Tuesday, August 20, 2019

How to become a professional wedding planner

If you have a calm nature, love for parties and a helpful disposition, an exciting and lucrative career in planning a wedding can be yours. Almost anyone can transform a current profession or hobby into a wedding organizer.

Today's bride is too busy to plan her wedding, and what was once expected from family members is now often unavailable because they live in other cities or are very busy with their own careers. To reduce tension and ensure a perfect wedding, more and more brides are turning to wedding organizers for help.

Wedding planners have incredible flexibility in their time, and most planners work outside the home. It is a career that is easy to integrate with raising children or caring for older parents. Most of the work is done over the phone, and meetings in churches, parties, and fiancés can usually be scheduled at convenient times. However, being at a wedding to make sure all the details are done and calm the nervous couple, wedding planners will have to work on weekends and evenings.

Steps to launch your career

First, think about the different elements of the wedding that the planner must organize: places, themes, flowers, food and drinks, clothes, photography, honeymoon and other aspects of the wedding. Most people have some experience in one or more aspects of these aspects of the wedding, and most wedding planners have transformed their work as a florist, caterer, photographer or travel agent into a larger and more exciting career as a wedding organizer. If you have not had any of these careers, you may want to start looking for a job as an assistant to a wedding organizer or work in the non-profit event planning department. This will help you develop the skills you need to succeed in planning.

Make a list of wedding items. Find many suppliers for different items that you can't afford. Interview them and decide which ones you want to use for future weddings. Check if you can get a discount for referring them exclusively. You can also develop a reference exchange - you will scratch their scratches.

Find ways to use your talent to help friends and acquaintances in planning weddings. If you already have a career as a florist, you can receive payment for your flower work, but also offer help to the bride for the rest of the wedding, first as an additional free service, and then gradually offer for these services for a fee. Or, if your talent was a hobby, offer help to friends at your own or children's wedding. Maybe you can volunteer to help the brides in their church with their weddings to gain experience. After voluntarily taking several weddings that you need to document with photographs, you are ready to create your own portfolio and start an exciting new career.

Gather a portfolio of your wedding planning experiences. Go to a good stationery or gift shop and buy an attractive photo album. Do not skip this purchase, as it will be part of the first impression. Brides will want to see that you are organized and know how to do things with style. Also write a story about your background at weddings, not to mention that most of your story was voluntary.

Get permission from friends to use them as a reference, and ask them not to mention that you helped them for free. After the wedding, and your friends are grateful for help, tell them that you are starting your new career as a wedding organizer and ask them to direct you to their friends who are getting married. Word of mouth will always be the most important source of new business. You can ask your friends to mention your name in the wedding announcement as a wedding organizer. The memory that they had a wedding organizer will impress their friends and you will get free advertising.

Talk to places of worship and catering rooms about their weddings; especially those where you have a personal connection. Give your business cards to the wedding coordinator or someone who talks to brides about how to use space for the wedding. These people can recommend you to your fiancé well before they think of hiring a wedding organizer. Try to get a list of future weddings from them and send the bride a letter and a brochure.

Consider printing your brochure - it could be an inexpensive brochure consisting of three parts in black and white or more expensive with color photos. Start with an inexpensive version, but make sure you use attractive and easy-to-read fonts as well as a nice layout so that the brochure presents the right image. A local copy center can help with this project. After a longer field trip, you can print the more expensive wedding brochure you made.

Design and print business cards - they are inexpensive and easily available at your local copy center. Then you should give them out to everyone you meet at parties, grocery stores and even at your friends' weddings.

If your city has a wedding fair, get a stand and advertise your services. You will be exposed to a large number of future brides, some of whom are just beginning to think about their weddings and which are likely to be overwhelmed by the fair with the number of decisions to be made. These brides will be happy to find someone to help them plan the perfect wedding.

Consider advertising your services on yellow pages, as well as in carefully selected publications. Advertising is very expensive - buy ads only in publications that future brides and their families probably read or consult when they think about marriage. You'll want to choose local publications instead of national magazines.

One last tip

When you start a new career, be patient. The phone probably won't ring at first. Your business will probably be small in the first year, but it will grow every time you get married. Ask every bride you helped to mention anyone who talks to her about her wedding. Make sure your brides and their mothers have a supply of your business cards that you can give to your friends. You may consider paying them a referral fee for each new customer you send. You successfully coordinate with each wedding, you will probably get three new clients. It won't be long before you have to hire assistants to handle the amount of work you have.

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