Wedding Business hacks to save you time!

Artwork for podcast Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney

Episode 157 • 27th March 2025 • Wedding Pros who are ready to grow - with Becca Pountney • Becca Pountney

Becca Pountney: 00:00:00

Time is one of those things that you can never get any more of.

There's a limited amount of time in the week and I know as a business owner and a busy mum, that finding things that save me time is always going to help my business.

So in today's episode, I'm going to be talking you through some of my little business hacks and time saving activities that I think you could implement into your own business and hopefully they'll help you get a little bit of time back. I'm Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger, and you're listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast.

I'm here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you're in the right place. Let's get going with today's episode.

None of the hacks that I'm going to share today are hugely complicated or going to change the world, but they're all little things that have really helped me in my business because time is of the essence and I find myself repeating tasks or doing things over and over again looking for pictures that I need to use. And there are some ways that I've found to save myself time.

Now, the most recent one that really drew my attention to this is that I used to spend ages trying to plug my laptop computer in. But I realized it's because where I had my plug socket and where I had my computer were the opposite side of the desk.

And so every time I took my computer out, I'd have to crawl under the desk and poke the wire through. Anyway, over the Christmas holidays, I had a revelation.

Why don't I just move my computer and my power source to the same side of the desk so that it's really easy to plug it in? I know that's ridiculous, but it has absolutely been game changing because I'm no longer fighting with the wire behind my desk.

I've got it plugged in on one side.

So just take a look at the space around you before I start diving into these time saving hacks and think, is my workspace set up in an optimized way or am I too having to crawl under a desk and spend ages fiddling with a wire? Or is there a way I can make this more efficient for myself?

An efficient desk, an efficient workspace leads to an efficient mind and Getting more done. Anyway, that's what's inspired me for today's episode. That isn't one of the hacks, but hopefully it will help you along the way.

Let's dive in then, because today I'm going to share with you six different things I do in my business. The little hacks or little ways that I save myself time that I think could help you as well. Okay.

Number one is to do with social media and specifically Instagram posts. Now, one of the things I talk about in your business is that you should remain on brand at all times.

And that's one way of people knowing when they see your posts or your stories that it's you because they recognize the color. Now, in my business, I use a couple of different kinds of Becca blues.

One darker turquoise kind of color and one traditional Becca blue that my wall is painted in in my office. So whenever I go live, you see that color behind me and people associate my posts and my business with those turquoise colors.

Even my book cover is in those colors as well.

Now, whenever I go to add an Instagram story and I want to put some text on on that Instagram story, it's really important to me that I try and get the color to match.

Now, if you use stories, you'll know that when you add an Instagram story and you add a bit of text, it gives you a whole set of colors, but they are the standard colors and the chance of them matching your business brand color are basically zero. So how do I ensure that my Instagram stories stay on brand at all times? Well, let's introduce the first hack.

Now, I'm going to try and talk you through this slowly. It may help if you have your phone and you go along with me as well, because it's always hard to demonstrate in audio how I do something.

Now, the first thing is I want to make sure you've got something in the photos of your phone that is in your business color.

So, for example, if you've got a social media post you've made on Canva that is definitely in your business color, make sure you save that and have it in your photos, in your phone as a favorite. Or you can even put it in a file and call it branding colors or something like that, so it's easy for you to find.

The reason is we're going to come and use that multiple times. If you've never had that, that, why not just create something inside Canva?

Just create a square, make sure you know your brand color and add your brand color in Canva using the hex code or the color code and make sure you've got a whole square of that color. Download it as a photo and again add it to your phone photo so that you've got that.

If you have got multiple brand colors that you want to use, you could do that for each of them so that you basically have a little folder on your Phone now with 2, 3, 4 graphics are all in your different brand colors. Now, that might seem obscure, but we're going to come back to it in a second.

So now what I want you to do is go into Instagram and imagine that you're creating a new Instagram story. Maybe you've got a photo that you're going to take. You're going to go up to that little smiley face and add some text.

And in that text just write, hello. Now you will see that it comes up with that color wheel that I talked about earlier. But those colors are not your brand colors.

So what I want you to do next, before you worry about the color, is to go to your little smiley face again and add a photo. Now guess which photo you're going to use. You're going to use that photo we just saved to your phone a second ago with your brand color.

So if you've got it in a folder, it'll be easy to add it to it. You might be thinking, becca, I don't want a square of this color on my Instagram story. Don't worry, we're going to delete that in a second.

