We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Paul Marsh. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Paul below.
Paul, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
I fought this opportunity to become a wedding officiant, kicking and screaming. But the universe held me down and gave me nuggies until I surrendered and embraced the opportunity. Now it’s my primary income stream. Really!?! This is an enlightening story about how our calling can find us once we have accumulated the life experiences we need to bring our true gifts to light. It may be unseen and right under your nose.
A quick overview. Weddings In The Wild is a marketing name for an individual, that’s me, who provides a creative and professional service. That service is as a wedding officiant and concierge. My niché is a nature focused, poetic ceremony that comes to life as the performance surrounding the “I do” moment. The ceremony is written in my unique style that incorporates life lessons for the couple’s relationship, from the surrounding natural environment. The couple shares their vision for wedding day with me, and I help them create and capture that moment. All of the necessary skills and abilities have accumulated over decades of life experience, from high school photography to SBDC basic business classes that seem like just yesterday. Let’s get back to the origin story so you have a better understanding
When weddings found me and I finally decided to surrender, then I pursued it as a going concern. There was no deep, burning inspiration or divine insight or passionate vision. The universe basically hit me over the head with a 2 x 4 and drug me kicking and screaming towards weddings until I decided to jump in and put all the parts in place. That is when the doors opened and business began to take shape and flow. I didn’t know what to do as a single male who had never considered marriage in the face of a proposal. Fortunately, I had been a recreation and tourism professor at Cal Poly Humboldt. So I reached out to my former students who I knew were now potential brides and also doing event planning work. These people refined the concept for me. My neighbor, across the street, came up with the name. (She moved to Montana after graduation and did get married!) My former students flushed in the details. And after a few weddings, the brides were telling me that I really should offer a concierge service because what I had provided them. That aspect of my still developing services had helped them plan the do-it-yourself wedding experience that they had hoped to create. On top of that, they really raved about my performance and the ceremony that I created.
None of this would ever have happened. Had I not gone on a backpacking trip with one of my students. As an outdoor adventure leadership professor I took classes into the wilderness for a learning experience experiences. I would use students who had been in prior semester courses as assistant instructors for the new students. One of my assistant instructors, the one who did the backpacking trip with me, asked me to perform the honors for his marriage. I connected him with a former student who I knew was a photographer. After the ceremony, the photographer student told me that I “had to” do this because he was a wedding photographer now, and nobody else was doing what I had done. “It was beautiful!”
Talk about scary. Jumping off of a cliff and trusting that a hand will reach out and catch you before you hit the ground. That’s sort of what I did with this wedding thing. The first year I painted a house and ended up digging post holes in a yard for a privacy fence. Within 2 years I came to realize that I had found a niche in our local wedding industry. It had not occurred to me, or anyone in the local wedding industry, that living this close to a Redwood National Park, a World Heritage Site, was a real draw for couple who were eloping. I also came to realize that I didn’t fit in the wedding industry, and I sure wish I had those advertising dollars back. There weren’t any go anywhere wedding officiants on the internet. When this began, I actually had a potential client think that I was just trying to get their business by telling them that no one else did what I did. Three days later I heard back from them, telling me that in fact they had scoured the internet and I was correct. No one else did what I was doing. Seems to me that Covid changed that a bit, but I still think I’m pretty much a unicorn.
So here I sit, a shingle hanging on the internet like fishing bait, offering to help couples who want to get married with a beautiful, nature focused civil ceremony in a gorgeous outdoor location. The majestic redwoods, along with the unique ceremony and service are the key pieces of magic for this business. Another draw locally, that really adds to the success keys: we also have pristine, uncrowded, rugged beaches that serve as a haven from the heat of the Central Valley during summer.
Bottom line, this has been successful because I have trusted my intuition, followed my heart and the lessons, while I have also embraced having fun. All in the light of the responsibility of joining a couple in matrimony on one of the most important days of their lives. Of course, everything comes with a Dookie sandwich, so you’ve got to pick sandwiches you’re willing to eat. However, I embrace that the responsibility is on my shoulders to make life, and whatever comes along, fun. My elevator speech: Hi my name is Paul and I make love (long pause) as a wedding officiant. When you say “I make love” everyone listens, and that was the goal. Or how about the gnawing question of why a certain photograph gets so much traction? Turns out that pictures with blue in them get 75% more Likes on Instagram…. oh, how cool! Sort of fun to geek out on. Fun, just like building the website, but not so much fun about the constant tweaking. Okay, accounting is not why I get out of bed, but has to be done. Just give me the crack of dawn and the mist rising around the Roosevelt Elk as I drive into the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park for an early morning elopement. Knowing that soon, the couple will be brimming with excitement and joy at having just committed to plans for the rest of their lives with their bet friend and true love. It’s all worth while!
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.
