Wedding Business Solutions

Carolyn Strauss - How do you keep your energy up in the middle of wedding season?

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Carolyn Strauss - How do you keep your energy up in the middle of wedding season?

Are you struggling to maintain your energy during back-to-back wedding events? Do you ever feel overwhelmed and forget the importance of each unique wedding day? In this episode, Carolyn Strauss shares invaluable tips on staying energized and present, emphasizing the special moments that matter most to your clients.

Listen to this new episode for ways to stay energized, focused, and passionate throughout the wedding season. Learn how to truly shine for every event, no matter how many you’ve done.


About Carolyn: 
Carolyn Strauss is a dynamic keynote speaker whose programs empower companies, events, and organizations to become truly irresistible   Known for her expertise in reinvention, team dynamics, and communication, she equips her clients with actionable tools to achieve their goals. As a Certified Speaking Professional, Carolyn has captivated audiences in 14 countries including keynoting a speakers conference in South Africa in April 2024.


Conatact Carolyn:
carolyn@carolynstrauss.com

My funny podcast at www.anotherdayaboveground.com 

Website:   www.carolynstrauss.com 


If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

Please be sure to subscribe to this podcast and leave a review (thanks, it really does make a difference). If you want to get notifications of new episodes and upcoming workshops and webinars, you can sign up at www.ConnectWithAlanBerg.com  

View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

How do you keep your energy up when you're in the middle of heavy, heavy wedding and event season? Listen to this episode and find out. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I am so excited to have my friend Carolyn Strauss on to talk about keeping your energy up. Carolyn, speaking of energy, how you doing?

I am great, Alan. How are you? And I just find it so fun when, when you and I get together because there are so many things that we have in common and different and, and besides the wedding business, I mean, it is the coolest, I think the most special business that there is.

Yeah, yeah.

It's coming from somebody who's never been married, by the way. I just, I want to give you the perspective of. I've emceed events all over the world. I was actually asked one time if I wanted to, what do they call it? Like, do wedding officiate. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah, I actually was asked to do that by a company here and I thought, no, you should have somebody who's a little more godly maybe. I don't know.

No, no, you know, listen, but you know, if we, I think you would be amazing at it. Right. But again, we get together, we just start talking about all different things. And we were recently at a conference together in Frigid, Minnesota. Thank you very much.

Oh, but you kept us warm. Well, kept us warm with your whiskey. That little bit of whiskey down. So warm and yummy. Thank you for that, Alan.

You're very welcome. Very welcome. I will have more the next time. So. But one of the things that came up is just talking about keeping the energy up. Now. We as speakers have the same thing. You're going back to.

Back to. Back to. Back to events. I have something coming up where it's two weeks in a row, I'm going to be in Vegas, then I'm going to be in Florida, probably with another event in between that. How do you keep that energy up? So the same thing with wedding and event pros. You're in heavy season and you might have events on Friday and Saturday and Sunday and then you. And then Friday and Saturday and Sunday and again. So what are some of the things that you, you found that you want to share with the audience here about how to just keep that energy going?

So for your audience who doesn't know me, I did live television for 18 years. I was on the Home Shopping Network and I sold pull on polyester pants and matching tops and matching skirts and matching Dresses. And I had to, every time I went on air, talk about and get excited about pull on polyester pants. Now I can talk for eight minutes about pull on polyester pants. But the point is, I, after I did it for a year, so I was on at least once a month. And we had, you know, basically the same basic bottoms, either wide leg or narrow leg or cropped or petite, average, tall, all of it, but it was still pull on polyester pants. And what I had to remind myself is that many of the people who were tuning in to hsn, the television, had never seen me before. They had never seen me talk about pull on polyester bands.

