Welcome to The Venue Pathfinder®

Dive Behind the Scenes into the Venue Business and Start Building Your Business

As you continue to build your business plan…

Be Inspired By Others Who Came Before You

These Venue Owners Were Once Dreaming About This Business Too.

• Contract Attorney: Sam Striler, 314-402-8056, sstriler@mlklaw.com

  • Sam Striler is the attorney I utilize at my venue and he has worked with dozens of other venue owners.

• Venue Design: Erin Morrison-Vincent, team@littlelightsevents.com

  • Erin is a former wedding photographer who built an incredible venue, became a coaching client of mine, and later started a venue design consultancy. She has an incredible eye for building a functional footprint, and a design that feels truly unique.

• SBA Funding / Lending: Michelle Louden, Senior SBA Processor mlouden@stonebank.com

  • Michelle is also a former client who successfully sold her wedding venue. For years prior to opening the venue through present day, she has specialized in SBA loans working for Stone Bank. She brings both helpful SBA loan insight, and the valuable knowledge of the industry as a former venue owner.

• Quality Table & Chair Providers:

  • Sourcing Local + Overseas Direct to Manufacturer - Carol - Prairie Event Supply: 641-792-3073 iowatablesandchairs.com

  • The Seat Co. - Our current supplier of our venues metal x-back chairs

• Logos / Brand Design: Gillian Tracey, hello@gilliantracey.com

  • I’ve worked with Gillian on multiple branding projects. She has been the primary designer (look/feel/color/fonts) for Kristinbinford.com.

  • Gillian also builds websites for businesses, however this is a skill we teach our clients in The Venue Accelerator® Coaching Program. We highly suggest applying to join us in that next level implementation program prior to hiring anyone to build your website.

• Insurance / Risk Planning: Justin Sutton, jsutton@nuptial risk.com 678-805-6600

  • Justin provides all of our event-day insurance to the couples at our venue, and many of my venue owner coaching clients venues as well. He is a super quality human who can help you think through and solve for the risks and liabilities facing you as a future wedding venue owner. In addition to risk planning and event-day insurance, he also provides traditional insurance services specializing in wedding venues.

• Venue Renderings:

  • Danades

• Key Business Tools

  • The Mopit Machine: This is a massive upgrade to manual mopping of the entire wedding venue! We have one and many of my coaching clients do to.

  • Quickbooks: While this might seem obvious, I want to call out you absolutely must have a detailed financial tracking software in your venue business. If you try to start managing business on spreadsheets it will be a nightmare.

  • Squarespace: This is the website builder we recommend for ease of use, and solid built in design. However, we’ve actually pre-built templates that we provide along with the critical coaching on sales, marketing and operational strategies to build the business and start booking inside The Venue Accelerator®. We’ve listed it here because we know it’s a question you may have, but we’d suggest don’t spend your time building anything without booking a call with our team first. (Our templates will likely save you 40 hours of headache and stress, and a heck of a lot of money over paying an expensive developer/designer to build one for you.) (Ps - before you say “I can’t do that!” trust me, you can. We’ve helped over 400 venue owners do it, and MANY of them thought that initially too.

  • A Good Leaf Blower: While perhaps this doesn’t fit in a “little black book” it IS one of my favorite and most often used business tools. From leaves, to debris, to snow, to blowing out from under tables in the venue to expedite every single flip night, we use ours at least 5 times a week. Our team prefers a backpack blower.