April is actually your busiest month (you just don't know it yet)

May 1st hits and suddenly you've got back-to-back Saturdays until October. Every year it goes the same way. And every year, operators who didn't prep in April spend the first three weekends of the season printing the wrong templates, scrambling to find their backdrop shipment, and texting assistants at 11pm on a Friday. Here's the specific thing to do this week: build your wedding template stack before you need it. Open your booth software and create at minimum five wedding-ready templates — one clean and classic, one modern minimalist, one garden/floral, one art deco, and one "blank" with just borders that you can brand quickly for custom requests. Export previews of each one. Put them in a folder. Done. While you're in there, write your standard load-in checklist for wedding venues. Not the generic one you've been meaning to make. The real one. Start times, gear checklist, extension cord count, contact names, print paper stock you're bringing. Wedding coordinators ask the same 12 questions every time. Know the answers before they ask. This probably takes four hours total on a Tuesday afternoon. But I promise you, doing this work in April — when you have the bandwidth — is worth twice as much as scrambling to do it between a 2pm ceremony and a 6pm cocktail hour in June. Wedding season doesn't wait for you to get ready. Get ready now.

Cassandra runs a solo operation out of Charlotte, NC. She'd been doing weddings for three years, averaging 8-10 a season. Solid bookings, decent reviews, but she was constantly in reactive mode. Every spring she'd show up to the first few weddings of the season feeling like she'd never done this before. Wrong template loaded, forgot to update her overlay with the couple's name, took 20 minutes longer than it should have to get the booth looking right. In April of 2023, she had a slow week and used it differently. She spent three days building out templates, creating a reusable wedding workflow doc, and — this is the part that mattered most — she set up animated photo capability and green screen as two paid add-ons she'd never offered before. She filmed two short samples on her phone in her living room and added them to her quoting emails. She priced the animated photo add-on at $175 and the green screen at $225. Between May and October that year, she ran 22 weddings. Fourteen of those clients were sent the sample videos during the quoting conversation. Eleven of the fourteen added at least one option. Nine took both. The math: $175 and $225 averaged out to around $370 per booking across those eleven upsells. That's roughly $4,070 from two features she'd turned on in April and never would have offered if she hadn't had a slow week to sit down and think. Her total revenue that season: $41,200. The previous season it was $27,800. Same number of gigs. Different preparation. "I always knew the season was coming," she told me. "I just finally decided to show up for it."

Before you book another wedding this season, update your wedding package pricing — even if you only raise it by $100. Pull up your most recent invoice, look at what you charged, and ask yourself honestly: is that still the right number? Rates have gone up across the industry and most operators haven't touched their prices in two years. Raise it. See what happens.