Want to scale your party plan business but aren’t sure how in the world you can add more parties to your calendar? I get it. The thought of increasing your party calendar might be a little scary. How do you fit in all the things you normally do for parties – like chatting with party guests or booking reachouts – without losing your mind in the process? Don’t worry, friend. I’m going to walk you some simple tips for increasing and scaling your direct sales business. along with some common pitfalls to avoid.  So keep reading!

5 Reasons You May Want to Add More Parties

Before we dig into all the tips on how to scale your party calendar, let’s chat about why you might want to. 

#1 – Income Goal

First of all, you may have a specific income goal that you’ve been pushing for. This one is pretty simple. You want or NEED more money. I never want you to apologize for making money from your business. If you aren’t making money, then what you have on your hands is an expensive hobby. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t start your business with a goal of spending. So don’t ever feel bad about actually earning an income from your efforts. If you’ve got a big, hairy, scary income goal, go after it with gusto, because there is absolutely no reason that you can’t. You are the CEO of your business and that means you are in charge.

#2 – Recruiting Goal

You might also have a big recruiting goal. Maybe you’ve said, “This is my year. I’m ready to grow my team.”  The more parties you have, the more people you’re in front of, and that means the potential for more team members. And don’t feel bad about this one either. The more people you come in contact with, the more potential you have for helping someone change their financial future. 

#3 – Testing Something

Maybe you’re testing something. This is something that I live by in business. Fail fast and fail often. What I mean by that is if I’m going to try something new in my business, I need to test it and I want to fail fast if it’s not going to work. I want to test it quickly to know whether I need to scrap it and start over, or if it’s an idea that could actually work. You might want more bookings just so you can test something like a new party format, new theme party idea,  an updated host coaching system, or a new booking ask. Fail fast and get it done. 

Another thing you might wan to test is your capacity. This is something I did quite often when I had my own direct sales business. Just because you’re doing a certain number of parties right now doesn’t mean you can’t do more. You just have to figure out how.  Ask yourself – how many parties CAN I do in one week? Then test it out and see what happens. Make changes as needed. 

#4 – Create Momentum

Another reason you might want to add more parties is to create momentum. Think about it. It’s much easier to push a boulder once it’s already rolling. The hardest part is that initial push to get it moving.  I’m a firm believer in the 30-60-90 rule. It says that everything you do or don’t do affects your business 30, 60, and 90 days from now. Imagine what would happen if you went buck wild crazy for a month doing parties? What momentum would that cause in your personal sales and recruiting? 

#5 – Company Incentive

This is probably one of my favorites! I’m a big ole carrot chaser, and I loved it when there was a monthly incentive that I was gunning for. It didn’t matter how big or small it was. I just HAD TO EARN IT! Maybe you’re looking at a company incentive right now that gets you all sorts of excited. Go ahead and ramp up your schedule and make it happen. 

How to Scale Your Party Calendar

Now that we’ve chatted about some reasons you might want to scale, let’s dig into HOW.

#1 – Calculate How Many Parties You Want (and Why)

I’m never a fan of aiming for random numbers that I pulled out of thin air. The first step to scaling is calculating how many parties you want and why. I know this involves math but stay with me here. Think about how many parties you need to book to hit that incentive or income goal? How many more parties does your team need to do? How many people do you need to put yourself in front of to recruit more? 

I know this might take a hot minute to figure out, but I’m always shocked at how many people don’t know how many bookings they need to actually hit their personal income goals. This is just math. Don’t be afraid of it. If you know what your party average is, and you know what your commission rate is, you should know exactly how many parties you need to hit that income goal.

Here’s a quick example:

Let’s pretend you want to make $1,000 a month. You’ve been making $300. So we need to figure out how many MORE parties your calendar needs to make up the $700 difference. Let’s also pretend that you have a $500 party average and earn 25% commission on your sales. 

Simply take $700 and divide it by 25%. That gives you $2.800. Now I know that I need to sell $2,800 MORE per month than I was before. Don’t get stressed. Let’s break it down even further.

If you know your party average is $500, then we can take $2,800 and divide it by our party average of $500. That means you need 5.6 more parties per month to make your income goal happen. But let’s just call it 6 parties to be safe. 😉 

#2 – Decide on a Deadline

The next thing is to decide on a deadline. I hear it all the time. You want to do 12 parties a month, but you’ve only been doing five a month forever. So when are you going to do 12? What’s your deadline to get it done? Stop wishing and hoping it’ll happen and velcro yourself to a chair until you make it happen. Okay, not really, but you get the idea. 

Here’s the deal, friend. It’s much easier to give yourself a deadline in the near future and then knuckle down and make it happen.  Because once you get your calendar to that ideal number and you’re consistently booking two parties from every party, it’s really, really hard to slow down.

I personally like to work in quarters. So if you want to scale from 5 to 12 parties a month give yourself a quarter to scale up. This allows you to put the systems in place and not scale so quickly that you don’t have time to fix the things that might be broken. If you’ve got 5 right now, focus on booking 2 from each of those – now you have 10. But they may not all be within the next month. So focus on booking 2 parties from the ones that happen in the next month and keep working to boost your calendar a week or so at a time. 

