We recently connected with Hanna Defoe and have shared our conversation below.

Hanna, appreciate you joining us today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

When I started my wedding planning business in September of 2021, I was dead set on not having a team. With my experience as a HR coordinator in my full time job, I knew employees were lots of work and there was lots of paperwork to them! But, as I did my first 14 weddings solo in 2022, I quickly realized I couldn’t do anymore weddings without an assistant. I started looking for my team to help assist me on wedding days, and at this point I didn’t plan to have any of my team do weddings without me – I figured I would always be there to be the “lead coordinator”. As we started doing weddings together, a few of my assistants expressed that they would be interested in taking on more of a lead position and that then opened up more opportunity for my business to scale and to take on more couples. in 2022 I had 14 weddings, in 2023 the team had 35 weddings (3 without me there with my team handling) and in 2024 we currently have 48 weddings with a few potential pending bookings.

I do feel I scaled my business pretty quick, and to do so I had to do a lot of weddings for very cheap. It’s one thing when you are hiring someone with 25+ reviews and years of experience, and another thing to hire someone who hasn’t had any reviews yet and is just dipping their toes in the wedding industry.

Most of my leads the first 1.5 – 2 years came from facebook wedding groups – truly I would not have been able to scale without those groups! Now, most of my leads come from referrals from past couples or vendors, or SEO and writing blog posts, or venue referral lists.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Upon graduating college in 2016, I started working as a HR coordinator at a local manufacturing/distribution company. Even before that, I worked at Culver’s for 5 years and served in the Army National Guard as a Human Resources Specialist. After working my full time HR job for a few years, I realized this wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I loved who I worked with (for the most part) but the HR aspect of it was mentally draining. In August of 2021 my husband and I were visiting my brother and sister in law in Portland and my sister in law asked me if there was anything I could do for a job, what would I do? I’ve always been a planner so some sort of planning or corporate planning would be great, I even remember saying wedding planning possibly but I didn’t want to work every weekend.

I sat on that conversation for 3 weeks and on September 10th I woke up and decided to start my wedding planning business. I had my business name though of instantly, and then bought my logo on etsy that night. I met with a lawyer and 18 days later on 9/28/2021, my business was formed. I booked my first couple on 11/7/2021 and I have currently booked 99 couples with Hanna Marie Events since then.

I quit my full time job on February 8th of 2024 to pursue my business full time. With another jammed packed wedding year, I knew that I couldn’t continue to work full time. This was never my plan when starting this business, not even a 10 year plan, but with hard work and dedication (and lots and lots of hours), I did it!

My team offers everything from wedding management to full service planning, and we also added on wedding content creation as a service last summer as well.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Absolutely and I love this question! Currently my instagram is at almost 2300 followers – which 1) I know follower count doesn’t mean everything and 2) this can be seen as a small number to some, but to me it’s a huge number I’ve grown in just 2 1/2 years!

My biggest piece of advice is to show up. Show up in your stories every now and then and show your face! There are so many fellow wedding vendors and small business owners that I couldn’t even put a face to their name. People buy from people – and showing your face and tid bits of your life will help with people resonating with you.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

I’m going to tie this question in with the previous one and give almost the same advice – showing up. Making sure I’m posting about my business, but also posting about myself. Every 12 or so posts, post a photo of yourself. So many people have told me they searched wedding planners on instagram and followed the ones who they could see were active on instagram and showed themselves.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.hannamarieevents.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hannamarieevents/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hannamarieevents/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hanna-defoe-290382107/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@hannamarieevents

Image Credits
I have the photographers name listed on the image name!