Life is an adventure that doesn’t always unfold to a script. But if you follow your heart and pursue the passions that grab your interest, you’ll end up someplace you want to be in life. I studied photography at summer camp and extemporaneous speaking in high school. I was the photographer for the high school yearbook. Sales training as a corporate sales rep doing industrial sales gave me a solid set of skills for representing myself. When you spend 35 summers as a summer camp counselor and program director you learn exceptional ways to approach creativity and your mind is pretty open to the different ways that people present themselves. I’ve spent winters in the backcountry guiding people on powder skiing adventures. Most of my life was spent as an experiential educator facilitating personal growth for people who are trying to get from point A to point B in their lives. That could be overcoming an at risk childhood or working together as a corporate team. When you think about it, it all boils down to the same kind of experience. Two people venturing into the woods to make a commitment on the rest of their lives, essentially an unknown element full of passion and hope. As with being on ski’s with a group in the wilderness, my role is to be the assurance that all is well and that all is coming together perfectly on their wedding day. (Side note: wedding day is in the top 10 most stressful days in a person’s life. My service is aimed at minimizing stresses.) The combination of life experiences I bring sets me apart from the standard wedding officiant in terms of breadth of experiences that shape my creative writing and performance, as well as bring calm to both the legal and ceremonial aspects of the day. All accomplished as I help to frame and bring out the emotional depth of this benchmark in life. Leaving the couple to enjoy the moment, take in the surroundings and celebrate their relationship.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
You mean that one time when the couple didn’t really want a lot of family at their wedding so they only told one cousin. But the one cousin let the cat out of the bag and 20 family members showed up. Did I mention that there was construction and everybody had to reroute their travels, so I had to guide by a different route to the ceremony location over the phone with a poor cellular reception. This put us an hour and a half behind schedule. Once we all got to the trailhead to hike into the ceremony location, the photographer and I looked at one another and decided to suggest something that was much closer to the parking area than the 3 mile hike into the woods. However, the groom wasn’t there! Oh, yes, said a couple of folks coming out the trail, we saw a gentleman all dressed up walking with two ladies and they were headed down that way. … OK, I guess we’ll go in. … But somebody forgot to tell the mother of the bride that there was a hike involved and she had to give up halfway there because the dress sandals weren’t working out. She missed out. When we finally got to the location. It became evident that the groom had forgotten the rings. I bent a ring out of a paper clip, and he promptly told me that it was not as nice as the ring he had made. I told him I was just trying to help. At which point he walked away down the trail.
Don’t panic, this couple had been together for 10 years. The boyfriend of the brother’s sister headed down the trail and got him turned around and came back. After the ceremony, the brother’s sister refused to sign the marriage license as a witness because she said she didn’t agree with what had happened. Fortunately, the sister of the bride had already signed and only one witness was required. After parting hugs and congratulations, I am pretty sure I passed everybody on the way back to the vehicles. The next day, I was speaking with the photographer, who was the former student I mentioned earlier in this article that got me into weddings in the first place. And he said to me, “It’s a really good thing that you have a wilderness therapy background. You stayed there and got them married. I’m not sure any other officiant would’ve done that, I think they would have just said ‘that’s it’ “.
No, I don’t know the outcome. But I imagine it went well, they already had 10 years and a house together. The moral of the story: if you don’t want anyone to know you are eloping, don’t tell ANYONE.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
Most people would call my business a side hustle. But what really sets me apart from other side hustlers is that I treat it like a full-time job. Answer the phone when it rings, respond to an email when it arrives, treat life like you’re a real estate agent who works whenever the phone rings. As I said, digging post holes to build privacy fences and painting houses fueled the first year. After that, word started to get out. Advertising across the Wedding industry didn’t work because I don’t fit into what most people conceptualize as the wedding industry. So those resources basically just helped to build my SEO. Not a bad thing given the niché that I’m operating in. An a-ha moment was when I realized that the target market was a psycho-graphic rather than a demo-graphic. The epiphany allowed me to shape my message using the steps of the hero’s journey.
Realizing that people don’t shop for a wedding officiant the same way that they might shop for hard goods, I decided that posting three times a day on social media is probably not worth my while. Instead, social media is a gallery to celebrate my couples. Scaling up actually happened through referrals from photographers. If, as a wedding officiant, you bring joy to the couples ceremony and they look amazing in their pictures, then photographers like to work with you because the couple see the photographer as wonderful for connecting them with and officiant who fits their vibe. It also works because the couple is more radiant in their photographs, reflecting the photographers art.
Covid was a boon because you could only get married outdoors. Our county Office of Emergency Services told local businesses that if they could figure out a way to open in category that was listed to open before their industry, during the Covid reopening, to go ahead and submit. I was able to present as an outdoor recreation option, offering a cultural ceremony in an outdoor setting, which allowed me to begin offering services in May. Rather than September when group events were scheduled to be allowed to start happening again. The San Francisco Chronicle even reached out to me because Humboldt County California issued more marriage licenses than any other county in California at one point during that summer. To put that in perspective, we are a population of 140,000 people with a geography of 4052 mi.² in a State with 29 million people, and they were curious about what was going on with so many people getting married way up north. People were coming north from the cities to be outdoors. So, during lockdown summer, I had 30 ceremonies while most wedding industry people were on the sidelines. Since then, things seem to have leveled out and I’m using a little bit of advertising to keep my SEO up and perhaps expand my reach.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://weddingsinthewild.com
- Instagram: @weddingsinthewild
- Facebook: @weddingsinthewild
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/paulemarsh
- Yelp: Weddings In The Wild
- Other: Reddit: @weddingsinthewild
Image Credits
Paul Marsh, Kate Donaldson