They had never had the experience of what it's like for me to stretch it and pull it and hold it up to the models. So when I think about the wedding business or the event business in general, because that's the industry that you and I are in, Alan, but the wedding business, what we have to remember is that for many people, this is the most important day of their lives. I mean, I know that's obvious for your entire audience, you guys all know that. But given that sometimes we may forget that and we're just going through the motions. What I used to do is put myself in the position of, okay, so if I'm home sitting on my couch watching this show at this moment, what do I want to hear, what do I want to see and what do I want to feel in order to take action? So as a wedding planner, I imagine that if you just stop in the middle of the hectic of getting the food set up and, and the, the alcohol and, and the band and everything, and just stop for a moment and go, okay, what is Grandma Nancy sitting in the audience need to experience at this moment? What one tweak can I make right now where the bride will go. That's special because our job in the event industry. But your job, I believe, as wedding event planners is to create something special. Moments and special memories.

And the way I talked about it for years, is that how memories are formed? Memories are formed with a time, an experience, or an emotion or a place, time, place, emotion, experience. Okay, Think about a wedding. It has all of it. It is a directed time, a certain amount of hours or a weekend or, you know, however long the wedding is going to be, it's the place. So the place has got to be special. And it will be ingrained in that memory. And then these experience. What.

What are the experience? And then what emotion is attached? So if we look at weddings like I look at events from those four points of view. The time, the place, the emotion, the experience. If we look at all of that and go, okay, what one thing can I tweak at this moment to affect one of those four things?

Yeah. Now, I always think about it just as a consumer. The experience is not just at the event. The experience starts way before that. And just think about yourself as a consumer. You walk in, is the person smiling? Right. Walk up to the counter, does the person smile? Do they make eye contact? Doesn't have to be creepy eye contact, but do they make eye contact? And, you know, are they. Are you feeling the presence? When I do a trade show, sometimes I'll have a friend helping me in the trade shows.

This one big conference, Carol and I do, there's 5,000 people come to this, and there's often a line of people waiting to talk to me. Right.

And as there should be. As there should be at all times, you should actually start a queue outside your office for your kids to have to line up to come talk to you. I think that's how it should be with you. Yeah.

Well, empty nesters now. So that's good. There's no more line. We're good. Just the grant. Just the grandson. Just the grandson. But he's a.

He's one. Not. He's one. He's the only one. So he gets all the attention. There you go. So my friend Brian said, is you're just present with everybody? Like when you're talking to that person, you're present with them? And I said, yeah, because I know what it's like to feel like that person is not being present, that they're looking for the next person they're going to drop you with. And we all have that.

And again, this is not just at the wedding. This is when you're communicating with them. Do they feel like a number when you're in person on the phone, on Zoom, Are they paying attention? This is the kind of. This whole experience thing of how are they going to feel about the experience? And then, like you said, keeping in mind everybody there. So one thing that I say is, every time they say yes to you. Now think about this, Carolyn. Every time they bring you to speak, they've said no to everybody else.

Right.

And I. Huge. And I call it a privilege. It is a privilege when we're on a stage. It's a privilege when they ask you to be the. The dj, the florist, the. The officiant at the wedding, because they're saying no to absolutely everybody else. And yet you see people who this.

We're talking about the energy here, right? You did a wedding on Friday. You did a wedding on Saturday. Now it's on Sunday. They don't want you to be the tired person on Sunday.

And what you did that weekend is none of their business. Right, right. We. We should. When I went on television, I had all kinds of stuff going on in my life, you know, because I was on for 18 years. So a lot of things happen over the course of 18 years. And what happened before I went on camera had nothing to do with what I was there to do. So if you can be present now.

One of the things I talk about in my speeches now, what I'm known for, is how to make you, your company or your product irresistible. And one of the things that I believe that wedding event professionals can do to be irresistible is to be centered and clear. One of the things that's happening in the world right now is the pace of change and how fast things are moving and how disruptive things are at all times. So what if. What if every moment you went, okay, how can I be centered and how can I be clear? Because events are hectic. And those people who put them on weddings, especially, because things happen. You know, the dog runs off with the ring. It happens, right? Or you have it planned out on, you know, the mountains of Colorado where I live, and it snows, so there are things that happen.

