Mindy and I had been wedding photographers for five years, but we knew that ultimately, one day, we wanted to own a wedding venue. We could “want it” all day long, but ultimately we had to swallow the hard pill — exactly how does one go out and buy a wedding venue?
Mindy’s brother, Chad (who is now our business partner), is a commercial developer in Grand Rapids, and he was showing us bunches of cool buildings around Grand Rapids. But the crazy thing 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 dream was to own a venue with a warehouse we could fill with decor to make it easier and more affordable for couples 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, excuse me? There was no way we were gonna just walk up to them and say, “hey, we want to buy your building.” Who does that?!
So 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 go! We sat down with the owner at The Cheney Place and before we could ask our sneaky question, she said, “So you’re wanting to know 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 which terrified me. “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 pet project, 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 an unexpected twist changed our lives forever. Who knew it all started with just asking the question!