Diary of a Work from Home Mom

Tomorrow I hop on a plane to LA. Not only for a meeting with an investor interested in Event Hollow that I have on Thursday, but for my last elopement as a wedding planner…. for what will most likely be quite a long time.

If you know me, you know me as a wedding planner and floral designer. I started my wedding planning and design business back in 2012. It was called Something Blue back then, and I rebranded in 2017 to Blue Daphne. This company grew me. It taught me so so much about responsibility, perseverance, and grit. I learned how to have tough conversations, how to bounce back from failure, when to be quiet and take my punches, how to do my taxes (and that I need to do my taxes), how to stretch a dollar, how to overspend a budget and thus set a more realistic budget, and to set deadlines for myself farther out and surprise my client when I get them done sooner (learned that the hard way).

I also learned that nothing can derail me from achieving a goal I set for myself. No matter how low I feel about my performance, I always deliver.

Whenever someone comes to me and asks me for tips on starting a business because they are thinking about it, my grandfather’s words to me when I asked him the same question 10 years ago booms loud in my memory: “Jennifer, when you start your own business, you create this big monster that only you can feed. You build and run a machine that only you can fix”. I naively said (well more likely thought to myself, because one can never contradict my grandpa), “yeah yeah grandpa, I got this”.

Man. Was he RIGHT. I learned that days off are not a thing when you run your own business. The day you decide, “you know what? I deserve a break today”, becomes the very day you will have to put out your first fire. Soon, I realized I had this monstrous beast that ate so much metaphorical food, that only I had the metaphorical ingredients to make. And it needed to eat 24/7, on holidays, at inconvenient times, and it never thanked me.

Really think about that if you are thinking about jumping in to the world of being your own boss. Because some days, on more than one occasion, I have felt and feel like getting a normal job would be so much easier. Like wow, what it must feel like to just go to work for only 8 hours a day… And when I get home, I can do whatever I want/need to do until the next day and literally not have to make myself available to anyone besides my family… I legit cannot imagine it. That sounds so nice.

You have to really love and believe in your work if you are going to pursue running your own business.

Right at the time I thought I was getting sick of being a wedding planner, I discovered elopements. Modern couples that want an elaborate adventure that’s unique and off-beat, with as few as 2 people and sometimes a few more. Planning and designing elopements made me fall in love with my job all over again. It broke up the monotony and made me love planning all events again. Just adding the variety changed my perspective and gave me something new to love about the career I created for myself.

So my elopement this week is bittersweet. I am so excited for this couple, and sad that it’s my last. But it also means I am another step closer to only working 2 jobs instead of 3. Closer to having one less beast to nurture. After all, I have the machine of being a mom to feed three little beasts, and wear the 27 hats when fixing the million individual moving parts of my newest, most complicated and expensive machine with no handbook that is Event Hollow.

Talk about biting off more than I can chew. Circling back to my last post: thank God for my support system, or I might just choke.

As my first entry in the Industry Insights section of this blog, I am laying the groundwork for what established me in the wedding industry first. So if you are an event professional or small business owner, stay tuned for my entries on Industry Insights, as I am planning to share my knowledge and what I’ve learned, as well as the unspoken industry secrets and hacks.