So do you have a tent that's available? Right, right. But if you stay calm, one of the things that makes you irresistible and magnetic now is when you're calm, people will gravitate to that and people will want to work with you because they know that they can trust you, that they're safe. So how do you be safe during the entire experience from the before, the during, and the after?

Right. Because it's contagious, the calm. It's also contagious, the frantic. Right. If they see you with your hair on fire, they're going to have their hair on fire. You need to be the calm. I think you often need to be the swan gliding gently across the water, paddling like mad underneath, because it is so many things going on. But, you know, we have to deal with that situation.So the whole idea of. Of energy, though, right? Let's say it's six months into your season, you've been doing weddings every weekend, and you're tired. I mean, it's. You're human. You're going to be tired. What are some of the things you can do to maybe not overcome that. Because tired is still tired is as tired does. Right? What are some of the things that you've seen that could help people keeping that energy up when, like you said, they don't want to see the tired dj, right?

So there are lots of ways, right? There's the. So we are physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual beings as humans. So first we got to take care of our biology. So are you drinking enough water? Have you moved? Have you stretched?

Have you.

Have you taken the 10 deep breaths that it takes to get oxygen into your brain? Have you ever done this exercise, Alan, with people? Like, maybe at a conference or when you're speaking? What I do when I work with CEOs sometimes is I actually have them take a really deep breath. It's kind of like a yoga breath. And go in as hard as you can and hold it, and then let it out. And then do it again. And then let it out, do it again. If you get dizzy on the third breath, which I would say more than 50% of the people do, that's because you're not getting enough oxygen to your brain on a regular basis. So I'm serious. It's as simple as going somewhere where there's air that's hopefully kind of fresh and.

Or stand in front of the air conditioner or something if it's a warm day and take, like I say, 10 deep breaths. But if you don't have time, just three really deep breaths to get some oxygen to your brain, next thing is water. Water is liquid oxygen. It's H2O's. So it's more oxygen than breathing. So take some water and drink a huge glass of water. So handle your biology then. If we're physical, then we're mental.

What are you saying to yourself that will get you through this wedding? Not, oh, my God, I've been doing this for six months. It's another wedding. I'm tired. I just really want to go home and go to sleep. That's one conversation you could have. But the other conversation you could have is, I am so lucky that this group, this couple, is trusting me. How lucky am I? And I love the framing of luck. Like you said, the privilege.

It's the privilege. It's the luck that they have chosen me of all of the other options to be here and witness the sacred moment in their lives. Wow. So then it's the how lucky am I? Right. That is just a really cool thing because that shifts the energy. If I say to myself, oh, you know what? It's another wedding. I'm really Tired. I can get through it.

It'll be fine. I'll get through it. And it'll be fine. If I go. I am so lucky. I get to be here for the most sacred, one of the most sacred moments in these people's lives. Okay, let's do this. Even just those words, you can see it in my face, how it actually shifts the contour of your face and the brightness of your eyes.

Oh, speaking of the brightness of your eyes, get. Lumify. I know you're going to laugh. Have you heard of it?

No.

I used it. I used it today. Lumify are these drops that you can get at any drugstore, target anywhere. Lumify. And they're eye drops. And you put one drop in each eye, all of the red goes away. Look at this. All of the red gets out of.

Look at this. There's no red in my eyes. It doesn't sting. It doesn't hurt. It's soothing. It's amazing. Anytime I'm in front of an audience, anytime I'm on camera, as I am here with you today, and it matters, right? When your eyes are this bright, people are like, wow, she's awake. See, it would actually make a difference.

Even if there's not a lot of red, it actually. Look at that. It actually makes a huge difference. And that will make you look less tired. And when you walk by and you see yourself in a mirror, male, female, it doesn't matter. You will see yourself and go, okay, I don't look tired. I don't feel tired. I'm fine.

Right? So there's. There's the I thing. Okay? So it's what you. It's physical, it's mental, it's emotional. You know what? Please leave your. Just feel the love. I am love. I am love.