It's just so we can get the color right. So now you've got that showing over the top of whatever your story is.

Go back to your text, go back to that little color wheel that we talked about, and you will see the little paint drop symbol on the left hand side, which is where you can do color picking. So you can pick a color. Well, guess what? Now, when you do color picking, your brand square color is going to be right there.

So hover that color picker over that little brand color that you've got, and instantly your text background will be the color of your brand.

Now, you can go ahead and drag and drop the little graphic that you had before to pick the color from into the delete button at the bottom of your story. And there you go. You now have an Instagram story or a reel with text on it. And guess what? It's in your brand color.

So go ahead, give it a try, and I promise you'll revolutionize the way your stories look, because everything will be in your Brand colors. And people will start to recognize like they recognize your face. They'll start to recognize when stories are yours. Give it a go.

If you get ST, let me know. Okay, hack number two for today is all about WhatsApp and WhatsApp for business.

previous podcast episodes in: 2025

And the great thing about using WhatsApp is that you know the message is going to be delivered if you've got their phone number, and you've also got those little ticks. So on the whole, you can see when your messages have been delivered and whether or not they've been IGN Ignored is a really fast way to communicate.

And increasingly, couples are choosing this as the communication tool of choice.

Now, at the beginning of the year, when I started talking about WhatsApp, I got a lot of pushback from people, and I understand why, because they said, But I use WhatsApp as a personal thing, and I don't want to integrate my personal, my business stuff together. I don't want my boundaries to be broken, and I want to keep it separate.

So I did quite a lot of research and found a great way where you can go ahead and have business WhatsApp but keep it totally separate to your personal WhatsApp. The other thing people were worried about is going and having to give their personal phone number out. Some people don't like to do that.

And again, my workaround means you don't have to give out your personal phone number and you can keep your WhatsApps separate. So I'm going to talk about how I've done it myself, and hopefully that helps you.

So if you have WhatsApp on your phone at the moment as a personal number, you don't need to touch that at all because you can download from your app store the WhatsApp for Business app. It's a totally different app also from WhatsApp, and it keeps it totally separate.

So you can have your personal WhatsApp on your PH and you can have your business WhatsApp on your phone. And with all apps, you can set different things so that you can only use them at certain times of the day.

So if you want to really go with your boundaries, you can do that with the business WhatsApp. Anyway, what you do is you download the business WhatsApp onto your phone.

Now, the first thing it's going to ask you for when you go to log into it is a phone number. Now, to set up a business WhatsApp without using your personal number, you are going to have to have a separate phone number.

Now, the great thing about business WhatsApp is you don't actually have to use a mobile number to set it up. So, for example, if you already have a landline number, maybe you have a landline number that you use in your business.

You can actually set your business WhatsApp using that landline number. So you can set that up. That's what you can give out, that's what you can get people to click on and you can use WhatsApp with it.

dline phone number anymore in: 2025

I'll put my affiliate link in the show notes below. It was recommended to me and I found it to be very good.

The main thing is it's not too expensive, so I think it's £10 per month or £11 per month, something like that. And you can buy a phone number. Now, when you set it up, you basically can choose what kind of phone number you have.

So I decided to go for a London phone number so that I look like I'm based in London, because I didn't really want a Bedfordshire phone number, particularly when I work all over the country. So I chose to have a London phone number and within about three minutes, I'd managed to set up and get my phone number and put in my payment details.

To make the payment, it immediately gave me a phone number. And then in the settings, what you can do is you can set it up.

So if someone rings that phone number, if you want to use the phone number on your website, it just automatically diverts to your mobile. So if someone rings my new London number, it just rings my mobile phone. But now I've got that number, guess what?

I can set it up on my business WhatsApp.

So what I did is I went into that business WhatsApp app, took my new London phone number and put it in and set up a totally separate business WhatsApp. This now means I can link to WhatsApp from my Instagram to this new number without having to give out my personal phone number to anyone.

It means I can add a contact via WhatsApp button on to my contact page if I choose to. And also I can give it out to clients knowing that it will stay separate from my personal number and I only have to look at it in business hours.

o date with what's working in: 2025

WhatsApp in your business in: 2025

I've heard so many good things about the amount of people inquiring with it, the speed of response. People are coming back to it. Unfortunately, email is starting to become more and more redundant with the younger age demographics.

