“Hi all, I am facing a tough decision to either sell my venue or manage it from another state. I Regret Buying My Wedding Venue. ” This venue owner asked to be anonymous in their post submitted to the Wedding Venue Owners & Management Community Group on Facebook. “We moved to this area to buy and manage this venue, but my business partner bailed just a few months in, leaving my husband and I overwhelmed, isolated, and depressed living in a very depressing area. We put a lot of care and money into renovating our venue the past year, and just as we are wrapping up the renovations, I’m not sure I have it in me anymore to run it. Maybe because it has been basically closed and just eating all our resources and time for nothing. Part of me is wanting to know if our renovations will work, as we did have weddings book while we were under construction. But at this point I at least need to be in a better location for our mental health where we also have family. Any advice about those who sold or managed their venue far away, or just any other advice would be helpful.” ***Make sure you scroll down to the section on things you should know before buying or starting a wedding venue. Think about the impact you will have on existing wedding venues.
This venue owner was feeling hopeless, and alone. I hate the thought of a venue owner feeling alone as their dream is falling apart, you are not alone. There are many other wedding venue owners struggling with similar issues and I hope they find The Wedding Venue Owners & Managers Community Group so they can benefit from belonging to a supportive community willing to share their knowledge, suggestions and real life advice. I connected with this venue owner and was able to learn a little more about the challenges she was facing. She has decided to sell the venue and return to her hometown. This was a stressful, financially draining endeavor that did not provide financial return on investment or a long-term sustainable income. Keep reading for tips on how to avoid wedding venue buyers remorse. Do you have an “I Regret Buying My Wedding Venue” story to share? Please contact didi@weddingvenueowners.com. Let’s create more awareness for what it’s really like to own a wedding venue.
Top reasons venue owners regret buying or starting a wedding venue.
Before you move forward with investors or partners, think twice. Do you remember what it was like to have roommates in college or when you first moved out on your own? It sucked! They seemed really cool until you lived with them for about 3 weeks. That’s when you realized you had nothing in common, they were irresponsible, they refuse to clean, they don’t pay bills and you’re stuck in a one year lease. Don’t repeat this when you partner on an investment. **Heaven help you if your partners are “friends”. Make sure you have everything, especially agreed upon roles, workload, boundaries and how decisions will be made and approved, IN WRITING! Often there is only one partner/investor who carries most of the workload while the other partners claim to have been under the assumption that they were financial partners only and not responsible for any of the operations or management duties. However, these same non working partners will want all types of free perks like drinking & eating for free, never alone, always with an entourage. They will dip into the business accounts & sign up for money crushing services that bring no value, cost a fortune & will not be governed. Please contact didi@weddingvenueowners.com to access wedding venue start up consulting, wedding venue management and operations consulting. Invest in professional guidance so that you can avoid heartbreaking, financially draining mistakes.
Top reasons venue owners inform me that they are throwing in the towel.
- Not enough funding to make it through the venue construction AND still fund advertising and marketing. Often venue owners are applying for another loan before construction is complete!
- Getting into a bogus 3rd party wedding directory adv contract. Signing up for the big wedding websites very often wastes the wedding venue owners advertising budget and leaves them with tons of bad leads. Did you know….most of these 3rd party wedding websites use blogs like, “how to find the cheapest wedding venue” to get the leads they send you. So, when those leads don’t convert, now you know the reason.
- Partner with friends or putting your friends in positions that require an expert. Some of your friends will claim to have the skills necessary to manage expert level positions. THEY DON’T HAVE THESE SKILLS to perform the duty they begged you to hire them for and they will take your money until you have the nerve to fire them. Friendship ruined, venue ruined, money lost! **I know, there are some of you out there who hired a friend & it worked….You are the rare exception.
- Some people, no offense, are terrible at running a wedding venue. You are brilliant, you are amazing at running the other business you have but you might be terrible as a wedding venue owner. No problem, there are ways to work around this, hire a management company or hire a team to run your venue. Don’t wait until your wedding venue is too far gone to step aside and let experts manage essential duties.
- Pricing failures! Bad pricing and bad packages – I see these daily. You can bring leads to your venue for tours but if they aren’t booking, you may have bad pricing/packages to blame.
- BUYER BE WARE!! A bad real estate deal could lead to absolute ruin. Your realtor is supposed to look out for your best interest, but most realtors don’t have wedding venue experience and may not recognize some of the issues that could be terrible for a wedding venue.
Do you have wedding venue, wedding industry or hospitality industry experience? If you do not have experience owning & running a wedding venue, get connected with a wedding venue consultant or wedding venue coach. I have a list of wedding venue mentors located all over the US, I can help you find a local mentor who understands state guidelines & legislation that may impact your wedding venue business. I provide wedding venue coaching and consulting but I am booked up months in advance, I will help connect you with a wonderful, trusted, wedding venue coach if I am not available. Contact me at didi@weddingvenueowners.com for more information.
