Wedding planners are responsible for organizing and executing all aspects of a client’s wedding day. If you have a passion for weddings and are detail-oriented, becoming a wedding planner may be the perfect career! Here are a few tips on How to Become a Wedding Planner?
About a Career as a Wedding Planner
Few jobs offer as many benefits. You will enjoy a rewarding job as a wedding planner, bride consultant, wedding consultant or wedding coordinator. If you open your own business as a wedding planner, you can be your boss.
Many couples are looking for a wedding planner in today’s busy world.
There are more chances to be a wedding planner in 2018 than ever, with more than 2 million weddings in America alone. Someone must oversee every detail of a marriage to make it a success. You could be that “someone”, the wedding planner.
You can be a wedding planner if you want to. You don’t need any special education or experience to be a successful wedding planner.
How to Become a Wedding Planner
Passion and Commitment
Time commitment is one of the most important differences between a regular job and a career in wedding planning. You must be available to your clients before and after work if you want to succeed as a planner financially and professionally.
You might get a call at 9 PM from clients who expect you to answer their questions immediately. If you’re new to the business or trying to build a reputation, it is essential to smile when you answer the phone.
Before you think, “No, not me, I’ll set boundaries right from the beginning,” remember that busy brides will not always follow those boundaries. A nonresponsive wedding planner can make a depressed client, regardless of whether or not it was your fault.
My best advice? If you are passionate about being a wedding planner, learn to love the calls and the unscheduled appointments. You will soon find new work if you don’t feel inspirational.
Learn the Business
There are many misconceptions about wedding planning. While it may be a great job, it is not for everyone. You may be wrong about what wedding planning is.
Professional wedding planners can help you learn as much as possible from their own experience. Once you have a good understanding of the industry, it will be easier to dive in.
Kristie Santana is a professional wedding planner and a board member of the National Association of Wedding Professionals (NAWP) and the most widely regarded and popular book about becoming a wedding planner.
This book has been a great help to thousands of young people in their wedding planning journeys and gives an insider’s perspective of what it takes to be a professional wedding planner.
Spend a few days researching the business of wedding planning before you spend money on certification courses or months working for an established company.
You’ll be better prepared to get your career started. Local professionals are also an excellent resource for researching the topic. You can never learn too much!
Get Certified (Optional)
Ask professional wedding planners if they think certification is worthwhile. You’re likely to get one of two answers. Either they believe that wedding planner certification is precious and highly recommended, or they’ll scoff at you and tell you to save money for something of real value.
The answer lies in the middle, like many difficult questions in life. Let’s not forget this. To plan a wedding, you don’t need to have a certificate. It will not help you get clients once your business is running.
If you can afford the tuition (typical $1-2k), and you don’t view your certificate as a substitute for practical experience, you have a lot to learn and very little to lose.
Although you might be able to plan a successful wedding, that is only half the battle. Understanding how to legally operate a company is the other half.
This can be more challenging if you have never started a business. This process can be aided by a certification program that will teach you about business structure, tax considerations, and how to write contracts.
It doesn’t matter what your situation is; it is a good idea to do extensive Google searches on the legalities of running a business.
Experience a Hands-On Experiment
Once you feel you have a good grasp of the industry, you can start and do some work. You can’t replace the feeling of being at a real wedding. There are many ways to find them. This is the best part about the job if you love weddings as much as I do!
The first and most obvious is to call local wedding planners and ask if they are willing to take on an intern. This is a great way to get more help, especially for free.
Although it may seem counterproductive to work for nothing, it is always better to make your first mistakes with someone else’s benefit! You’ll learn many tips and tricks that will be useful in your business.
If you are having trouble finding a company to hire your services, you can look through your contacts to find someone who is planning their wedding soon or is currently planning one.
Tell them that you are a professional wedding planner and would love to help with their wedding planning. This will give you more responsibility than being an intern, as you will take complete control of the wedding instead of following someone else.
You can only truly get involved in the business by planning real weddings, whether it is for your company or a friend. It will be a great decision.
Get Your First Client
Congratulations! Congratulations! You’ll quickly discover that finding ways to get the phone ringing more often is part of wedding planning.
It doesn’t matter how many marketing techniques you use for your business; choosing one to specialize in is essential.
Let’s take, for example, that you have chosen to spend your marketing budget on three main avenues: Facebook advertising, bridal expos and Yelp promotion. You might be competent in one of the three, but not in the other.
Instead, it would help if you tried different marketing avenues to find the best one for you and then perfect it once you feel that you are the leader in your chosen marketing avenue (e.g., You rank first on Yelp, the table busiest at the bridal expo, etc., move on to the next one.
Your goal is to be recognized across all marketing channels, which will let your potential clients know that you are the best wedding planner in your locality.
What Skills Do You Need?
Planning and producing events of any type requires trust, communication and confidence. A professional planner can be relied upon to ensure a successful wedding day.
A Certified Wedding Planner can be a liaison between the couple and the planner, helping to smoothen any bumps during planning or on the day.
Good wedding planners can work within any budget to ensure that the bride receives all the benefits of professional connections and expertise.
The wedding planner can come up with creative solutions for every budget. The professional will work within the bride’s financial budget, find solutions that alleviate financial worries and communicate the realities of budget constraints.
A professional wedding planner will have the education and experience to help you choose the right vendors for your event.
The planner will help the bride choose who and when to book, provide price comparisons, evaluate vendor contracts, avoid overtime charges, and save on services when guests aren’t there.
Professional wedding planners will build strong relationships with vendors. This will trust that all vendors will deliver on time and within budget.
A Certified Wedding Planner can help with everything from coordinating events to overseeing vendors to cueing the music and seating arrangements.
Many brides realize that having an extra hand on their wedding day is invaluable. To ensure the smooth running of the event, the planner will plan and distribute all details to vendors and wedding party members.
I am running an event. You can relax knowing that your wedding day will be taken care of.
A wedding planner is not only skilled in project management and organization but also assists with design and decoration.
Every professional planner must have the ability to choose a color scheme, design tables and themes and understand theories about fashion and how events flow.
The job of a professional in wedding planning encompasses everything from the preparation stage to the day itself and the day itself.
It takes talent and skill to understand the science and art behind creating memorable events. Your career will be more successful if you develop your natural talent in design.
This is an example of Event Design. It shows how to design for emotions part of people’s long-term memories. Click here to see an Event Design sample.
Floral design is another skill that professional wedding planners must have to be versatile. Although you don’t need to become a professional florist, it is advisable to know the basics.
Flowers play an essential part in a bride’s day. A wedding planner must be familiar with the basics of floral care to ensure that flowers look fresh throughout the day.
Flower emergencies can happen at any time on the wedding day. Knowing how to fix a boutonniere, bouquet, or centerpiece could be the difference between a good reputation and a bad one. This link will provide a quick tutorial about floral design.
How to Become a Wedding Planner? Conclusion
If you want to become a wedding planner, there are a few things you need to do. It would help if you started your own business. You will need to be an expert and a charismatic person who knows how to create memorable moments for couples, families, and friends during the best day of their lives. Manymoon hopes that our guide was helpful for you.
