One volunteer install. That’s all it took for Kodi of The Event Kode to build a balloon subcontracting income that cleared more than $15,000 in a single year... without pressing pause on her own business in Kentucky. Subcontracting is still a bit o…
Picture this: you glance at your calendar and realize the multi-thousand dollar corporate party you decorated last year is happening this weekend... and nobody called. Maybe they forgot. Maybe someone new is in charge. Either way, that job just walk…
Seeing another balloon artist post a gorgeous install for a client you’d love to work with stings a little. Then some thoughts creep in... should I reach out to them, or would that be poaching? What's the difference between pitching and poaching bal…
Picture your calendar two weeks from now. Every Saturday is already spoken for with a $300 garland here and a $400 column delivery there. Then a bigger balloon job inquiry comes in for that exact weekend... and you have to turn them down. That was …
Handshake agreements feel fine... right up until someone asks what time they were supposed to arrive or how much you said you’d pay them. When Ashley of The Balloon Lab is hiring balloon artists for large installs, she has systems for avoiding that …
If you've ever found yourself hauling a helium tank up the stairs while a finished garland waits on your couch and your garage has quietly turned into a balloon warehouse... it might be time to consider a balloon pop-up shop. So many of us start at…
Picture 11 sorority houses packed so close together you could toss a rock from one window to the next... and every single one wants to outshine its neighbors' bid day balloon installs. That’s the world Ashley of The Balloon Lab Oxford works in arou…
The inquiry comes in: birthday party, Saturday delivery, budget $100 or less. You know how this goes... a custom quote, a few rounds of emails and a polite "we found someone cheaper." This is why you should have a minimum for your balloon business.…
Picture some custom-printed props that show up at your door ready to go... no inflating, no midnight pickup and no hauling it back to your storage room. That’s exactly what Chelsa of Custom Sign Sisters walked me through on the podcast, and it compl…
Your Saturday is filled, but inquiries are still rolling in. You're worried that if you keep typing "sorry, I'm booked", you're leaving real money on the table... and there's a simple way to keep it: grab and go balloon garlands. For a long time I…
"Balloons are cheap." "A full calendar means you're making money." Sound familiar? Some of these balloon myths come from customers, but some come from us... the decorators who really should know better. Either way, they shape how we price, how we p…
It usually starts with a quick DM to a balloon friend, they agree... and then a panicked message to the group chat asking how much to pay them. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. I think that hiring balloon help is one of the biggest mysteri…
If you're typing the same emails over and over, you're bleeding hours you don't have. Templates are the baby step into automation, because you can't hand anything off to a CRM or an assistant until the wording actually exists. You don't need fancy s…
"Aren't balloons bad for the environment?" If you've been in this industry longer than five minutes, someone has asked you that. And if you're like me, your first instinct was to launch into a speech about latex and biodegrading... but now there's a…
Quitting balloons is supposed to be the end of the story, but Melody's version had a plot twist. She built a following on custom backdrops and a disco ball wall, then stopped completely about two years ago. An old neck injury kept getting aggravated…
When I started my balloon business I had no idea what to charge for anything. So I did what everyone does; I went snooping for pricing on other balloon websites... and found nothing. So I figured it must be some kind of industry secret and kept mine…
Owing money at tax time used to make me cry. Actual tears. One year I owed $10,000 with zero plan, and the cash I had to hand over was the same money I'd set aside to pay myself. So when I say the tax conversation can get emotional... I mean it. The…
Forty Years, Three Generations and the Pricing Mistake They Keep Seeing Somewhere in Louisville, Kentucky there is a building where every bottle of HI-FLOAT has been made for the last four decades. It has never traveled more than five miles from wh…
Losing a great annual client stinks. Especially when it's one of those easy, same-time-every-year gigs that you count on. After COVID, so many of my long-standing venue and corporate contacts just... disappeared. Furloughs turned into layoffs, busin…
Ten years ago I made my own logo. It has little dots in it and four or five colors, and it is on the side of my van, so it is staying. What I did not know back then is that a logo like that disappears on a t-shirt. One of the colors vanishes into th…
Most of us use a tiny fraction of what our CRM can actually do for our balloon business. You get it set up, send a few invoices, and then never touch the settings again... meanwhile the platform is sitting there loaded with features that could quiet…
Ever tried to pin down when the next big balloon industry training is coming up on the calendar, and ended up with fourteen tabs open? You are not alone. That exact frustration is what led Dori to build something our whole industry has quietly been …
Some days the to-do list just wins. You blink and it is 5pm, and the one thing you actually wanted to do never happened because thirty smaller things kept jumping the line. If that sounds like your average Tuesday, there is a simple time management …
Every so often a balloon job comes along that stops the scroll... the kind that drips down the front of a sorority house or covers an entire building. Those installs look like they must be paying six figures. A lot of the time they are not. And that…