I am love. I am peace. I am love. And let that be, no matter what is going on, because we're all human and we all have tons of disruptions right now, and there's all kinds of stuff going on. But come from love, because that's what a wedding is about. It's about coming from love. Okay? And then there's the spiritual piece who lifts you up every once in a while. If I've been on the road, speaking again and again and again, I will call my best friend who is, like, positive and loving and supportive and amazing.

And before I go on stage, you know, an hour before, I'll call and say, all right, tell me what I'm doing matters. Tell me that I'm going to be great today. Tell me that they're going to get something out of my program. And she says, yes, yes, yes. I ask her to listen from a cheerleader point of view. And I say, be my cheerleader instead of be my therapist. You can ask people how to listen to you. Do you want them to listen as your advisor? Do you want them to listen as your cheerleader? Do you want them to listen as your therapist? Or do you want them just to listen as a friend? And you can actually ask.

So I'll say, okay, I'm calling because I need a cheerleader for the next five minutes. I'm about to go on stage. I've been on 10 airplanes this month. I am exhausted. Help me. And she does, and I hang up. And I've got the energy. So those are ways to manage your energy, and then there's managing the energy of the space.

So it's the questions you can ask. One simple question. What can I do right now to make this better?

I remember working with a venue in Austin, Texas, outside Austin, and the owner had had the venue for about 25 years, and I went down there for training, and she said to me, alan, when the day comes that I send a bride down the aisle, that I don't get a little teary, then I know I'm done. Because that's the importance of that. And it goes back to what I said. You know, saying yes to you is saying no to everybody else. I remember showing up at an event where they thought they were going to have a lot of people, and there's like, 20 people. And I spoke, and at the end, I don't walk out the back door. I go down. I'm speaking to the guy that brought me in, and he said, man, you just.

You just brought everything. I said, well, I only have one level. It's everything. And if one person showed up, they deserve everything. And. And this is funny, Carolyn. I actually spoke for one of the National Speakers association chapters on a virtual probably during COVID and the only person that showed up live was the person that asked me to do it. I literally did a webinar for one person.

Yep.

Right. But whenever I do a webinar for a thousand people, I always do it as if I'm doing it for one person.

That's right.

Right.

That's right.

Because we're picturing them, the value that you. You honored me with your time right now, therefore, I'm going to honor you with 100. And when you've done this, and I've done this, like, all day, and Then there's a party at night and then you speak the next day and then there's another party. And people like, man, how do you keep the energy up? I say I don't turn it off until this is all over. If I turn it off now, tomorrow ain't happening.

That's funny. If anybody's ever watched the Home Shopping Network, you know, there are things called Today specials. And you have to start at, you have to get there at 10 o'clock at night for hair and makeup and meetings. And then you're on from 12am to 2am Then you're back on from 8am to 10am, one to three in the afternoon, five to six, and then eight to nine at night. It's literally 24 hours of being on and trying to sleep for that three hours between 3am and 5:30am was so impossible for me. So literally I would do it, stay up, use more and more and more concealer, more and more and more lumify right to look awake on camera. But I wouldn't let it go until it was over. So it's funny you should say about the person who runs the venue who got teary.

I have been a professional. You know, we're both CSPs, Certified Speaking Professionals. We've both been professionals for decades. I don't tell you, you know, I'm at least 49 years old, between you and me, but for decades I've been doing this and there has not been one time even working with you. Today I'm sitting at home in my home studio, but even working with you, there's never been a time that I didn't get that adrenaline kick in my body, in my solar plexus. Remember, we're biological. So I have never not had that. And I have said exactly that.

The minute that that doesn't happen before I go on stage, that's the day that I should say thank you and goodbye.

Right? Right. I, I. One of my personal philosophies is I, I don't want to ever give the best speech I can ever give. I just want to give the best I've ever given every time.

Exactly.

