Mindy and I had been shooting weddings for five years, but we knew that our dream was to own a wedding venue one day. We could “want something” all day long, but ultimately we had to wrestle the elephant in the room. Exactly how does one just go out and buy a wedding venue?
Mindy’s brother, Chad (who is now our business partner), is a commercial developer in Grand Rapids, so we had him walking us around great buildings around Grand Rapids. But the crazy part was, we already knew what we wanted. The Cheney Place. We loved everything about it except that it wasn’t for sale. We especially loved its attached warehouse because our crazy idea was to have a venue we could fill with furniture and decor to make it easier and more affordable for people to design their wedding.
After looking at every property, our response was pretty much always the same. “Yeah… but The Cheney Place.” So he finally just said, “Why don’t you just ask them if you can buy it.” Umm, come again? There was no way we were gonna just walk up to them and ask if we could buy it!! Who does that?!
We came up with a sneaky plan. “Let’s ask them if we can rent space from them for our rental company, Fancy Fray. Then we can get to know them and see where things go from there.”
So we set up the meeting. Let’s do this! We sat down with the owner at Cheney and before we could ask our sneaky question, she said, “So you’re coming to me to ask if you can move your rental company into our space. My answer is yes!” Our jaws dropped. She stole our surprise. So Mindy popped the big scary question. “Yes, that’s what we came here, but what we really wanted to know was if you’d consider selling The Cheney Place to us.”
The owner started crying.
Little did we know she was looking for someone to buy it. All she wanted was a fun side project where she could host weddings. But it became so much more. Her exact words were “I wanted a cute puppy to play with, but I got Marmaduke instead.” It took a minute, but we partnered with Chad and his wife Heather to become the proud owners of our first wedding venue.
One conversation with a twist and our lives were changed forever. Who knew it all started with just asking the question!