Earlier this year I made the move from Queensland to Tasmania because it's simply just beautiful down here, the air is clean, the people are lovely and friendly, the food is great, the real estate is 0.1% cheaper than the rest of the country, plus Britt and I have been dreaming of the move for twelve years.
Which is all to say that I'm basically a new celebrant in a new town and any brand recognition or goodwill I had in the marketplace in Queensland and NSW was left north of the Bass Strait. So that means it's back to brass tacks for me, doing the things I've been coaching other celebrants to do for years – and I'm loving it.
My biggest asset in this new endeavour however is one I'm very happy to share with you as well. It's my secret trick to making money as a celebrant. One day I might even be so bold as to offer an online course about how to become a "six-figure wedding celebrant" and the whole curriculum would be this:
Reply to enquiry emails and messages. Then follow-up.
It's all the couples want: wedding celebrants that reply to their emails quickly.
I was worried that my price might be too high for Tasmania, but the truth is, when I reply within moments of getting the enquiry, I get the wedding booking.
Of course having all of your Facebook, Threads, and Instagram accounts; Google My Business account; Bing Places; Yelp; website; metadata; SEO all on-brand and in-sync as well helps. Plus it's advantageous to have a website that communicates the things that so many celebrant websites don't communicate: Who are you/what's your name, where are you based, where do you service, alongside a professional photo of the celebrant.
But those finer details don't matter as much as replying. Alan Berg recently spoke on a podcast about this phenomena of couples enquiring with wedding vendors and never getting a reply. He quoted really high numbers of couples never getting a reply.
An aspect of this that is often missed is how many of our emails end up in spam, so I'll email and text message couples that enquire, letting them know that it's possible my email landed in spam.
So there it is, the Josh Withers Six-Figure Wedding Celebrant course: reply to, and follow-up on, enquiries.
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This month's newsletter is, as you might have come to expect, a good one, but before we dive in I wanted to remind you of the benefits of Celebrant Institute membership:
Here at the institute we are not a not-for-profit community association or group. Our friends lead those groups, and we advocate for you to have the right to join them. We do not offer insurance products like they do, and we don't offer Facebook groups like they do.
We do something different:
- Sarah and myself operate a helpline for celebrants like you so every day, all day, we field your urgent/non-urgent/pedestrian questions about marriage law, running a sustainable and profitable celebrancy practice, and marketing it - that happens at celebrant.institute/ask
- From most of those questions we then write our replies up as blog posts that are made available to all paying members, plus we write about changes to the celebrancy program, innovations we believe would help you, and practices we think successful celebrants undertake
- We produce popular professional development courses that are available on-demand from our website.
- Twice a year we meet with the AGD Marriage Law & Celebrants Section in the celebrant associations and networks meetings and advocate for our members and a better marriage celebrants program.
- Sarah teaches the best Certificate IV in Celebrancy in the country, with some of the highest success rates for not just completion of the course (which is embarrassingly low in the training industry) but also for students to graduate, become celebrants, and then operate successful celebrancy practices.
- We interview real couples who are planning, or have planned their own wedding and ask them about the process, their budgets, and how they chose a celebrant so that celebrants like you can make educated business development decisions instead of going of here-say from other wedding professionals.
- Plus we write this email every month for all celebrants to enjoy, and also produce a regular podcast, the Celebrant Talk Show, which is free for all and produced to be helpful for the celebrant community.
$12 a month or $25 a month if you want access to the Insights podcast
If you want insurance we recommend you go to someone like Duck for Cover or research your own insurance, but if you want help, if you want to professionally develop, if you want to excel at your celebrancy practice, then we're glad you're here and we're here to help.
🔎 Insights into Kim & Zac's wedding and why they chose Tania to be their celebrant
Kim and Zac shared their wedding planning story on the Insights podcast including why they flew their celebrant from Queensland to Sydney, and how they chose their ceremony location. Listen to the podcast to get insights into how they made their wedding spending decisions.
🎧 New Celebrant Talk Show podcast episode
In this episode we chat about the Attorney-General’s Portfolio Miscellaneous Measures Bill and how long it’s taking to get through Parliament. We also talk about the state of the wedding industry worldwide and what we’re doing about it for our own businesses.
Listen on the website or find links to your favourite podcast apps here to listen on your phone.
🧾 Basic accounting practices
Do you know if you're operating your celebrancy practice with good basic accounting practices? We've got a post that will help.
💻 New Celebrant CRM
Sarah and I took a sneak peek at a new customer relationship manager, a CRM, for wedding celebrants built by a New Zealand celebrant - Victoria Thomas - last week, it's called My Celebrant App, and thought the app was interesting and that there's a chance you'd like to take a look too. Victoria writes:
Do you want to save time? Do you want to grow your business? Do you want to create an exceptional client experience? My Celebrant is the only business management platform built specifically for celebrants. Everything in one place to plan the perfect ceremony - available anywhere, any time!
Victoria's offered a discount code TCI50 which will grant Celebrant Institute email readers 50% off both monthly and annual subscriptions. Read about the app in this document or go to the website, My Celebrant App.
🗣️ New interpreter form
A reminder that there are new forms for faithful performance by an interpreter and statutory declarations. Our best advice is to search your computer for old blank versions of these forms, delete them, and download the new ones.
🎓 OPD
And a reminder to take a moment this month to complete your ongoing professional development if you haven't completed it for 2024 yet. Go to marriage.ag.gov.au/mcportal to log on and do it now.
📧 Overwhelmed with email?
At the top of this letter I encouraged you to reply to email enquiries quickly. There's a few problems with my charge though:
- The email inbox can be overwhelming when you're running your own business like we do.
- Even if you do reply, there's a chance it goes to spam.
So I've got three quick action points for you today to get on top of these email problems.
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SaneBox: I'm a massive SaneBox advocate, it's how I keep my inbox sane, and empty. I could wax lyrical about it for days so I've asked the guys for a special link for Celebrant Institute readers to give you a free 14-day trial, plus a free 1-on-1 SaneBox concierge coaching session. Use this link to access those two offers today: try.sanebox.com/celebrant
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FastMail: A common problem I find with email users today is that they don't have a separate email account just for business, and they don't have email at their own domain name. FastMail is a Melbourne company that I've trusted with my email for years (way better and helpful compared to Gmail). Use this Fastmail signup link for a 10% discount for your first year, and they can import all of your Gmail or Hotmail etc for free and help you redirect it to your Fastmail account using your own domain name so you look professional.
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Hello Inbox: Go to helloinbox.email to run your email account and domain name through a series of tests to see how spammy it is and what the likelihood of your email ending up in spam is.
And if you need help, you know where to find me.
– Josh
You are enjoying another Celebrant Institute production and you're receiving this email because you're a celebrant. If you aren't a celebrant then I don't know how you ended up here. If you've been forwarded this update and you'd like to subscribe for free, you can do that here.