Wedding Business Solutions

Take time to look back!

• Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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Take time to look back!

As we near the end of the year, are you pausing to reflect on what truly went well in your wedding business? Are you focusing too much on the challenges and forgetting to celebrate your wins? What have you accomplished that you didn’t notice while you were “in the moment”? In this episode, I share how looking back can reveal growth, gratitude, and new ways to invest in yourself and your business—for a better year ahead.

Listen to this new 6-minute episode for practical inspiration on celebrating your successes, learning from challenges, and setting meaningful goals for the future.

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 

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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.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com

Take time to look back. Listen to this episode. See what I'm talking about.

Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. We're getting towards the end of the year, and it's a really good time to take a look backwards before we look forwards. What went well? We don't often take time, especially if things were a little bit challenging at a particular time in our life or during the year, to take a look back at what went well. Because usually more went really well than went poorly. But what do we focus on? The bad. We focus on what went south, things that were problems. And we could go down the list of all those possibilities between personally and in business. But we need to take a look back and maybe even give yourself a little pat on the back and say, you know what? We did X number of events this year and almost every one of them went off really well.

Customers are thrilled. Hopefully all of them did, right? Customers are thrilled. The people that we worked with, the other vendors that were involved, they're happy with what we did as well. Our social media, everything that we did that was well. And then there were some things that could have been improved. There were some things that we need to learn from so they don't happen again. We don't want to just create more rules and punish the masses for the ills of a few, but we do want to be able to look back and say, you know what? For the most part, we did a really good job and we're going to do better in the future. We're going to learn from that.

But we also want to say thanks, right? Say thanks to all the people that we worked with. Thanks to people that supported us. If you're a solopreneur, there's always people that you're working with, and you want to be somebody that other people want to work with. So just be thankful, be grateful. Choose your phrasing for that. But take a moment and look back and say, okay, what did we accomplish this year? What did you accomplish personally? What did your family accomplish? What did your loved ones, people that are close with you—what did your organization accomplish, if you're part of a particular organization or your local community of wedding and event pros?

What were we able to accomplish this year? I'll bet in your area, you were able to accomplish hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing events. And yeah, I'm sure there's some outliers in there. I'm sure there are. But I'm sure that a lot of it went really well. And if you think about it, did you do a better job on the weddings and events this year than you did last year? Did you do better last year than you did five years ago, if you've been in the business that long, or even 10 years ago? Because it's like seeing somebody else's kids. You don't see them very often, and all of a sudden you see them and think, wow, they grew so much. But you as the parent don't see that. Whether it's your child or your puppy or your kitten or whatever, you see it every day. They see it once in a while.

They're seeing those spurts and growth. It's the same with your personal growth. It's the same with your business growth. You don't see that you're growing because you're in it. You're doing it. It's hard to see that. But if you look back and think, wow, what did I do this year that I didn't even know how to do a year ago, two years ago, five years ago? Or what was I doing, but not at this level back then? I think those are the important things to do at this time of the year—just take a look back and close off the negative for a little bit. Close off the negative and look back at the positive.

And then when you look at the negative and you say, okay, well, the balance is we did way, way more good than we did bad—or less than good, it doesn't have to be bad—what are we going to learn from that? And now what do we need to do going forward? How can we invest in ourselves going forward so that we can do more good and get even better every time? If you've been listening for a while, you've heard me say something like this: I don't ever want to give the best speech I can ever give. I don't ever want to do the best podcast I can ever do. I just want to do the best one I've ever done every time. I want my next book to be the best I've ever written up until that point, but not the best I can ever write, because I want the next one to be better. And I think it's the same for you. You want the next wedding or event to be the best you've ever done, but not the best you can ever do, because you want the one after that to be even better.

So look back at all the good that you've done. Give yourself a moment of reflection and take pride in that. If you have a team, do it together and take pride in what you've done and give yourself credit for that. And than say, how do we step up the game? And that should be your goal going forward.

Thanks 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.

Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:

©2025 Wedding Business Solutions LLC & AlanBerg.com


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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