Adelaide Photographer – Sweet Chilli Philly Photography

This week we have Heath from Wedding Guide South Australia and just in time too as this weekend is the Winter Bridal Ideas 2010 to find out more about the expo and to see where and when just follow this link. Anyway I will leave you with Heath to tell you a bit about what he does.

Business location:
Adelaide, South Australia

Business contact details:
Website: www.weddingguidesa.com.au
Facebook: www.facebook.com/WeddingGuideSA
Twitter: twitter.com/WeddingGuideSA
Email: hello@weddingguidesa.com.au
Phone: 0413 518 843

Question One: What made you decide to start a business and how did you start this journey of owning your own business?
Wedding Guide SA is my part-time job and it’s a collaboration with my partner. We decided to build the site after going through endless other websites when we were planning to get married to research ideas and get feedback from other brides/grooms. What we found was that most of the good websites were National based and not that concerned with South Australia. The news and articles were not always relevant to South Australia so we had to sift through content about venues etc. in Brisbane and Sydney to get to the information about Adelaide we were interested in.

We also found that most sites were always orientated towards the brides and left out the grooms with regard to the look and feel of the site or the content. We thought we’d make a site that wasn’t so frilly and just for the girls.

Question Two: Tell us about your business and what you offer.
The website has a few offerings. Broadly it’s to help South Australian couples plan their wedding and we do that by allowing them to browse through relevant Wedding Service Providers such as Florists, Photographers, Dress Makers and Venues that are SA based. There are also Image Galleries, Real Weddings and helpful articles coming soon.

We also have a Blog which they can follow the latest trends, styles and discussion points and comment on, or they can interact with each other in the Forum and discuss all things wedding to bounce off ideas or experiences they’ve had planning their wedding.

As well as all the above we wanted to create an online planning tool they would help take the stress out of planning the big day. We had tried a couple of other planning tools but found it frustrating that you had to use different tools for each task eg. One for Planning, Budgeting, Checklists etc. So we worked on building an easy to use planner (My Planner) that did all these tasks in the one interface. It helps takes the stress out of the planning process and you feel better prepared so there are hopefully no last minute “oh no, I forgot to confirm arrival time for the cars” situations.

Question Three: Have you faced any challenges and in what way do you think this has helped you and your business grow?
Initially the biggest challenge was to find enough time to do everything we wanted to do with the site – we have more ideas than we have time to work on them. Identifying what is most important and concentrating on getting them up and running, while collating a “wish list” of other ideas has kept us from getting bogged down and overwhelmed.

Question Four: What is your biggest goal you wish to achieve with your business in the next 5 years?
We’d really love to have increased our Members base by 15% each year so that in 5 years we have a larger group of people using the site and getting value out of all the resources that we aim to create for South Australian Brides. We’d also like to increase the wedding suppliers list by about 20% each year so there are greater choices for our users to browse through and find someone they can use for their special day.

Question Five: If you could give one piece of advice to someone starting a business what would you tell them?
I’m not really one to hand out advice that often but if I had to it would be make sure you do your research. Make sure that what you are proposing is viable. And if there is already someone else servicing the market you are targeting, make sure that what you are offering is better or caters to a niche in that market – or both!

And of course, lots of perseverance and the odd bit of good luck helps.

And here is just a few screen shots of the website so that you can see what Wedding Guide South Australia is all about