We recently connected with Taylor Cotter and have shared our conversation below.
Taylor, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
When you really think about someone’s wedding, it becomes an extremely difficult dream to live up to. There are cliches like “I’ve been dreaming about this day since I was little!” Couples will drop thousands of dollars on their perfect wedding and it can be really hard as a vendor trying to live up to the extremely high and emotional bar that couples set. Because of this, it’s extremely common to hear talk among wedding professionals about “drawing clear and obvious lines” for couples about what your services do and do not include. You have to be upfront with couples to make sure they don’t walk all over you and demand more than what they pay for. And while this is very important advice, we try extremely hard to help our employees think about it from the couple’s perspective. Their wedding day IS a day they’ve been dreaming about since they were little. They ARE dropping THOUSANDS of dollars on a single day experience that gives them nothing except memories in return. While trying to live up to the extremely high bar that couples set may be extremely difficult, we try so hard to package experiences and little surprises in that is not normal to the wedding day experience to not only live up to the high expectations, but also to try and exceed them. It’s all about preparing ahead of time and making calculated plans so that the expectations can be met and surpassed. One of the very normal industry trends for wedding venues is that couples can generally arrive only a few hours before their ceremony. So we turned our motto in to “the all day experience.” It’s not your wedding “afternoon” we like to say, it’s your wedding day! We allow couples to arrive as early as 8am in the morning. We WANT couples to spend the day with us. We turned getting ready rooms in to massive deluxe suites. We put in hair and make up counters with mirrors and great lighting. We put large fridges in the getting ready suites and even created a “for the suites” menu with everything from mimosa bars to chicken and waffle apps. Couples wanted the most out of their wedding day and want to feel like they aren’t on a time constraint. I also work as a DJ and videographer. And when couples have to get ready at one location and then travel to their venue with a limited and small time frame before their ceremony, I can’t begin to explain how much more stressful and cumbersome the day instantly becomes.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In high school, I played in little garage bands for fun with my friends. So we had live sound equipment we used for practice and playing shows. One day I got a call from my friends mom who said their daughter was getting married and needed someone with a sound system to play music and DJ. So I put together a few mix CDs and set up our band’s PA system and thought this was a pretty easy gig. I kept getting calls from more and more people to DJ and quickly learned I made way more money DJing than I ever did playing in a band. I learned as I went and eventually got good enough I was put on a venue’s preferred vendor list and started training more DJs to work with me. The first thing that set me apart was looking around at other vendors like photographers and I got really frustrated that many vendors only care about their specific service, not the overall experience of the couple. If photographers had a different timeline than me, they didn’t always care. The experience I would try and build during a reception would many times be ruined because sunset time didn’t line up with what I wanted the flow of the reception to be. My sister was a photographer and moved to Arizona where I was. She was an amazing photographer but didn’t have a ton of wedding experience. At this point, I had probably worked close to a 1000 weddings and felt extremely confident in my knowledge of the wedding industry and told her I would help with the wedding side of the business. We formed one company that offered photography, videography and DJ services all in one package. Instead of selling to couples that we were great photographers and amazing and fun DJs, we began selling the experience of one team for their wedding day. We learned that as a team that worked together, where the DJ cares as much as the quality of your photos as they do their playlist, we were able to far exceed the expectations of couples. The planning process for them became a breeze, day of execution was so streamlined, couples didn’t even realize everything we were doing behind the scenes. Wedding planners would come up to us and say hey, kitchen is 30min behind schedule. Our team would get together and figure out what to do and how to best use the time so we wouldn’t get behind and then just make it happen. Couples wouldn’t even realize anything was off. We bought DJ lights that gave our pictures and videos the best effects. We built DJ booths with TVs so that we could play a short slideshow of some of the pictures our photographers took earlier that day. Then that very first venue that added me to their preferred DJ list when I was just a newbie, the owner told us they were thinking of selling. And we bought it before it ever went to market. We took all those same principles of how to deliver a cohesive experience for a couple’s wedding day and we added it to the venue.
Any advice for managing a team?
Maintaining high morale in the wedding industry is extremely tough we have learned. You have truly love what you do. The experience of living up to a level of expectations is mentally and physically exhausting. If you do not truly love what you do, you will not last. We have had several employees who seem absolutely perfect for the industry but are burnt out within a year. We have learned two things that we think are vital to keeping yourself from burning out. First, you can’t do everything. For our venue staff, you can’t be there from 8 in the morning until the wedding ends at 11pm at night and then do it again the next day. Even if it is only a couple times a week, you can’t keep that up. Figuring out a staffing system that keeps yourself within normal working hours so you are stretched too thin. In the beginning, everyone thinks they can do it, but no one can last at that high rate. We also don’t let any of our staff do more than 2 events a week, including ourselves. The most popular days for weddings are Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Just because there are 3 days in a weekend does not mean you need to work 3 days in a row. We have burned many staff out and almost ourselves because of this, so we don’t allow it from anyone. The second is that when the off season hits, get out of town. Get away. Put the phone down and take time off to reset. The key to this is having a good team to help support you. If you are doing everything on your own then not only can you not put the phone down because there is no one else there to pick it up, but you are also doing everything! I remember one night literally breaking down in to tears talking to my wife and just saying “it never stops, my phone never stops.” I quickly hired an admin person so that I could actually take breaks away and disconnect.
How’d you meet your business partner?
How did I meet my business partner? Well, she was born a few years after I was. My sister was my first business partner and we’ve been business partners now for over 10 years. And that is utterly insane and unimaginable. I like to tell people and see their reaction when I say our parents use to have to take us to counseling together because we hated each other so much. We would get in to arguments constantly, yelling fits, there was no one that set off my temper faster than my sister when I was growing up. As we grew older and moved out of the house, we had spent several years apart before she had moved to Arizona where I was. Why we even thought about trying to start a business together is still something I can’t imagine why we decided to try. But you would never have guessed it. We are exactly the same in all the ways we need to be like being client focused and building the best experience. And we are exactly opposite in how we need to be as well. I am the abstract big idea person, and she’s the one who grounds me and figures out how to make these wild ideas possible. When we bought the wedding venue, we actually even had our dad join us as our third business partner. While we had worked in the wedding industry for years, we had never dealt with a business anywhere near the size of the venue we were buying. He came in as the CFO and has focused on how to help us become truly fiscally responsible. Some say never do business with family, there’s no way I could have done it without my family.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.superstitionmanor.com
- Instagram: @superstitionmanoraz
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/superstitionmanor
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylor-cotter-8264876b
- Other: Other business:
www.savethismemory.com
@savethismemory
www.facebook.com/savethismemory
