Episode 5: How to Navigate Change In Your Business

Episode Summary

It’s storytime friends. I was asked recently asked about what inflection points have transpired in my career that led me to both growth and change — a very charged question indeed. Today I share a little history lesson on my career journey with you in hopes that you can take my experience and shape it, learn from it and maybe connect with it on your own trajectory. We cover: how hotel experience shaped my career, how sobriety + entrepreneurship (which for me have had a parallel growth curve), COVID curveballs which led to hiring and scaling into a real team, creating a committee, marketing implementation and using data, and most recently launching LOO.

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julianleaver.com | @julianleaver

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi friends, and welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony. Today we are going, we’re just gonna chat honestly, and we’re gonna just talk a little bit about my trajectory in my business. You know, I was speaking with my friend Persephone before this, just about what are those inflection points that came for me in my business and kind of how that all culminated in where we are.

I really wanted to kind of start with my time at Rosewood because I think anytime somebody asks me about my story, it really does always, all roads lead back to Rosewood. When I started with Rosewood, it was around 2010 and I was really wanting to get into weddings and they just took a chance. I had never worked in hotels before. I had never been a catering manager before, but they saw something in me maybe that I didn’t see in myself.

I always say that working in a hotel is the best decision you can make when you’re first starting your career because you are kind of at the fulcrum of events. You’re learning from valet, you’re learning from the front desk, you’re learning from housekeeping, you’re learning from the culinary team, and there’s all these different people who need information from you and you’re having to learn how to communicate it.

And so in 2016 I started Julian Leaver Events. There was this opportunity at Rosewood to move to California and they had a job for me. But I thought, you know, I’ve built this beautiful thing in Dallas. I don’t really wanna leave Dallas.

What was interesting here too, in this exact same amount of time, there was a bunch of other stuff going on in my personal life that led me into therapy. And then being in therapy really led me to sobriety. And that would I say, is kind of like my business beginning and my sobriety journey kind of started at the same time. They’re intertwined.

I always say starting my wedding planning business was not a sober decision. It was like, okay, I’m gonna just do this and figure it out. And then I quickly realized, no, you’re not actually just gonna do this and figure it out. You need to be in the right head space.

Those first five years were probably just hitting the pavement, doing it by myself, being a solopreneur, figuring out how to make everything work. And the other thing I would say in those first five years was me kind of trying on who was going to be on my committee, right? Who was gonna be in my trusted group of advisors?

And then we kind of arrive in 2024. And I didn’t realize that 24 was gonna be like such a pivotal year for me. The thing that really shifted there was I got my first feature in Vogue. Sydney Waters, thank you so much for selecting me. It was an honor to do your wedding. I learned new things on that wedding. Sarah Fallujah, who was the photographer on that wedding, taught me a lot about how to structure a timeline in a different way, and now we structure all of our timelines in that different way.

The other thing that has kind of been going on in the background for me through all of this, really since about 2020 was I was working with another partner of mine, Jacob and Co-Creative. In 2020 we were trying to figure out how to make the infrastructure of a tent look prettier. Iteration, iteration, iteration, we came up with this idea of a quiet generator. So we’ve been working on this now since 2020. It’s kind of been like my side hustle on the side.

The last big shift in my business that’s happening right now honestly, is that this project, which we call LOO, which actually stands for Logistical Offsite Operations, is actually about to launch. We’ve actually created a solar powered generator that is silent friends, which is amazing. It’s like as quiet as a Tesla.

In 2016, would my business be where it is today? I don’t think that I could have dreamed this big, to be honest. I’m kind of just shocked and proud and honored that so many people trust myself and my team with their big days. So just be open friends ’cause you just kind of never know where this is gonna go. But it’s a wild fucking ride. So hold on and have fun and just enjoy it.