Before you invest in a wedding venue, please be aware, so many wedding venues are NOT profitable! Hundreds of wedding venue owners reach out to me a year or so after starting their wedding venue, in need of selling the venue or desperate to find help saving the venue from bankruptcy or foreclosure. It truly feels like an epidemic as it’s happening so often.
Do wedding venues have a responsibility to the existing wedding community when they start their business? In my opinion, yes. You can enter the wedding industry with a mission to succeed and positively impact the wedding industry at the same time. OR you can start your business without any consideration or concern about the impact your business will have on existing venues and the local wedding industry. Work together with local venue owners to bring more weddings to your market. Work together to create advertising campaigns that save you all money and bring the best leads. Every wedding venue has the same number of Saturdays in a year that you will have. If you work together, you can sell more weddings, attract a better-quality clientele, uphold best practices and protect your investments. When you are all solo and working alone, you are vulnerable, you pay so much more money, you have limited access to real market data. There are large wedding investment companies who prey on struggling wedding venues. If your business fails, those companies will offer to bail you out at a huge loss to you. Once they own your venue they will drop prices in an effort to put existing venues out of business so they can buy more venues and have a stronghold in that market. Your success is in the best interest of the existing wedding venue owners.
- Research the market to ensure that another wedding venue with the style yours will offer is necessary and essential. Are there 20 barns, should you really add another barn wedding venue in a market where the other barn venue owners are struggling?
- Research current wedding venues and never ever name your venue a similar name to existing venues
- NEVER EVER pose as a wedding client to tour venues gaining their practices, strategies, contracts, tour techniques and marketing material. Be honest and willing to pay for their educational offerings, intellectual property and time. They will find out you did this and there will be costly consequences, trust me. Instead, attend a Wedding Venue Owners Working Vacation where you can learn directly from existing wedding venues & tour venues honestly & ethically. How much should you pay an existing venue for their mentoring? $250 an hour is fair in my opinion.
- Have an advertising and marketing plan. YOU MUST Have an amazing website and social media: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and Pinterest are my top recommendations. I provide a weekly, Wedding Venue Owners magazine featuring a 7 Day Social Media Guide with step by step SMM instruction, inspiration and support. Advertising is costly, avoid 3rd party contracts with an effective strategy to control your best sales tools: SEO, Website, SMM. If you prefer to outsource this time consuming, essential business element, contact didi@weddingvenueowners.com for resources.
- Get Educated! Join Wedding Venue Owners Working Vacations, we host these all over the country! You will meet friendly colleagues, you will get to tour wedding venues & ask tons of questions. You will get hands on instruction on SEO, Websites & Social Media, Contracts, Advertising, Marketing, Design, Operations, etc…. Don’t wait until your wedding venue is on fire to search for solutions. Saving a business that is sinking costs far more than implementing a smart strategy from the beginning.
- Never copy the branding and marketing style of an existing wedding venue.
- Never hire friends or family with NO EXPERIENCE to take on roles where you need an expert.
- Are you opening your wedding venue close to an existing wedding venue? Consider the impact you will have on their business, respectfully consider ways that you can collaborate or work together to build business demand in your area.
- Reach out to the local wedding venues and let them know you hope to be a supportive part of the community. If you don’t get a warm welcome, call me, I am happy to provide strategies to help encourage a venue owners alliance in your area. Sometimes an impartial 3rd party can help facilitate a level of trust and encourage the friendly venue owners in your area to work together.
- One day you will be an OG venue owners (hopefully) you will worry about all the new venues popping up and you will hope they consider their impact on the wedding industry as they start up.
- Never bash your venue owner colleagues! So many companies benefit from venue owners being disconnected and afraid of one another. United you are powerful, divided you vulnerable. Divided, you are making others rich. Wedding Venue Owners Alliances are secretly happening all over the country, let’s get one started in your town, did@weddingvenueowners.com.
There are over 6000 wedding venue owners in the Wedding Venue Owners & Management Community Group on Facebook. While many people use the title of venue coach or wedding venue consultant, not everyone has a knack for providing education based on national research & successful wedding venue strategies. Some venue coaches are only able to provide the methods that worked for their singular venue in their market. True wedding venue coaching and consulting must provide knowledge based on years of research from wedding venue data & statistics all over the country. I am compiling a list of amazing wedding venue coaches & consultants from all over the world. If you are a wedding venue coach or consultant and would like to be listed in the WeddingVenueOwners.com education resources, please contact didi@weddingvenueowners.com,
Use this badge to show the world that you are a locally owned small wedding business. Let’s work together to shift power from large corporate machines, 3rd party directory wedding websites and wedding monopolies. Let’s put the power back into the hands of the locally owned wedding industry. Let’s work together to create a movement where locally owned wedding venues are sought out and selected first! Use this badge and link weddingvenueowners.com, we are wedding venue owners working together to change the way the wedding industry works.
Do you know someone who can relate to the, “I Regret Buying My Wedding Venue” story shared here? Please contact didi@weddingvenueowners.com so we can help others avoid business failure by understanding wedding venue ownership.