And that's what keeps me going is, am I, what did I do to be better? Right. What did I do to be better? I'm tweaking my slides like as, as I'm walking on stage. Practice. Right?

That's right.

And it was good enough. Yep. But I found a way to make it better, therefore, I did.

So with weddings, the thing that's beautiful about them is that every single one is unique. So instead of looking it as another wedding, I imagine looking at it like, look at the beauty and the energy and the dynamic that this couple or this group chose for this wedding. And how can I, as the wedding expert, how can I take this up one notch? Like, I mean, personally, I think candles are amazing. I think, I think using all of the senses as a speaker, I try to invoke all of the senses when I speak weddings even more. So, I mean, think about the smell, the smell of the flowers. Can you turn it up a little bit? Add a candle, maybe that has the scent of that particular flower so that as people are walking in, seeing the flowers get the scent of, of that. Right. Maybe tying that into the chocolates.

Because, you know, a party without chocolates isn't a party. But that's just my own personal feeling. So. Right. Maybe tie it into the. Right. So I think, I think the privilege, first of all, the privilege of me playing with you talking about weddings. I feel like weddings like I feel about boats.

I want to go and hang out with my friends at them and on them, but I don't want to own my own. So you know why? Because I'd have to commit to one. Not commit to one man. That's not what I'm saying. But I'd have to commit to one wedding. And I have a thousand ideas of how I want to be. So how I want it to be. But imagine now that you are a wedding event professional, every single one is like a brand new experience for you, right?

And now there's another side to this, which is. So an entertainer friend of mine, Mike Walter, I remember people talking about like the do not playlist and things like this and, and DJ saying, I won't play that song. I don't want. I've heard that a thousand times. And Mike jumped in and said, it's for them, it's not for me. Right. So I might not like this song. Now, there were good reasons for not playing certain songs at weddings, right? The foul language stuff.

There's. If you were married before, don't play the song that was your first dance at your first wedding. Okay, maybe, maybe that kind of stuff. But, but the idea of I'm not going to play this because I, the dj, don't like it, but everybody's going to dance that. You know, they're going to dance to that. And yeah, maybe it's like one of those switches, you know, you could flip and you're going to fill the dance floor and you've done that 50 times this year already. And do you really want to flip at 51? And the answer is they weren't at the other 50.

Right, right.

That. That's the thing here. They weren't there. I think about performer getting on stage singing the same song that they've sung 50 times this year is like us getting on stage giving a speech that we've given before, but not to them. And that's what I always think about is this is the first time I'm giving this speech to them.

And if they've seen it or heard it before. How many times have you watched a sitcom and you see the opening of the sitcom and you sit through the opening credits and it's just an anchor to how lovely that is. So when you're talking about music, what comes to my brain is cool in the gang celebration. Right. I do not think there is a more played celebration song, but there's a reason for that. It does get people up and moving. It does get people in that celebrate mindset. It is not about you.

It's what the. The event and the bride and groom call for.

Or the bride and bride or the groom. Right.

I'm sorry, That's. That's not what I meant.

No, no, no, no, no, I get. No, I get. But it, again, is where our mind goes to. Right. If you, if you were going to get married, you would be marrying a man. I'm married to a woman. That's where our mind goes to. I.

I think when this has come out, I will have spoken at the inclusive wedding summit where I'm. I'm going to be talking about our inherent biases. Right. Like, you know, where I was born, how I was born, who I was born to, all those things. I can't change that. My perspective is coming from New York as a white male, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's just. That's just who we are.

So anyway, but I think one of.

My favorite weddings ever, ever was a lesbian wedding. It was my former assistant and her wife. They got married. It was my favorite line from that wedding. It's just coming back to me. They said to each other, not only will I always be by your side, but I'll always have your back. And I had never heard that at a traditional wedding before.

Right.

That was so. I mean, I got goosebumps now just telling you that, remembering that.