They want instant messaging, they want WhatsApp. But this is a way you can keep your boundaries quite clear and separate. So it doesn't interfere with that, with your personal life.

But also means you don't have to have two separate phones if you don't want to. You just have two separate numbers so you don't have to give out your personal number to everyone. Let's move on then to number three.

Now, this is totally different again, but this is something I actually do on both my phone and my desktop. So on my desktop computer now, I have something on there called sticky notes.

It came as standard with Windows, but I'm sure you can download it for free otherwise. And it is essentially what it says on the tin, a sticky note that stays on my desktop.

The reason I decided to set this up is because I was finding that I was spending a lot of time searching for links.

So for example, quite often I will link to my podcast on social media or I might link to a sales page on my website or a link to Amazon to find my book. The other thing is I kept having to search for the same emojis that I wanted to use in my social media posts.

So things like the headphone emoji and the point down emoji. Also I have some affiliate links and things like that and I'm always searching through my emails to find them.

And what I found was I was wasting so much time trying to find these links all of the time because they weren't in a handy place to get. So that's where my sticky note came on.

So now on my desktop computer I have this sticky note that is there all of the time and it has all of these links.

So it has the couple of emojis at the top that I can copy and paste and then it has book link, agency link, podcast link, members lounge link, business builder.

So if someone asked me for a link or I want to use something in social media or link to it from another part of my website, everything is to hand and I'm not searching through emails, searching through my computer, searching through my website, trying to find the correct, correct link. So again, I recommend doing this yourself.

Maybe have the links to your pricing page, maybe have links to your portfolio, maybe have links to different venue pages.

Whatever it is that you send people to regularly and you talk about over and over again in your social media or perhaps emojis and things like that, hashtags even that you use over and over again, have them on that sticky note and then it's really easy for you go to go ahead and copy and paste that straight away. And it honestly saves so much time. I also have a version of this on my phone so that I have a note in my phone with some of these links on as well.

Because I know if I want to send them to someone on WhatsApp, if I'm replying to someone in DM on Instagram messenger, I need them on my phone as well. I'm not always on my computer. So that is my hack number three. Get your sticky notes set up with all of your links.

I guarantee you it will save you so much time if you spend a lot of time searching for links like I do. Let's move on to hack number four.

Now, if you're anything like me in your business, you use all sorts of systems, all sorts logins, and you have so many passwords and it's really hard to work out what your passwords are. And also if you were like Becca previously, you just use the same password for anything, which isn't great security.

We all know how annoying it is when you get hacked on Instagram or you get hacked into your email.

Obviously you should have two factor authentication on, but if you're using the same password for everything, if they get into your email and they get into your Instagram, they can still bypass that unless it's on your mobile. So. So it's really important that we get better at our passwords. And I think the more systems we have, the harder this is.

Well, a couple of years ago I started using A password manager. And again, this has been game changing because I'm not spending ages resetting passwords and using the same password.

Instead, I've got all my passwords managed. So the password manager I decide to use is called Last Pass. There is a free version. I actually have the more expensive, slightly paid version.

It's not loads of money, but it's not free.

And what it does is basically to set it up, you have to have one really, really long complicated password, because that's the master password that gets you into all of the passwords, and that's the one you want to be completely unhackable, because if someone hacked into that, you'd be in trouble. So you have set it up with one massive password that you do need to be able to remember and needs to be totally different to anything else.

And then what happens is you have a little icon on your browser. And so whenever you go to a website, it will auto fill from your last pass the password.

And this is game changing because it lets you set up really complicated passwords. You know, the kind of ones with loads of letters and loads of numbers and that kind of thing.

But because you set that up, then it allows you to just auto fill the passwords and you don't have to remember them. And they're all stored in this vault. If you have the paid version, you can have the vault on your phone as well as on your computer.

But I think if you have the free version, you have to just have it on your computer. But it's great. You can also see the passwords.

You can copy and paste the passwords, and if you use it for multiple different people, like we do in the agency, we can have them all saved in the one last pass. And it makes it so much easier and much more secure to stop people hacking. In other things that are great about LastPass, you can share passwords.

So for example, if we were to do work with you in the agency and you needed us to log into something and you have LastPass, you can share the password with us to our last pass, and we can just copy and paste it in without you having to text it or email it. And you can even have it so that we don't actually even see the password, we just copy it over and it just automatically logs us in.

