We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicole Heylmun a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicole, thanks for joining us today. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

When I first started my business I had a few months of lead time that I didn’t need to make an income, and decided to take my time building my program and testing out my concepts. I decided to start by offering a free business mastermind, and started posting all over local wedding groups offering membership! I had an amazing response, and ended up working with two groups of 5 wedding business owners over 3 months, as I built my official course. As I was hosting this, I created an Instagram page and began posting daily, positioning myself as an expert. Right when I needed it (at the end of the 3 months), word began to spread that I was offering business coaching, both through word of mouth and social media. The very first person to reach out came at exactly the right time, when I needed to start making money. She sent me a DM on Instagram, we set up a discovery call, connected, and she booked immediately! It was such a perfect fit, she ended up hiring me on for over a year and half, and she is now one of my greatest success stories. In fact, she has grown a 6-figure wedding business in under two years, and is now one of my Booked. coaches who I’ve trained to teach new wedding pros how to do the same!! Now we help so many new businesses gain their first clients, and their second, and so on. It is just the best feeling landing that first client because it truly means you’ve started a business, and it means it just might work…..

Nicole, 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?

My name is Nicole and I’m a business coach for wedding pros! My business used to be called Nicole Renee Coaching, but I recently re-branded and re-structured my business… and we’re now Booked. for Wedding Pros. My background in the wedding industry started over 9 years ago when I worked for WeddingWire/The Knot World Wide. I consulted with thousands of wedding pros on how to attract and convert leads into bookings, and eventually decided to take my expertise private when I opened NRC.

After two years of success, working with dozens of wedding pros 1:1 and in group settings, helping them build booked out businesses, I decided shake things up and start a business model in the industry that no one else has.

I hired 3 of my top former students who have built their own 6-figure wedding businesses in under two years, and trained them to teach the same material to their students. We are now able to reach even more students all over the US, and have plans to grow further as we hire more and more coaches.

We currently offer 1:1 business coaching to wedding professionals who are either just starting out, or who haven’t been able to break into the price bracket they truly want. We help them become better, more knowledgeable business owners by teaching them skills such as branding, marketing, niching, social media, sales, and so much more. We help them get Booked. out with their ideal clients.

We offer a 5-month program where you get to work 1:1 with one of our 6-figure coaches to build and/or transform your business. We love what we do!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

My first year of business was going amazingly as I built my 1:1 coaching practice. I was making more money monthly than in my previous sales job and was on track to hit $10k months very shortly. Right around that time, I hit a personal hardship when my brother suddenly and unexpectedly passed away.

During the aftermath and in my grief, I wasn’t able to sustain the 1:1 coaching I had grown my business around. Meaning, I simply wasn’t able to offer myself as a 1:1 coach any longer and stopped taking on clients. I tried to shift gears and switch to digital courses, so I could still help people build businesses but without extending my personal energy in each project. Though I had some early success, I didn’t quite have the mental capacity to truly let this take off. In my brain fog, I made some bad investments and bad decisions, and ultimately decided I needed to take a step back while I figured out my next moves and worked on healing myself.

At the same time a job opportunity came along at a well-known company with a great salary and benefits. While I knew that I ultimately wanted to be an entrepreneur, I also knew I needed to start over, re-fund my bank account for a bit, and let my mind think in different ways. So, I took the job and worked double for a while, while I healed, re-configured my business, re-branded, and re-launched.

This step away was the best decision I could have made because I was able to have some financial security and make business decisions out of a much better place, a place that wasn’t coming from scarcity or fear. I was able to take a full 9 months to re-launch with my full intention and love behind it.

In the past few months I did re-launched with an entirely new business model and we have already seen incredible success. We are working with tons of amazing new clients, the response has been incredible, and I am so excited about the future of this business.

If I had let myself feel defeated when switching to digital products didn’t work, I wouldn’t have picked myself back up and tried again, in a different way. I would have let the shame of having to go back to a “real” job temporarily stop me from putting the newest version of my business back out and into the world. Sometimes something doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean you have failed. It simply means you need to try another way.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I’m speaking specifically to my ideal client, here – which are wedding business owners. Using social media alone will not build your business – it must be combined with building real-world connections and networks. Social media works better when it is truly SOCIAL. Meaning, people will share your stuff more often if they know you and have a relationship with you IRL. They will feel more confident when they’ve worked with you before and can vouch for you. Social Media will not, in and of itself, build your wedding business.

When I first started my coaching business I wanted to work with local business owners. While I built my social media, I also attended every styled shoot I could in-person, and then followed up with potential clients via social media. I wrote posts about local businesses that I was working with, so they would share the stories on their social media and it would reach more local business owners in their network. While all of my first few clients reached out through social media, they only submitted that inquiry after someone personally told them about me and how great my services truly were.

The only way I was able to reach success was through utilizing multiple marketing channels concurrently.

Contact Info:

• Website: bookedforweddingpros.com
• Instagram: @booked.forweddingpros

Image Credits
Cait Swithers Photo & Film