Well, but that's, that's the personalization that regardless of who the couple is, I didn't have that option at my wedding, I got married 41 years ago, and it was, we had a rabbi and a minister and it was a very, very traditional. Do you, do you love, honor, cherish? Here you go. There was no thought of writing your own vows or doing things like that. And I tell couples now, that's the most important part because there's no law that says you have to throw a party. And that's the other thing everybody to think about here. Every time you get hired, there's no law that said they had to hire anybody because it's all discretionary, right? If you get married, you have a bar mitzvah, you have a quinceanera, you have a christening, you have a communion, you have a holiday party. All these things are discretionary. And if you think about that, your livelihood is people paying you because they want to bring people together to celebrate something.

Even if it's a celebration of life, it's still celebrating something. And that should get your energy up. Besides the fact they said no to everybody else is to think. I say, when you're prospect, not prospecting, when somebody reaches out to you, you want to find out three things. What's the occasion, who's coming? And then what does a successful outcome look like and feel like to you? Not to me, to you. And then how can I make that happen?

Those are the same questions you ask as a speaker, right? What's the occasion, who's coming? And what does it look like for this program to be a success to you? It's the exact same questions that we ask Alan. But there's a. To me, it feels like for the weddings, though, there is a level of a once in a lifetime maybe, but once in a lifetime experience, Right? So how, how can you create a once in a lifetime experience for everyone involved?

Right? Nobody goes into the wedding thinking they're going to do it again.

Right, exactly right.

And that's why they spend 50 to 60 billion dollars in this country on wedding receptions. Because you're thinking, and again, we've been fortunate one.

You have. Yes, you have, my friend. And.

But yet a cousin of mine got married before we did. Unfortunately, her husband passed. She was not looking for love. Love found her. She got married again. She never thought she'd have a second wedding. She thought they would have been married forever, which if he hadn't passed, they would have been. Right? So it's those things is just, I think keeping the energy up is about just taking yourself out of it.

Like you said, your backpack of baggage you're carrying is up to you to leave on or take off every time you walk in. But now let's turn around and say, okay, these people brought people together to celebrate something, and they chose me to be a part of that, to be. To be a part of this. And if that doesn't bring your energy up, then you really have to question if you're in the right business.

That's right. That's exactly right. And it's okay if you're not. I mean, here I am on a podcast to support wedding professionals. But. But I got to tell you, if it doesn't turn you on anymore, the world is changing and it's changing rapidly. One of the things I talk about is the rate of change, and we are literally living in a 200% rate of disruption right now. Meaning that in the year 2019, the global disruption Index.

I'm going to take a second on this. I think it's important. Was at 5%, meaning that you could expect some kind of a big disruption somewhere in the world every two to two and a half months. So a climate disruption, a technological disruption, a political disruption, a financial disruption. Okay, you could expect that once every two and two and a half months. In 2024, according to the Global Disruption Index. Mackenzie. I believe it's a global.

McKenzie Global Disruption Index. We're at a 200% meaning that you can expect one every week or two. Every week or two, you can expect some huge disruption. So if you can, can. If. If this doesn't do it for you anymore, probably there's been some disruptions that have happened, and this might not be your happy place anymore, you know, or take a break. There's nothing wrong with taking three months off going and exploring something. Go and attend a bunch of weddings.

I was just in South Africa this past year, which was the most incredible experience ever. I was there for almost four weeks, and I got to experience things there that don't happen in the United States. And I came back with a whole new perspective on events because I went to a bunch of events there that are different. Right. So maybe you go and go to some weddings, you know, over in Asia or in Africa or somewhere, and then come back with a new perspective.

Well, or just you can go two states over and do this as well. It's just taking yourself out of wherever you are. Again, you're in Texas.

Go to Massachusetts. If you're in Massachusetts, go to Texas. You will have very different wedding experiences.

Right. And just life experiences, just the way people treat you and stuff like that. Sometimes you do not just need to decompress and just get out of that. I was a guest on a podcast, and they asked me, why do you do what you do? And I think everybody, if you're listening, I think you can relate to this. I do what I do because it fulfills two things. It brings you value and it brings me joy. So if you're doing this wedding, this Kinsei, this mitzvah, this holiday party, this picnic, this whatever it is, and it's bringing value to the customers. Excellent.