So we don't even know what your password is. You can change it anytime and reshare it with us. So it just keeps everything really secure.

So if you want to share passwords with people, it's a great option.

The other thing it does is it will look at the Internet and it will give you a risk warning and say your password's weak or we can see that this has been involved in a data breach or the password's been used too many times and it's just a good way for ease to update passwords and make them more complicated. So I absolutely love my password manager. There is other ones available.

I don't have any kind of affiliate link with LastPass, but I will put the standard LastPass link in the show notes below. If you want to have a look, look at it.

But really game changing for me in terms of remembering passwords and making sure my stuff is more secure and more locked down. Also, just as a reminder, I mentioned it earlier already. Make sure you've got two factor authentication turned on on everything important.

I know it's a pain when you have to wait for codes to be texted and things like that, but it's so important to have things like your accounting software, your email, your social media, everything has two factor authentication. Why? Because. Because trust me, if it doesn't and someone hacks into it, it's a complete nightmare for your business and you can lose everything.

So another little reminder off the back of the password manager, make sure you go in and turn on two factor authentication on pretty much every site because almost all of them have it now. Okay, time saving hack number five is one of the more complicated ones to explain, but it is one of my favorite things.

Now I'm going to talk you through how to set it up on an iPhone, but you can also use it on other types of devices as well. I just don't know how to do it. You may have to Google it if the settings, the buttons to click are slightly different.

If you do have an iPhone, then you'll be able to follow along with my instructions and I'll talk to you through how to do it. But the hack is text replacement. Now, you know I talked earlier about links that I share all of the time and how I copy and paste them.

Well, there's some links I share so much that I actually don't even copy and paste them. I've made it even easier for myself by using text replacement.

Now, essentially what text replacement does is you choose a keyword or a key phrase or a key set of letters, and every time you type that into your phone, it can automatically replace it with your link or your text. So for example, my podcast link I share every single week, multiple times a week with people. And so in my phone I've set up a text replacement.

So if I type the Word pod pod into my phone, it automatically puts in the whole link to the podcast and it's easy for me to share and it takes less than half a second to do. This is also a great way where you can actually do this for responding to inquiries.

So, for example, if you have a template response that you send to people on your computer, why not copy and paste it into a note on your phone, first and foremost? And also you could add it to a text replacement.

So you could have, I don't know, a keyword, something like response, but maybe respond or something so that it's not a word you use normally as long as you can remember what it is. And so whenever you type in those letters, it will give you the full response. How quickly would you be able to reply to people that way?

Obviously you can go in and edit names and things like that, but instead of typing it all out or even finding it and copying and pasting it, it within half a second, you can have the full response in your email ready to go. So I'm going to walk you through how to actually make this happen on your iPhone.

And like I said, if you've got a different kind of device, it's possible, but it may not be exactly the same steps. Okay, so to set this up on your iPhone, first of all, you need to go into the settings section of your phone.

And once you're in settings, you need to select general. And then under general, you need to select keyboard.

So to recap that, again, you need to go into the settings on your phone, go into general, and then go into keyboard. Once you're inside the keyboard settings, you will see a button called text replacement.

So go ahead and go into text replacement, and this is where you'll see anything you've set up and when you can set up new phrases to replace. So go to the top right hand corner of the screen and there's a little plus button. And this will allow you to set something up.

You'll then see that there are two different options. Those options are phrase and shortcut. So in phrase, you need to write the long thing that you want.

So it could be the link to a page on your website, like the pricing page or your contact form.

It could be a link to your brochure, it could be a link to your lead magnet, or it could be that long reply that you might want to send someone to try and be able to reply to them quicker. So that's what you put in Phrase.

And then in shortcut, you put in the phrase or the letters that you want to be able to type to make that whole massive thing appear. So in my example, I would have put the link to my podcast under phrase and then the shortcut would just be pod. Then you just save that.

e is the phrase is limited to: 2000

So if you do want to write something particularly long, you may have to split it into a couple of parts. I recommend going and giving it a try. Honestly, it's so game changing. If there's links you use or send all of the time, let's get it set up for you.

If you want to be able to use WhatsApp and send people links to your calendar, for example, example or links to your pricing page, your brochure really quickly and easily set up the text replacement, I promise you it will save loads of time. Right, let's move on to number six. This is my final shortcut hack for today. I hope these have been helpful. By the way.

