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Real Business Advice for Wedding Pros

Renee Dalo

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Episode 46: Understanding Taxes for Your Business

Episode 46: Understanding Taxes for Your Business

Episode 46: Understanding Taxes for Your Business

Today we’re talking about taxes. Go put yourself a glass of wine! Or grab a cupcake or something. If you have tax questions (and we know you do!), we have answers! Our special guest, Braden Drake, LOVES talking about taxes, and we love Braden, so let’s get to it!
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Our Guest – Braden Drake


Braden Drake is your gay best friend, but an attorney who can also do your taxes. He is the owner of Braden Drake Law, where he helps creatives with business formation, copyright, trademark, contracts, and tax. He also owns Creativepreneur Community, an online resource for contract templates, courses, freebies, guides, and all of the resources creatives need to get legally legit.

Key Takeaways:

  • Do you have a hobby or a business? If you are bringing in money, you have a business. And you have taxable income.
  • If you are making a full faith effort to have a business, you don’t need to turn a profit in the first few years to get deductions.
  • If you earn at least $400 in income that is subject to self-employment tax, you have to claim that on your tax return.
  • How taxes work: full-time income – expenses – standard deduction – adjustments = taxable income
  • Your taxable income determines your tax bracket, which also determines your percentage of taxes paid
  • Be sure you are tracking your mileage to get the most deduction.
  • Quarterly Taxes: It’s best to pay your taxes quarterly in April, June, September & January.

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Episode 38: 6 Top Hacks for Successful Creative Business Owners

Episode 38: Top Hacks for Successful Creative Business Owners

Episode 38: Show Notes

We are keeping our January resolutions to you going strong with this weeks episode! This week, we talk about the top hacks of Creative Business Owners. If you are overwhelmed and wondering which part of your biz needs to be Marie Kondo-ed, we’ve got your back. Just start here. Just do these six things, and you’ll be starting the year off like the rockstar you know you are. Let’s get to it!

Our Guest – Mac Hughes
Episode 38: Top Hacks for Creative Business Owners
Mac Hughes is a business management software guru and notorious fashionista among friends and coworkers alike. She graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in entrepreneurship and dove head first into her career. She has worked alongside the tech pro’s at MINDBODY and HoneyBook for a combined 5 years of experience in helping business owners adopt processes for streamlining their passions. If she’s not busy at her desk at work, you can probably find her crafting some home brew in the garage or digging up vintage finds for her own side hustle: her Etsy shop, OneBabesTrash.

Key Takeaways:

  • Set clear, actionable goals.
  • Organize your processes.
  •  Automate: Don’t freak out. Use email templates, canned responses, and other smart solutions for tasks you find yourself doing repeatedly.
  • Automate the back-end, not the client facing experience.
  • Price Confidently. Aka, raise your prices, Y’all!
  • Make it easy for your clients to pay you. Take online payments!
  • Take time for yourself! Your clients will be able to tell when you are stretched too thin and at the end of your rope.

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Episode 37: Productivity Tips for Wedding Pros

Episode 37: Productivity Tips for Wedding Pros

Episode 37: Show Notes

Do you wish you could be more productive? Our modern life makes it so easy to be a victim of “shiny object syndrome”. Also, mindlessly scrolling on IG or Facebook isn’t helping us live our best lives either. We want you to work smarter, not harder, and part of that is mastering your personal productivity. This week, we bring you tips to increase your productivity and talk about productivity resolutions we are making for 2019. Listen in, and become more productive in just 39 minutes!


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Key Takeaways:

  • Get rid of distractions! Don’t work with your phone on your desk. Turn off phone notifications. Anything that dings at you or makes a noise needs to be silent while working.
  • To-do Lists are King! Whether you making a monthly, weekly, or daily to-do list, it’s best to write it down and get it out of your head and onto paper.
  • Multi-tasking isn’t real. Don’t get caught up in the Superwoman status of a multi-tasker. Mono-tasking is where it’s at.
  • Consider Batch Scheduling.
  • Try the Pomodoro Technique – 25 minutes of work followed by a 5-minute break.
  • Eat the Frog: Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task, the one you are most likely to procrastinate on if you don’t do something about it.
  • Consider only checking your email once or twice a day. Use an autoresponder to remind clients of the timeframes.
  • Touch-it-Once email method (TIO): The basic idea behind “touch it once” is that whenever you get an incoming task in front of you, you decide right away what to do with it.
  • Create a morning routine and a nighttime routine that serves you and your life (outside of your business) well.

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Episode 35 – Year in Review 2018

Episode 35 - Year in Review 2018

Episode 35: Show Notes

In this final episode of 2018, Mindy and Renee look back at their first 30-something episodes and highlight the topics that resonated the most with you, our audience. No surprise that Pricing was our most liked topic, with 2 pricing episodes in the top 5 of the year! Who doesn’t love talking about money, right? Our Top 5 rounds out with Wedding Management, Pinterest, Instagram, and Vendor Referrals – further proving that you guys are the smartest and savviest audience in podcast-land. Tune in as we recap the year, plan for next year, and announce two fun new ways to connect with us! Thanks for listening, and we will be back with you in one short week … in 2019!



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Key Takeaways: Top 5 Topics of the Year
  • Pricing: Don’t base your pricing off of your competition, you don’t know if they are profitable!
  • Wedding Management: Stop calling it Day-of or Month-of Coordination. It does not exist. Let’s move away from this limiting language.
  • Pinterest: Creating content specifically for Pinterest, aka, cover photo collage to drive engagement from Pinterest to your website.
  • Instagram: Stop posting blurry photos! Make sure your captions make sense, tell a story with every photo
  • Referrals: getting more referrals from your peers is a KEY part of growing a strong business and strong brand

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Episode 34 – How to Stop Negotiating Your Price with Maria Bayer

Episode 34 - How to Stop Negotiating Your Price with Maria Bayer

Episode 34: Show Notes

On today’s episode, we chat about all things sales with special guest Maria Bayer. We tackle confidence, mindset, how to sell without being “salesy” and what to do when a potential client asks for a dreaded discount. Maria shares actionable strategy and amazing tips to help you up-level your business and become oh-so-profitable in the process. “Change your mindset, change your life!”



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Our Guest – Maria Bayer

Episode 34 - How to Stop Negotiating Your Price with Maria Bayer
Maria Bayer is a sales & mindset strategist, coach & wealth creator. She is the creator of “Irresistible Selling” an online group coaching program she designed to help creative business owners book high-paying clients quickly (often on the spot!), grow their business and design a life they love. Maria teaches the authentic selling and mindset strategies that helped her triple her income in less than a year, and go on to book over $25 Million in sales from companies like Target, Best Buy, Ulta, Office Max, and Hyatt. After working together, Maria’s clients often 2x -5x their revenues year over year as they continue applying her strategies. Maria also leads a private Facebook Mastermind group of talented creative business owners called Learn Collaborate Flourish. Maria is a national speaker and has authored and co-authored several Kindle books, and her articles have been featured throughout the creative industry. Maria holds a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and currently resides in the Scottsdale area with her husband Tim and fur-baby Gia, usually with a cold brew in hand.

Key Takeaways:

  • Why “sales” seems to be a dirty word to creatives.
  • How to get over your own mindset about pricing your worth.
  • Part of the sales process is educating your client on your value.
  • Confidence is key!

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Episode 34 - How to Stop Negotiating Your Price with Maria Bayer