up the pieces.

Lastly, we previously mentioned that the wedding industry is often glamorized. You see the lush florals, the perfectly set tables, the beautifully cut cake, but most people fail to realize the steps taken to make that a reality. We really chose to focus our marketing on accurately portraying wedding day, sans the glitz and glamor. Someone is going to be in the sun all day, perfectly placing 200 table settings out, folding the napkins, lugging chairs, lighting candles, clearing dirty dinner dishes, rounding up the rowdy groomsmen, sweating bullets and we don’t want that someone to be you. It takes what may appear to be a luxury service to some couples, and prioritizes it as a necessity for a stress-free day. We want us to put in the sweat-equity and take on the hard work that no one else wants to do, so the couple can enjoy the day that they’ve spent months, sometimes even years, planning.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Aside from weekly marketing on social media, partnering up with venues and vendors has made such a huge impact on our growth as a business. The past few years, we’ve linked up with multiple venues around middle Tennessee to coordinate as part of their all-inclusive packages offered. Not only has that kept our calendar full, but also has led to many referrals from happy couples, venue owners, and vendors that we’ve worked alongside of.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I think I can speak for all business owners when I say that often times, we tend to wear so many hats and stack so much on our plate that it ends up overflowing. My personal pivot point happened in 2021, when I gave birth to my first baby girl. I gave myself entirely too little downtime and continued to actively book weddings and events until I found myself in tears holding my newborn, just from the sheer stress of trying to manage it all. I quickly learned that the most important thing is a healthy work/home life balance and it’s okay to give yourself grace and rest when you need it. While I did fulfill my very overloaded calendar and mom-out to the fullest that year, I gave myself the courtesy of a few months off the following year to regroup and rebalance.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thebusybridetn.com
• Instagram: @thebusybridetn
• Facebook: @thebusybridetn

Image Credits
Kelsey Paige Photography Frozen Exposure Photo & Cinema Jamie Pratt Photos Mandy Chadwick Photography