197: $500 for the Hour: The Wedding Officiant Side Hustle

What if you could earn a surgeon's hourly rate without years of school, a huge student loan, or even a related degree? In some places, all it takes is an online ordination, a script, and about fifteen minutes on your feet.

Today we’ll hear from Brad Lau, a wedding officiant who has led over 800 ceremonies and built a business people now pay $500 a wedding for. Brad walks us through how he got started, how he turned his very first nervous, low paying weddings into a stream of five star reviews and referrals, and why he believes stepping in front of a room full of strangers and making them feel comfortable is the real skill behind the job.

But is this side hustle scalable? Brad’s wife has turned it into a full service operation by layering in photography, hair and makeup, florists, and more.

Whether you want to keep this simple as a weekend side gig or turn it into something much bigger, Brad breaks down the real numbers, the marketing strategy, and the mindset that got him started: stop planning to plan, and just start.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How Brad built his first year of bookings starting from zero
• The strategy he follows for turning happy guests into five star reviews
• What officiants actually charge and how and when to collect payment
• How to expand a simple side hustle into a bigger operation
• Why you must check your local requirements before you get started
• Brad's best advice for anyone afraid to start something new

Freebie alert! Brad is offering listeners a free 30-minute video consult to help you get your own version of this business off the ground. Just mention you heard about him on Side Hustle Hero.

Do you like what you're hearing? Consider giving it a caffeinated thumbs up. We'd really appreciate it!

Need a little (and sometimes big) push to start and stay focused to grow your side hustle? Dive into my online Masterclass: How To Turn Your Thoughts Into Wanted Things.

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The Real Numbers Behind a Wedding Officiant Side Hustle

Most people who think about starting a side hustle spend weeks agonizing over the wrong questions. What should I charge? What if nobody books me? What if my first attempt is bad?

Brad Lau, a wedding officiant who has led over 800 ceremonies, didn't waste much time on any of that. He certainly didn't wait to feel ready, and he didn't wait for a perfect script or a polished pitch. Instead, he booked his first weddings nervous, underpriced, and far from smooth. That decision, more than anything else he's built since, is the reason he can share this success story today. Quite simply, he started.

Everything else in his story, the reviews, the pricing, the scale, only happened because he started before he felt qualified to.

Reviews Are the Real Product

Ask Brad how he built his business from zero clients, and he won't lead with marketing spend or a clever ad campaign. He'll talk about five star reviews.

Early on, he charged next to nothing because the first priority wasn’t the revenue. It was getting the proof. Every wedding he officiated became a chance to collect a testimonial, a photo, or a warm word from someone in the room who might need an officiant themselves one day. He treated the guest list at every ceremony as a room full of future customers, not just witnesses to someone else's big day.

This is worth sitting with if you're early in your own side hustle. Brad's approach was to price low, specifically to make saying yes easy and get five star reviews flowing before he worried about the rate. But there's a way to do this that keeps your pricing honest instead of just looking cheap.

Rather than discounting because you feel unsure of your worth, consider telling the potential customer directly that you're confident in the quality of your work and can justify your skill, but you're looking to build up your reviews, so the rate is discounted in exchange for an honest review once the job is done. That turns the lower price into a trade, not a bargain bin. You're not the cheapest option in the neighbourhood for the sake of being cheap, you're offering a fair exchange, your skill and effort for the social proof you need to build the business. And either way, a stack of five star reviews does more to build trust with a stranger than any amount of polish on your website.

The Money Question Isn't as Simple as It Looks

Here's something that gets glossed over when people talk about side hustles like this one. In Brad’s markets, the rate for a wedding officiant typically runs $300 to $500, and his own rate sits at the top end of that range. That is a genuinely good return for roughly an hour of on-site work.

But before Brad ever stands in front of a couple, there's a script to write, a business to market, a calendar to manage, and years of reputation building behind him. The ceremony itself might be short, but the business supporting it is not. The number on the invoice is the visible tip of a much larger iceberg of unpaid setup work, and that's true of almost every side hustle worth doing, not just this one. But as you become more experienced and have honed the templates, your prep time will become more efficient.

Scaling Looks Different for Everyone

One of the more interesting parts of Brad's story is what happened around him rather than to him directly. His wife took the same starting point, officiating, and built it into something much larger by layering in photography, hair and makeup, florists, and other vendors. Another company took the same core idea and built an entire elopement package around it, complete with a helicopter ride into the mountains for the ceremony.

Same business. Wildly different scale. And that's really the point. A side hustle doesn't have to be a fixed size. It can stay exactly as simple as Brad describes it, a script, a fifteen-minute ceremony, and a rate that works for you, or it can become the foundation for something much bigger if you decide to build outward from it.

The mistake a lot of people make is assuming the size of the business they start with is the size it has to stay. Brad's story suggests the opposite. The starting point and the ceiling are two completely different things, and you don't have to decide on the ceiling before you take the first step.

Local Rules Can Sink a Great Idea

There's a practical detail that deserves more attention than it usually gets: the legal requirements to officiate a wedding vary significantly depending on where you live. Some places require formal registration. Some don't recognize certain types of ordination at all. Yet others have a cap at the number of licensed officiants allowed in a geographic area. The rules can shift from province to province or state to state, sometimes even city to city.

Make checking into this one of your first steps. Before you build a script, a website, or a pricing page around any regulated activity, whether that's officiating, tutoring, consulting, or anything else with local rules attached, it pays to spend an afternoon confirming what's actually required where you live.

Starting Ugly Beats Waiting for Ready

There's one more thread running underneath everything above, and it's the reason any of the rest of it was possible at all. Brad's advice for anyone afraid to start is simple: stop planning to plan, and just start, even if your first attempt is, in his own words, awful.

That's not a throwaway line. The reviews came from ceremonies he wasn't fully confident in yet. The pricing came after he had already proven himself, not before. The scale came later, built on a foundation that started small and imperfect.

If you're sitting on a side hustle idea right now, waiting until you feel ready, Brad's path is a reminder that ready is usually something you build by doing the work, not something you arrive at before you begin. Charge a hundred dollars if you have to. Do it for free if that's what it takes to get your first honest review. The version of your business that people pay real money for later is built on the version you're too nervous to charge for today.

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