#3 – Decide How you will Scale

The third step is to decide how you will scale. Will you just get bookings from current parties? Are you planning to do some prospecting? Some of this depends on your deadline. If you’ve got a deadline that’s three months out and you’ve got some parties on your calendar, you can just focus on booking more from those existing parties. However, if your deadline is shorter, maybe because your spouse has been laid off or has retired or that incentive trip has a close deadline, then you might need to do some prospecting. You could offer a new party format or new party theme. Make a plan to make it happen.

#4 – Book in Close

Another step that people don’t think about, which is number four, is to book in close. That means you’re booking parties closer to today’s date on your calendar. This might seem kind of obvious, but sometimes it’s not. So if you’re trying to scale, make sure you’re booking your parties super close to each other. That means if you’re trying to scale from 5 to 12 parties, and it’s January, then you’re not going to offer somebody a February date. You should keep offering your next two available dates over and over again until you’re consistently getting 12 (or however many parties you want to do per month).  Don’t offer months down the road. If someone will ONLY book a few months down the road, then obviously go ahead and get them on your calendar. 

#5 – Consider Changing your Party Format

Another thing is to consider changing your party format. Sometimes you’re stuck doing parties the same way that your upline or someone else has told you is the right way to do parties. But the truth is you can do parties however you want. I’m a firm believer that it’s not the number of days or the format, but the content that matters most. So yes, you can do parties in whatever way works best for your life right now. If you’re struggling to scale to the number that you want or need, consider changing the format and party length to make it a better fit for your calendar. Maybe you go from a five-day, down to one day or one hour, or maybe you switch it up and do 15-minute messenger parties.

#6 – Switch to Multi-host Parties

Another idea that direct sellers have found to be successful is switching to multi-host parties. This allows you to get more bookings on your calendar without actually having to do MORE parties. You’ve got multiple hosts at the same time in the same party, which means you might also have better party engagement. If you’re curious if it will work for you, test it out and see what happens. 

#7 – Don’t Stop

And my last tip is don’t stop! It’s easy to be hard on yourself after hearing five ‘no’s’ to hosting or after one party flopped. Don’t stop after that. Commit to yourself that you’re going to make this goal happen. If scaling your business is that important to you, don’t allow hard times to cause you to give up. Velcro yourself to a chair until it’s done. You can make it happen!

Common Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

Now that you’ve got some tips on HOW to scale, let’s quickly run through some common pitfalls and how to avoid them. 

#1 – No Weekly Schedule

The first pitfall that I see most people fall into is not having a weekly schedule. It should be your goal to create a weekly cadence or rhythm for your business. Not only does it make you more efficient, it also makes your business so much more predictable. A weekly cadence allows you to know exactly what you’re doing each day for booking, recruiting, and posting. As a result, all of those essential business building tasks start to become systematic.  Begin and end your parties on the same day if you’re doing multi-day parties. If you’re doing one-hour or one-day parties, make your party days the same days each week. If you’re doing one-hour parties, stick with the same days and times each week. Do not be a slave to someone else’s wants and desires, even your hostesses. You are the CEO of your business and you decide the days you work.

#2 – No Systems

Another pitfall is having no systems. This is a big one. If you’ve been around me for any length of time, you know I love systems. Systems are how we get stuff done. You want to systemize your bookings, your host coaching, your recruiting, and your parties, too. With more parties, you’re naturally busier and you can’t scale chaos. So when you start to increase your number of parties, all the problems that you’ve been having with fewer parties will become very apparent and will become even bigger. It’s best to have some of your systems nailed down before you scale.

#3 – No Automation

Another pitfall is having no automation. Use automation tools where you can. You might be wanting to skimp on that $10 a month for Cinchshare or PostMyParty. Spend the $10. The only way to scale effectively is to automate some of what you’re doing because you can’t do everything forever. A CEO of a million-dollar company doesn’t do everything forever. You’ve got to come to a place where you’re okay with purchasing and investing in those automation tools.

#4 – No Family Buy-in

The next pitfall is having no family buy-in. Think about this for a second. You’ve got to get your family on board before you try to scale. Your family needs to know why you’re pushing so hard for the next thing. They need to understand what’s happening because this will be more of a time commitment for you and less time for them.

#5 – Not Actually Needing to Scale

The last pitfall to avoid is not needing to scale. Wait, WHAT?! Hang with me for one more sec. Let’s pretend you have an income goal. You may think the only way to get more income is to add more parties. But that’s not the only way. What if you could work the same amount of time or less and still grow your income? Ask yourself a few questions. Are you happy with your host coaching? Are you happy with your party average? Are you happy with your average attendance, your number of orders from your party, and your recruit leads per party?

If not, then work on fixing those first! You can increase the amount that you sell at each party, new team members that you sign from each party, or bookings from each party before you start to add on more parties. Take this one to the bank, less equals more. When you scale a broken business, it’s still broken. More parties doesn’t always fix the problem. 

This is where we have to be a little introspective and decide whether you need to scale with more parties OR scale by improving your return on the things that you’re already doing? 

Friend, if you’re ready to scale your party plan business, take some time to create a plan and then set aside the time to execute. It won’t happen by accident. So go make something big happen in your business!

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