By managing her 360 photobooth business in HoneyBook, Christiana Yebra was able to save time and capture more bookings than before–ultimately helping her grow the side hustle to a complete success.
If you’ve ever had a side hustle, you might not expect to make as much as your full-time job. For Christiana Yebra, she was able to unlock that milestone in only four years by leaning into SEO and capturing client demand for photobooths with HoneyBook.
Her 360 photobooth rental business hit .$5 million in revenue last year, and much of that wouldn’t have been possible without the ability to capture leads, stay organized, and book clients through HoneyBook.
Explore Christiana’s process in HoneyBook:
- About Christiana Yebra and Currently Events
- Her challenge: Creating a seamless experience for herself and her clients
- Getting set up with HoneyBook
- Christiana’s clientflow inside HoneyBook: Qualifying up front and booking with all-in-one proposals
- The results: Unlocking an extra $500k over 5 years
- What’s next: leveraging a successful system for other business ventures
About Christiana Yebra and Currently Events
With a biology degree and a background in health care, you wouldn’t guess that Christiana Yebra has helped build and grow multiple tech companies and brands. But, she’s a great example of how entrepreneurship can take you in multiple directions and enable you to forge your own path.
Though she’s had success with multiple business initiatives, it’s her side hustle in particular that Christiana manages through HoneyBook, and through which she was able to generate an astounding half a million in revenue.
In 2017, she was putting on events for various organizations when she realized that the most popular part of each event was always the photo booth, second only to the bar. She started renting out photo booths to bring to her events for about a year but decided to fabricate her own 360 photo booths in 2019. With her first custom booth, she didn’t have to rely on other people’s products.
After the 360 booths got more and more popular at her events, attendees started asking if they could rent them for their events as well, and Currently Events was born as a photo booth rental and event strategy company.
Listen to the podcast: Side hustle success: A roadmap to $500K in revenue with Christiana Yebra
Her challenge: Creating a seamless experience for herself and her clients
When the company first got started, she didn’t have a brand or a booking process. At first, she was renting her photo booths through word of mouth and had a bare-bones Squarespace website with a simple contact form.
She managed all leads through Gmail, used Quickbooks for invoices, kept track of events and meetings through Google Calendar, and used Adobe PDFs to edit and send contracts. The tools and tech were there, but it was all disjointed and nothing was connected–it was easy for things to get lost.
After a few months of getting started, she noticed a viral social media moment where Cardi B was using a 360 booth at a birthday party. Immediately, Christiana jumped on the opportunity and started optimizing her website for “Cardi B photo booth” and similar terms. Optimizing for SEO worked quickly, and she went from receiving 2-3 inquiries per month to 50-100 leads per day.
The leads were coming in fast, and she needed a place to capture leads, store them, communicate with clients, set expectations, and create and store contracts. Plus, she also wanted to streamline the entire process for her clients as well. Sending them to six different tools was disjointed for her, but also unorganized and overwhelming for the clients.
Organic search drove the lift for us, but HoneyBook has made sure nobody falls through the cracks. I could have never done that with Squarespace.
Getting set up with HoneyBook
After using HoneyBook as a client, she was impressed with how it demonstrated legitimacy for other businesses, and it was clear that it was the all-in-one solution she was looking for.
After seeing HoneyBook, I remember thinking the business I was working with had their act together and was legitimate, and I wanted people to have that same feeling with us.
To get onboarded, she used the HoneyBook help center and watched some of the tutorials available. She set up all of her files and had a great start with HoneyBook’s contract templates.
She only needed to use her business lawyer to tweak the contract templates slightly for her business so they included specifics about safety and weather at events. From there, she sent her files to friends and family and tested the client experience with them to make sure everything was set up how she wanted.
Christiana’s clientflow inside HoneyBook: Qualifying up front and booking with all-in-one proposals
For Christiana, the client experience is everything. At events, she ensures her clients and their attendees are getting something different from all other photo booths out there. She and her team take the time to make attendees comfortable, and they actively focus on body positivity and inclusivity so everyone gets the best photos.
With HoneyBook, Christiana can make sure that elevated client experience starts as soon as they inquire, not just at the events.
Lead form
For Currently Events, a majority of their clients come through organic Google search. After leaning into SEO early on, they’ve been able to show up for popular search terms that people use to find 360 photo booths.
Once users land on her website, they can use a HoneyBook lead form to inquire. Christiana and her team capture the leads’ general information as well as more details about their event, such as the event type, venue, and theme.
Overall, having leads come into a central place is key for the business, and at times Christiana and her business manager can manage 20 leads per day within HoneyBook.
Automations
As soon as someone fills out her lead form, it triggers a HoneyBook automation. Leads receive a follow-up email that thanks them for inquiring, provides some general information about the photo booth rentals, and also asks “How big is your event?”
Asking this question after leads have already inquired is crucial to qualifying them. Christiana found that asking the question inside her lead form caused customers to say they were having a smaller event, even if it was bigger. By asking for their response via email, she can make sure they’re interested and get a more realistic response since they know it isn’t locking them into a specific price.
Onboarding clients before HoneyBook could’ve taken me an hour or more. Now, once I have an interested lead that falls into my highly interested category, it takes me 5 minutes.
Using project details to create custom proposals
Once leads respond via email, she and her team go back and forth with them to answer questions and go over pricing, event needs, and specifics. After going over all the details, they create a custom proposal.
With HoneyBook, the booking process is quick and easy. Her team uses templated proposals that they can easily duplicate and edit to include the client’s event details before sending. Within one file, clients receive the contract and invoice and can pay a 50% deposit to secure their date.
The results: Unlocking an extra $500k over 5 years
Since the business launched, Christiana and her team have generated half a million dollars that she’s been able to invest back into her business growth.
Christiana attributes much of this to HoneyBook, since she was able to capture all of the demand her company generated through SEO. She’s able to convert up to 98% of her proposals, which she also credits to the lead form questions and email templates she was able to create inside HoneyBook.
The impressive business growth is also thanks to putting her time where it matters the most.
“Before HoneyBook, doing a discovery call, answering questions, setting up a new customer manually, generating PDF agreements, and capturing payment could take me over an hour for each customer. And that’s if everything worked,” Christiana said. Now, it only takes her minutes.
“When you’re booking 20-35+ events a month, eliminating some of the work before the event is key. The event itself is where we want to spend our energy. Paired with my amazing operations manager (who also loves the platform), HoneyBook helped me cut my admin time by over 50%. The more integrations and improvements we make, the better things continue to get.”
What’s next: leveraging a successful system for other business ventures
In terms of what’s next for Currently Events, Christiana is looking forward to implementing more post-event work via HoneyBook. For example, she’d like to easily thank guests, share their galleries, and showcase her company’s referral benefits at the end of an event.
Like most entrepreneurs, Christiana also already has ideas for new ventures. When it comes to HoneyBook, she’s been able to benefit from the results of a well-organized system and clientflow for her photobooth business. Moving forward, she feels confident that she can use the same process for a new business that she’s working on.
Capture leads, sell services, manage projects, and nurture client relationships from one platform. All that and more with HoneyBook.