And if it brings you joy to bring value to the customers, you're in the right place. You're in the right place. And I think that's what keeps me energized, is I'm not going to get on that stage or do that sales training if it doesn't fulfill both of those. Because. Because I follow that by saying, if it does both of those, I'll cash the check, right? Yes. If it doesn't do both, I don't want the check. Because somebody's getting cheated. If you're not getting value, you're getting cheated.

If I'm not getting joy, I'm being cheated. And I can't be giving you the best value if I'm being cheated because I'm not bringing my joy with this. So.

So funny you should say that, because I actually said to somebody the other day, they've not worked with me, they've seen me, they met me. I did a webinar in April of 2023, and I got an email in December of 2024. Carolyn, I've been thinking about you. I'm like, it was 18 months ago that I did this webinar for your organization. I mean, and it was like. It was like one of the. You know, it was a contractor's organization, and it was. It was 18 months ago.

And she's like, well, I've been thinking about reaching out. I'm like, well, yay. And thanks. But after we talked, and she said, well, you know, what is it? What does it cost and everything. And I said, well, let me tell you the value I'm going to create. And then I told her, and she. And I said, look, and if it doesn't bring you that value, don't pay me. And she said, what? And I said, honestly, if we get halfway through and it's not working for you, don't pay me the rest.

And she looked at me like I had three heads. But who doesn't do that? I don't understand being in a business that you wouldn't do that. So, you know, as a. As a florist, you deliver what they request, not what you want them to have. You can make suggestions, but deliver what they request.

Right. And if you're not the right fit, you tell them you're not the right fit and let them find somebody who.

Is or recommend somebody. One of my things is please be a resource. The most important thing you can be in such a disruptive environment when things are changing so rapidly is a resource to other people. I mean, Alan, you and I recommend each other all the time. I mean, we can. We will. We do you know what I mean? When we hear something that's right for each other and not necessarily for us, or maybe we. So maybe somebody.

Let's say Julie had beautiful flowers at her wedding and she sends her best friend to you, but what her best friend wants is not something you don't do. Dried bouquets, but you know somebody else who does refer them. Then you're still being of service to Julie and you're being of service to her best friend.

Yeah, I. Last story I got. I try to keep these to a half an hour.

Oh, sorry.

That's all right. No, we just keep talking. It's great. I was at an event and I heard somebody say, if you don't want to do the wedding, just give them a really high price. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. If you don't want to do it, you don't do it. Because the high price doesn't change the reason why you didn't want to do it. And now you're going to feel just dirty because you took the money and you still don't want to do it.

Therefore, again, who's getting cheated here? You're both getting cheated. You're not getting joy. They can't be getting the full value if you don't want to do it. Because whatever that reason was, maybe personality or location or timing or whatever didn't go away because you charged them a high price. So if you don't want to do it, you don't do it, period. That's it. And leave it open. Leave that space open for someone who.

You do want to work with and recommend someone else. Keep them in your ecology if you possibly can.

Right? Unless they're just really nasty people and then just.

Oh, right, then, yeah. Then. Then don't do. Don't do their wedding and wish them lots of luck. Right, there's that.

Or if you recommend them to someone, it's for a whole different reason, but we won't go into that right now. So I'm going to put in the show notes all the way to contact you. But if somebody wanted to find out more about you, Carolyn, where would be the best place to go?

Well, my address is 6. No, I'm kidding. You can go to CarolynStrass.com C A R O L Y N S T R a u s s.com and all the stuff about me. And I'm also very active on LinkedIn. You can find me on Facebook. You can call Alan personally. His phone number is. No, I'm kidding.

And he can get you in touch with me, too.

And I will talk all about polyester pants. So there we go.

Eight minutes.

Thanks so much for joining me, Carolyn. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or you can  text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.

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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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