Meet Lynette Mccarthy

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lynette Mccarthy. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lynette, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

Operating a Wedding Venue and Christmas Tree Farm offers me so many opportunities to be creative. From the design of the Wedding Venue during the build to the addition of new features, I never stop thinking about design elements.

For the Wedding Venue, staging the venue for scheduled tours and photo shoots allows me to be creative with flowers, centerpieces, table settings, and linen colors. There are decorations we include with each wedding as part of our packages. I am always reviewing how these things look either in person or photos taken at our venue to ensure things show well and stay fresh.

With the Christmas Tree Farm, I have the opportunity to put my creativity to work when designing and making the wreaths, swags, and centerpieces that we sell during the season. As this is seasonal and live greens don’t last from season to season, I literally start fresh each season.

Finding the time to do all of this is the true challenge.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I have always loved creating things. Art classes were my favorite classes growing up. My grandmother was a very talented artist and one of the few women of her time to attend college. I didn’t get her painting and drawing skills, but I did get her creative thinking and drive. My grandfather, her husband, was an architect and restored historic houses. That is where my love for restoration, repurposing things, and design (how things flow) came from. My mom is very organized, great at throwing parties and family gatherings, and always has laughter in her heart. She passed all of those skills on to me.

All of those influences led me to where I am today: living in a historic house, designing the wedding venue, repurposing things around the farm, and operating both a wedding venue and Christmas tree farm. Designing the venue and what was going to be in it was one of the most exciting projects I have ever been part of. It’s a bit like planning a wedding, exciting and at times overwhelming, but with the excitement of looking forward to a new chapter in your life and seeing your dreams becoming a reality.

With the venue completion in early 2020, my focus shifted to hosting weddings for the amazing couples we have the pleasure of meeting and working with. One of the most important days in a couple’s journey is their wedding day which makes my job as venue manager very special. We want our couples to feel like part of our venue family and not just another wedding on our calendar. This is one of the reasons we limit the number of weddings we do each year so that I can focus on our couples and give them the personal attention they deserve. Also, I am a romantic at heart and what better way to celebrate love than a wedding! It is very hard work, but one of the most rewarding when you see the love and happiness on their faces on their wedding day.

And here’s where the creative side kicks in. We are always looking at ways to spruce things up or provide new areas for our couples and their photographers to capture amazing wedding photos. Last year we added our fairytale bridge, this year we added a new ceremony entrance arbor, new flowerbeds, and a new photo spot by our pond with a repurposed buck-board wagon. The area with the wagon is still a work in progress and there are plans to add flowers and greenery near the bridge.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

In the previous section, I talked a little about the skills that were passed down to me, but there are also ‘learned’ skills or knowledge that are also important. These may differ depending on the type of business or profession you choose, but there are common threads.

Two very important pieces of advice I would like to pass along are:

– Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t let the fear of failure block you from realizing your dream. None of us get 100% of it right on our first try. Sometimes we learn so much more from a failure than we do from a success. Use the failure as a tool to regauge/refocus efforts to achieve your dream.

– Don’t be afraid to learn new things or go out of your comfort zone. It’s never too late and you can teach an old dog a new trick! If I’m not learning something new, I feel like I am standing still. Learning is something that inspires and motivates me to keep moving forward. Heck I even had to learn TikTok and how to go live on social media to promote the business. Both of which were outside of my comfort zone at the time. I haven’t mastered these skills yet but hope someday I will.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

My current number one obstacle is our online presence, in particular our Ballroom at Windsor Website. Over the last couple of years, the popular thing to do was to open a wedding venue. This is happening all over the globe and has saturated the market in many places, including Delaware and our Tri-State area. This has led to lower traffic to the website.

Earlier this year, I started taking classes and online sessions on SEO (search engine optimization) to help build up the website to get us in front of more couples in our area when they search for wedding venues. I knew nothing about this topic and when I read things online it was confusing and not specific to the wedding industry. I was fortunate to find resources specific to wedding industry SEO that offered classes and training. SEO does not happen overnight, nor does it stay static, so this is something I continually work on and learn more about. You also don’t see results right away, so you have to be patient.

Another facet of this, is learning how to blog and blogging consistently. Coming up with weekly topics can be challenging, especially when you have writers block. Fortunately, I am a member of a group of locally owned wedding venues across the globe, that help and support each other. I share blog ideas with them and also get fantastic blog ideas from the group. It has made blogging much easier, and I have been able to do a weekly blog starting about a month and a half ago.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Lynette McCarthy, Natalie Wagner Photography, Film and Photo by Jacob Williams

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