This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
>> What's up friends, listeners, community? This is Chris Guillebeau. Welcome to Throwback Thursday/Where Are They Now? Where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them on the show. So far in these features, we've heard from a woman who teaches citizenship classes and civics lessons on YouTube, as well as a guy producing scavenger hunts in many different US cities.
Today, in our latest feature, you'll hear from Jen Glantz, also known as the bridesmaid for hire. She had one of the most interesting ideas, one that I never would have thought of. I guess it's because I haven't been a bridesmaid, but also, there are lots of other bridesmaids who didn't do this, and she was able to capitalize on it in a remarkable way. I'd encourage you to actually go back and listen to the original episode for more backstory. That was episode 83.
In today's Throwback episode, she'll tell us a bit about what's happened since, along with her biggest current challenge, and some advice for anyone who'd like to follow in her bridesmaid biz footsteps. All right, let's hear directly from Jen. I'll be back at the end to wrap us up. My name is Jen Glantz. I am currently living in New York City, and I was featured on episode 83 about my slide hustle, which is bridesmaid for hire.
I started bridesmaid for hire after all of my friends got married early in my 20s, and I found that I was always behind the scenes at weddings, and what I noticed was in a billion-dollar industry, there was nobody there whose job it was to be there for the bride. If they had a wedding planner, that person was often really busy planning the wedding, setting it up, dealing with vendors, but no one was there to deal with the people problems. I started a company where I provide professional bridesmaid services, surprise, and needs. They hire me to be their personal assistant, on-call therapist, social director, and peacekeeper because literally every wedding has drama, and nobody is there to deal with it. So that's a lot of what my company does.
We service both brides and maid of honors, and we service brides so that they can hire their own bridesmaid, have a day of coordinator, or just have a wedding consultant be there for them on the phone to answer all their questions when they get engaged. We work with bridesmaids as well to help them figure out how to do their job for the first time. And finally, we work with maid of honors doing maid of honor speech writing, and also coach them through that position 'cause it does sometimes feel like a full-time job. Since I was last on the show, I decided to do an evaluation of all the packages that I offered, and instead of having many different packages to serve as different clients, I decided to reduce it down to a core three to service two specific clients, the bride, and either the bridesmaid or the maid of honor. In addition to that, I've had over 40,000 people apply to work for me, and one of the cool things I've done in addition to hiring more people, I think I started with three and now I have seven, is I found a way to incorporate a product to sell the people who I cannot hire.
So so many people reached out wanting to work for me, and I cannot hire 40,000, but now I have an online course where I can train them to start their own business in the wedding industry that disrupts it just like mine. Another major project that I launched in addition to this business is called Finally the Bride as an extension to my personal life where I just got engaged, and now I'm letting people vote on my wedding decisions and my wedding planning, and I'm using a business model around that to also generate income off of the original brand Bridesmaid for Hire. The biggest challenge I'm currently facing is that even though I have been a business owner for five years, I am still extremely stubborn. I still wanna do everything myself. You know, at this point in my business, I do believe I should be having other people help me with certain tasks, certain projects, but I still have this mindset that I am the only one who can do anything, and I know that that's not true.
So one of the biggest accomplishments that I personally made as a business owner this year was hiring people to do some projects for me and some consulting for me, because I finally realized that if you are a one-person show, you can't be as powerful as you possibly could be if you allowed other people to enter your business and do the things that you either don't have time to do or you're not the expert in. I wanna continue optimizing and improving Bridesmaid for Hire, continue to make our core products even stronger, and perhaps do something that helps Brides and Bridesmaids made of honors while they're on the go and facing problems in real time. So I think those are gonna be some of the big future goals for the company. I think it's also really important to remember that you can enter and disrupt an industry that you don't know much about and you have never had experience in. I never wanted to be in the wedding industry.
I never thought I would have a business in the wedding industry, but I found myself going to a lot of weddings and noticing that this was a problem that wasn't solved. So if you wanna get into business and you're wondering what and how and why, start asking people, "Hey, what's your problem?" And I know that sounds defensive and rude, but the more you can get people to open up about their problems, not like they're really deep emotional problems, but just everyday problems like, "Hey, my shirt keeps coming untucked," or, "I have a really big problem where it's raining "and my umbrella always breaks." The more you accumulate problems, the more you'll figure out, "Okay, what is an unsolved thing in an industry "that maybe people have tried to solve, "that they haven't solved it good enough, "or maybe you could put your own spin on it?" So asking people what the problem is and then testing it out. Maybe having a minimal viable product that you share with some people, get some feedback and keep improving. I always say start now, start with the bare minimum. It's never gonna be perfect, but you continuously can improve and don't overthink it.
Some of the best business ideas, like mine, people say to me all the time, "Oh my God, I thought about doing that, "but I just never did." We'll do it. - Well, you heard it from her. The bridesmaid for hire, the original, the one and only, although she has 40,000 other people who want to do the same thing. So good for her. Congratulations, Jen.
- It's so wonderful to hear how your business has grown. And even though she's grown that business quite a lot, she also realized she was getting spread too thin and had too many packages. Too many offers, essentially. She had all this demand and so she thought she had to serve all the people, but then kind of realized that simplifying would actually help her. So she reduced it down to what was it, I think two to three packages.
Also, I really liked what she said about how the problem you solve doesn't have to be in an industry you have a background in. I mean, this is kind of interesting. It's kind of provocative in some ways, because, or at least it's contrarian. And even for me, I would say often I encourage people to start with that, like start with your own industry, start with your profession, start with what you're familiar with, but it's not the only way as she has demonstrated. Or maybe I guess you could say it was an industry she was familiar with from having been a bridesmaid.
So experiencing it from that perspective, but she never wanted to be in the wedding industry. She was just going to all these weddings and noticed that this was a problem that wasn't solved. So as she said, you don't have to find a deep emotional problem. You can just find an everyday problem. And there's a lot of money in solving everyday problems, a lot of money, a lot of demand, a lot of needs, as I think you can tell from her story.
Again, I would encourage you to listen to the original episode, which was, let me see once again, I think it was episode 83. You can just go to sidehustleschool.com/83 to hear that. [Music]
You might want to check out Jen's latest project, which is her own wedding at finallythebride.com. Great domain there, finallythebride.com. We're going to be doing these throwback segments throughout 2020.
So let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. It is the year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your side hustle, if you'd like to be a ring bearer or a flower girl or a flower boy, you know, we're inclusive, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We'll be featuring them throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. This has been episode 1153.
My name is Chris Guillebeau for "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from The Onward Project.