I know that we've been a bit all over the place, but for me, anything that saves me time is so, so helpful.

And I realize you may have to go back through Pause, stop and follow the instructions, but at least you know now that these hacks exist and you can start making them work for you. You. So my final hack is that I use a website called Snap Insta. Now what do I use this for?

Okay, you will know that I want to make reels and then repurpose them everywhere. And sometimes that can be a bit fiddly and sometimes we want to make the reels inside the platform we understand the best.

So, for example, you could make a reel inside Cap Cut and then you can share it from there. And sometimes I do that, but sometimes I actually just want to make something directly in Instagram.

That's the platform of choice that I understand how to use. I find it easy to navigate and I don't always find Cap Cut as easy. So this is what I do. I make my reel inside Instagram and then I use Snap Insta.

So why do I use that?

Well, once I've made my reel and it's published on Instagram and I want to repurpose it elsewhere and I download it, it has the watermark on it saying that it's been made on Instagram. But obviously if I then go ahead and put that on Tick Tock or put it on YouTube shorts.

It doesn't look great because it's obvious that I've just copied it over from Instagram. This is where my little Snap Insta hack comes in.

So if you were to go ahead on Google and just search for Snap Insta, you'll see the web address is snapinsta app and I'll make sure I put this in the show notes as well. Now, it's a bit of a dodgy website, I'm going to be honest.

It's got a lot of adverts on it, but it does the job and it's always worked really well for me. I've had no problems with it. So use it at your own risk.

When you go in there, you'll see that you can add your URL of your Instagram reel into the little box.

So inside Instagram, on the reel that you've already published, go to the little share icon, say Copy link, and then go ahead and paste that link into your Instagram video downloader and hit the button that says download. And then under that again, it will allow you to download it to your phone.

This will now download your full reel that is on Instagram onto your phone without, and this is the important part, without the watermark. And it will save it to your phone phone. Now it's just a video on your phone.

So you can go ahead and add it to Facebook, you can go ahead and add it to Tick Tock, you can go ahead and add it to YouTube shorts anywhere you want to, even your website, because it is just a video on your phone and it will look like a unique piece of content to those platforms. Obviously, you may want to pay attention to things like are the rights for the music okay on all these different platforms?

But on the whole it's generally absolutely fine.

So I use that all of the time because I don't have time to make different content for every platform platform, even though I know that's best practice. And I definitely don't want to make it look like I've just copied stuff across with the Instagram watermark still on it.

Obviously, the size and the shape and things like that, where the text lies, you do need to pay attention to it. But I absolutely recommend this as a really quick and easy way to download your videos.

You can even go ahead and do all of the reels you've already got on your Instagram.

If you haven't yet set up a Tick Tock, start downloading them all to your phone using Snap Insta and then over time you can start adding them to your TikTok. TikTok, you spent the time making this video content, you might as well be putting it everywhere you possibly can to get more eyes on it.

And Snap Insta is my secret hack to how that works. Now like I said, I'm not sure how legitimate this site is, so do use it at your own risk.

But I've always found it to be really helpful and if for any reason it disappears, I'm sure there's more out there that do the same thing. It's just the one that I use right now and I know works.

Let's recap then, because I've gone through six different things that are going to help you save time in your business and a little hacks that I use myself. Number one was all about how to color match on Instagram stories and reels to make sure that everything is in your brand color.

Number two was all about what's up for business and how to avoid using your personal phone number and giving that out and how to have a landline number.

Number three was those sticky note links that I have on my desktop and the notes in my phone as well because I spend too much time searching for links otherwise. Number four was the trusty password manager I use LastPass. Number five was that clever text replacement hack.

And number six was Snap Insta, all about how to download things from Instagram so you can repurpose them on other places. I really hope you found this episode helpful. I'd love to hear which of those hacks you are using yourself. Why not message me and let me know?

Also, it's been a while since I've said this, but if you do enjoy listening to the podcast, please, please, please go ahead, take 10 seconds out of your day and leave me a review on wherever you list Podcast. It's been a while since I had a podcast review and trust me, they mean everything to me.

It's me just sat here on my office producing this content for you. I never know who's listening, who's enjoying it, what you're using it for, what benefits you're getting from it.

So please do go ahead and take a few seconds out of your day to leave me a review.

Let me know what you love and why not reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook or wherever you spend your time on social media and let me know which of these hacks you're using in your business. I'll see you next time.

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