Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sarah Ashley. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Sarah, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
From a bedroom window to creating luxury experiences in major US cities. Starting out, TED was built from the ground up only using the pennies we had and a fully debt free company from day one. We started with a small bedroom in our home that would hold our equipment as we grew our inventory. We would load a small pickup truck that we backed up to a window, nearly backing into our home for every job. Once, we had the money saved we built our first warehouse and purchased our first work vehicle. From that the rest is history. What we learned from these times is to do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary to get the job perfectly done. We sacrificed so much in our beginning stages but the result, is success. This has turned our team into professional problem solvers, this attitude makes no job too large or daunting, we problem solve and provide our clients highly successful events. Our success story only begins here, we have officially been in business in Tennessee since August of 2018. We are proud to announce due to our success here, we are launching our California office October 5th!
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 a lighting, draping and custom builds company that serves live events, originally based out of Nashville, TN. Live events meaning anything from high budget weddings, festivals, and corporate events. The live events world is around the clock. We are expected to answer calls day and night, and the crazy part is we do. In this industry, we are well known for our timeliness both on the front end, quotes and responses as well as our time on the job site both loading in and loading out. While on site, we are also known for our teamwork mentality. We are always happy to help fellow vendors get their job done as well, at the end of the day we must all be successful for a successful event. We take great pride in our work, we strive for a perfect job set, despite the fact that it will only be set for a few hours. Everything we touch, we leave it the best it can possibly look, creating unique experiences for the guests at said event.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
Well, we are fortunate enough to be married. Brandy, my wife, and I met in Dallas Texas back in Jan of 2017 and married in June of 2018. One month later we opened up T.E.D. and poured our hearts into building clientele and our name. I can say that 5.5 years later we are still happily married and have now built two companies together from the ground up and are most recently launching a non-profit foundation set to officially launch in the beginning of 2023. More on that soon!
Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?
To be honest, it was just a ton of hard work and belief in ourselves while having the underdog mentality. Like previously stated, we started by loading out of a bedroom window in our home buying the equipment as we sold the jobs. With my background of working in the industry, I knew what few things we needed to get started and purchased as we went. We both worked full time jobs during the day and built quotes, did client correspondence in the evenings over dinner and worked all weekend long to pull off jobs for the first year we were open. Neither of us had a backup plan, we were going to make it happen no matter what we had to do.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.tneventdesigns.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tn_event_designs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TNEventDesigns
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTXCIkz3O34fu3cEr3jJPqw/videos