This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up everybody. Welcome to Cytosol School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday, our weekly segment, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. Yesterday was my birthday as well as the birthday of The Money Tree, which is now one year old, my new book. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to go on tour last year.
So I'm really sad about that, but still hoping at some point to go on the road. In the meantime, if you haven't checked it out, go and give it a read. The Money Tree available wherever books are sold. All right, so Throwback Thursday. Last week we heard from the founder of Turnkey Translator, who argued that anyone who speaks multiple languages can profit from their skills.
Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from the founder of Budget Savvy Bride. And she recently said yes to serious growth. It's a love story and also a profitable one. What has happened since we first featured Jessica in episode 849, which was approximately 710 days ago? Well, let's hear it directly from her and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up.
Jessica, what's up? [Music]
My name is Jessica Bishop. I am currently living in the UK and I was featured in episode number 849 about my side hustle turned full-time business, the Budget Savvy Bride. The Budget Savvy Bride is an online wedding planning resource, publication and community that helps couples plan a wedding that they can actually afford and that feels authentic to them. Our goal is to help make the wedding planning process as simple, savvy and stress-free as possible.
And we do this via the resources on our website, thebudgetsavvybride.com, our podcasts, the bouquet toss and our wedding planning support community. Weddings don't have to be expensive to be beautiful, so we're here to bust that myth. Mainstream wedding planning mega sites you might be familiar with often share these stats and figures about what the average American wedding costs. And usually those figures are in, you know, like the $30,000 range, but at the Budget Savvy Bride, we regularly interview real life couples, most of whom have planned their weddings on budgets of less than half of the supposed average with many of our weddings coming in at $15,000 or less. And we share their actual wedding budget breakdown so you can see exactly how they spent that budget.
This is so powerful because it gives couples an inside look at how others were able to pull off some savvy wedding magic with a similar budget to theirs, proving that it's not only totally possible, but they'll also find great tips and take ways to do it themselves. In the time since my original episode, so much has changed, honestly, both in the world and also in my business, COVID obviously has thrown many industries for a loop and the events and weddings industry was hit particularly hard by restrictions on gatherings. So despite that fact though, 2020 was actually a very positive year for the Budget Savvy Bride. We reached over 10 million people via our website and social channels last year. Luckily, our focus has always been on simple and savvy celebrations so that couples can focus on what actually matters most, their relationship and their marriage.
So we've really heavily leaned into that messaging and into creating resources to help couples navigate the new challenges of wedding planning. The biggest challenge I'm currently facing in my business is growing my team. I've always taken pride in what I've been able to build with my own resourcefulness and the fact that I've done so much of it on my own. Admittedly, I can be a bit of a control freak and I have had quite a hard time letting other people in to help with certain aspects of my business. So delegating has always been kind of a challenge for me.
But over the years, I've been able to get by with various part-time helpers and assistants. But finally, after nearly 13 years in business, I'm getting ready to take the leap into bringing on my first full-time employee besides myself. So it's a huge step and a very necessary step to grow in the direction of the bigger vision that I have for the brand and my business. I think getting really clear on what your audience or potential customers' problems are is super important, knowing what their biggest struggles are, what keeps them up at night, what they hope for and dream about, make it your mission to help solve their problems. And in these times, building a community around your brand's mission, I think is more important than ever and it can be really powerful in terms of growth.
In the original episode that featured my business, it was shared how I started the blog as an outlet for all of my wedding planning thoughts and musings, so as not to burden my closest friends and family with wedding talk. And online communities have been such a huge driving force for that. And over the years, we've built an amazing Facebook group with over 14,000 brides and grooms to be who are collaborating and chatting with each other and getting support from one another. And so we decided to create our own special place for our community via a fantastic app called Mighty Networks where our audience can connect and collaborate and share with each other in a private and supportive space outside of all of the noise of your regular social media feeds. The only other thing that I would say is that I think 2020 was a big cultural shift for everybody, right?
It caused all of us to take a drastic pause, slow down and really reevaluate and reexamine our lives and what really matters, what's important, what's not. And I think that's really framed a lot of the way that we're approaching, you know, the conversations that we're having with our audience about wedding planning and putting the focus on what actually matters in the long term, which means planning a wedding within your financial means and not taking on debt that's gonna steal from all those wonderful plans that you have with your spouse for the future. [Music]
Awesome, congratulations to Jessica on saying yes to growth. It's always interesting and fun and really admirable, I think to just watch when somebody has been a solopreneur for a long time, you know, often by choice because that's what they wanna do, but then they decide, okay, I do wanna take, you know, the next step, whatever that is, and now I gotta learn about outsourcing and delegation and focus much more on personnel. I sometimes go back and forth on what's best about that for me, but as I said, I like seeing how other people navigate that process.
Also, a quick comment on statistics. This is helpful for a lot of things in life. It's really important to know the difference between the mean and the median because often you hear statistics about the average cost of something. Like here we have the average cost of a wedding is $30,000 or something. And you hear this often in the media, could be about this particular statistic or something else, but often when people say the average, they're talking about the mean, okay, which is when you add a bunch of stuff up together and you're like, what is the average number?
But that number is often skewed because of some outliers. Like you've got some people out there spending maybe half a million dollars on their wedding. And so that greatly increases the technical average or again, the mean. But if you look at the median, that's the middle value in a set of numbers, then it gives you much more accurate results. So the median cost of a wedding is actually closer to $14,000, at least according to Google at the moment.
And of course some people spend a lot less than that, right? So know the difference between the mean and the median. Jessica, thank you so much again and congrats. Listeners, if you have a question, if you have a comment, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/15591559.
We're gonna link up Jessica's website podcast for her new reality show, What's Love Got to Do With It? Well, that one's not a real thing. I just made that up. So whatever she does have is gonna be on that page along with some other resources. And of course, I hope you will subscribe and come back tomorrow.
So glad to be able to make this show for you every single day. That's it for now. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
