Las Vegas Wedding Officiant Bets on Red

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Thanks for tuning in today. This is episode 1914 of Side Hustle School. That would be 1,914. We are still going strong. It's all because of our amazing community.

And that means you, you are awesome. All right, now we thought about saving this story for Valentine's Day, but then we realized that's 11 months away, also known as a really long time. So here you go. Here it is today. In this story, a car rental consultant goes from hurts to hearts with a six-figure side hustle.

She is a Las Vegas wedding efficient. Why not? And we're gonna learn how this business model really works. As I said, it's doing really well. She has definitely learned a lot in the time she's been doing it.

So let's dig into the details. Las Vegas wedding efficient bets on red. That's today's story. [Music]

Sometimes something monumental happens and we suddenly veer off to a whole new life. That's what happened to today's side hustler, Maria Marano.

Several months after the death of her husband, Maria was looking to start over. She wanted to do something she enjoyed that had an impact on others. After she saw a friend perform a wedding ceremony, she knew she'd found a calling. She wanted to become a wedding efficient. But she didn't rush right into this new adventure.

To be sure of her decision, Maria first molded over for a while and did some research. A wedding efficient, of course, is someone who performs wedding ceremonies. They can also branch out to perform funerals, end of life ceremonies, and naming ceremonies for infants. In most places, you have to be an ordained minister to perform weddings, but receiving your ordination can be done fairly simply. It doesn't mean going to divinity schools for years.

In most cases, it's much, much easier. Now here's where it gets interesting for Maria. After obtaining a license to perform marriages in the state of Nevada, that's where she lives, Maria created a promotional kit with her bio and a video of her performing a mock wedding. Then she put on her heels and a smile and began knocking on the door of every wedding chapel on the Las Vegas Strip, asking for referrals. She was nervous, but knew she had to try.

Side note, you might wonder how many wedding chapels there are on the Las Vegas Strip. I wondered too. So I looked it up. It turns out there are 50 of them. Five, zero, definitely a popular venue.

Maria got her referrals and got underway and also made a number of mistakes. In her early days of officiating, she once got the name of the groom wrong. Whoops. She once used the name of the bride's ex-husband, not ideal, and she once forgot to tell guests they could sit down, leaving them standing for the whole ceremony. Still, she learned from the mistakes and quickly developed her own style.

Being an officiant is all about making connections, literally. It's something the couple and their friends and family will remember for years. It's a big responsibility. To grow the business, Maria joined her local chamber of commerce and some wedding-related associations. She continues to talk to venue owners and hotel chapel managers to stay top of mind in case someone asks for an officiant they'd recommend.

She also advertises her services on websites, including the knot and wedding wire. And finally, she always has her elevator pitch ready in case someone somewhere asks what she does for a living. When she started, her cost of licensing with the county and ordination itself was just about $150, and her website was about $500 to get up and running. Being a wedding officiant began as a side hustle for Maria, but it eventually grew into one of her main sources of income. As a part-timer, doing weddings 50% of her time, she made between $15,000 to $20,000 a year.

Now, she earns over six figures a year. Looking back, Maria wishes she had a mentor in her early days. So to help others just starting out, naturally, she has created a training course that teaches budding officiants everything they need to know about licensing requirements, how to perform the perfect ceremony, and how to create a competitive fee structure. For her, all of those elements combined into a rewarding second act. [Music]

If you'd like to learn more about this whole business of becoming a wedding officiant, obviously, Maria's website is a good starting point.

TrueLoveNots.com, that's nots with a K, K-N-O-T-S. We will link it up on the notes page. Also, for jurisdictions, make sure to do your research to find out the process in your country, state, province, county, city. It does vary quite a bit, but there are lots of places where it's actually pretty simple. So who knows?

Maybe that'll inspire somebody out there. And if not, what else could you do like this? Like what else, what other services might there be that you could apply a similar model to and who knows, create a side hustle or maybe something so much more. Well, that's it for today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/19141914. You can also send us a comment or question there. And of course, you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for tuning in. Take care of yourself out there.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. [Music]

- From the Onward Project.