Guidance for the new wedding planner in planning a wedding checklist
After deciding to become a professional wedding planner, what do wedding planners do to get started successfully in today’s competitive environment? In the past, professional wedding planner training for wedding planning as a career began with rules on how to plan a wedding by building wedding checklists and a wedding timeline, with some attention to wedding trends and traditions in world weddings. Planning a wedding checklist is as important as ever. But wedding checklists are just the beginning of the journey for a new wedding planner preparing for wedding planning as a career today. For the beginning wedding planner, starting a sustainable wedding business in the present environment requires hands-on support from experts who have adapted to change and achieved success in wedding planning as a career. (And for the couple planning a wedding checklist on their own, having help from an experienced wedding planner saves the time and stress associated with being a wedding planner for your own special day.)
Wedding Checklists Get You Started, But the Wedding Planner Gets You to Your Goal
Wendy Harrop is an outstanding example of a professional who is expert in far more than planning wedding checklists. An award-winning wedding planner with 20 years of experience, Wendy knows how wedding planner businesses work in today’s environment, how planning a wedding checklist works in every situation, and how success in wedding planning as a career can be achieved in any local market. Before becoming a certified wedding planner, she coordinated weddings for college classmates getting married in Eugene, Oregon, and worked as a paid staff member for churches in Southern California, where she coordinated members’ weddings within the conventional framework of a traditional wedding. There she learned firsthand how challenging a big church wedding can be, especially for a budding wedding planner getting married in a ceremony where her father is the officiant! She says her experience taught her how easily even a wedding planner coordinating her own wedding can lose control of planning a wedding checklist when family and friends become involved. To work well, she believes, wedding checklists must have clearly stated boundaries, avoid undue outside influence, and focus on the primary goal of planning a wedding checklist: achieving what the couple getting married, not family or friends, desire for the wedding. What does a wedding planner do? Ask Wendy!
Wedding Planning as a Career Has a Bright Future for the Wedding Planner Eager to Learn
In 1991, Wendy founded It's Your Day, a full-service wedding planning business now located in Northern California. Unlike the typical wedding planner with a 12-month client roster, she readily accepts 'day-of' wedding planning jobs, coordinating wedding venues, vendors, and other crucial elements of wedding checklists that worried clients have already put in place before they hire her for the weekend. She meets as frequently with every couple, working through expectations and contingencies as thoroughly as possible before the big day. This is especially important for ‘day-of’ clients, she says, 'to get their vision, understand their dynamics, and come prepared for anything' that may occur between the start of the rehearsal and the end of the reception. ‘Wedding checklists are the smallest part of the job,’ she adds: ‘Happy couples are the biggest.’ With Wendy's help, your wedding event planner career will have a happy beginning, too.
Get the Guidance You Need in Starting Your Own Wedding Planner Career
A Wedding Wire Bride's Choice 2011 Award winner for professional wedding planning, Wendy believes that choosing wedding planning as a career means having a life with a mission. She develops close relationships with most clients, helping them to stay on schedule and budget, to navigate the 'sea of advertising' that surrounds most every wedding website, and to communicate their reasons for choosing nontraditional alternatives such as online invitations and paperless RSVPs. Throughout the wedding planning process, she focuses on implementing their vision, monitoring their progress, and minimizing their wedding stress. To maintain her client-focus, she manages only one wedding a weekend, using a rational fee structure based on a simple set of variables that she explains clearly. Her expert advice for mission-minded individuals who are beginning wedding planning as a career can be accessed through Member queries to New Wedding Planet's Business Development Center.
Wendy is one of eight Advisors to New Wedding Planet's Business Development Center. The Center provides Members with quick, concise answers to the most common questions and issues faced by wedding planners, wedding professionals, and couples planning their own wedding. Once you're a Member, it's as simple as sending a query from your Personal Resource Page. Members may also commission Advisors to work on Special Assignments where one-to-one interaction and collaboration is utilized to produce a comprehensive, custom-tailored solution. Special Assignments are subject to availability and are quoted on a per-job basis.
