How to Get Started Planning Weddings | Wedding Planning Q&A

Hi and welcome to Union Podcast. My name is Jamie Wolfer and I'm a wedding planner who absolutely loves to share how I got started and scale my business to above six figures in this amazing and occasionally extremely competitive industry. In this podcast, I share the tech, tactics, mindset and mistakes that got me to where I am today. No gatekeeping, no cloak and dagger, just full disclosure and a little humor along the way. So whether you're a planner or a solopreneur, my goal is for you to be a better business person than I ever could have been and support you on this journey. I let's dive into this week's episode. Today's episode is one of my favorite things in the entire world, and that is a live Q and A from one of our Union mastermind calls. I know you're going to love it. Take a listen. What is the best thing to do if you want to get started in the business but have no experience, not even planning your own wedding? So there are quite a few things you can do. I would say if you need to replace an income, right? If you need to get event experience but you don't have time outside of regular working hours and you're like, I need experience, but I also need money asap. I highly recommend getting into event catering, which is a very nice crossover when it comes to planning. It gives you the experience, it helps you to understand meal times and meal temperatures. You get to see behind the scenes in a way that you can't in any other capacity and it's entry level. So that's usually my recommendation for someone who's like, I need to get started, but I also need money like immediately and nobody's going to hire me if I have zero experience. That's not how this works. So that would be a recommendation for that. If you would like to get actual wedding planning experience and you can afford to take some hits, you can afford to work a couple of days for free. I highly recommend you join another wedding planner in your area and offer to intern for them for free. Just be like, hey, can I come shadow you for a day? Do you need an extra set of hands that boots on the ground Experience is going to be absolutely incredible. And honestly, it'll teach you two things, what you want to do and what you don't want to do. I will never forget the first event that I worked for somebody else. And I've told this story before, so if I sound like a broken record, forgive me, but if you haven't heard it, act surprised. Or if you have act surprise. Either way, surprise. The planner had this system where you had to walk around with a clipboard the whole time. And I was like, that's not good for me because I kept leaving it everywhere. And that the emergency kit, she wanted it to be on my person at all times. Well, it's this really intense over the shoulder bag that started to cause my shoulder to cramp. And I was like, I don't want to do this. This is ridiculous. Like I am so not a clipboard person. Or I'm going to set it down to help somebody and I'm going to forget that I put it there. So that helped me kind of frame up my systems and what I liked about that and what I didn't like. And then emergency kit, I was like, if I do one or when I do one of these, mine's going on wheels. That's it. Enough said. So that's another thing that you can do right there. Lastly, if you want to get started with your business and you can't seem to find anybody that is willing to let you intern and if you can't seem to or you don't want to go work in catering, which is totally understandable, honestly, you could probably just get started if you haven't. Because I believe that you have enough framework in this course, in this program. Truly within my core, I think that if you go through this and you go through the master plan, you will be able to plan a wedding with no problem. Yes, you're going to want to make sure you have support on your first wedding day. I actually recommend support on all of your wedding days and to never work alone. But there's a lot that you'll probably be able to do without having much experience at all whatsoever. The way you can get clients, a couple recommendations for that would be go on Craigslist and do it unbranded. Right? Just get some experience. So that way if you screw up, they're not going to come. Leave like a one star review, which they're probably not going to. Don't panic. But if you want to have like hedge yourself and protect your brand and your brand identity, but you need the experience. Try advertising on Craigslist. This is something that my good friend Dave recommended that he does with all of his new videographers, his new wedding videographers, he gets them trained via Craigslist. He's like baptism by fire. You go do this event, we'll come with you, we'll have someone train you. But that way, in case anything goes awry, it's not going to blow back on us as a brand. And I think there's a really smart process or strategy by using that because then it helps you to gain the confidence that you currently probably don't have while also getting like real boots on the ground experience. How many times I say boots on the ground feel like I said a lot of times. I'm only mildly embarrassed to admit that in the beginning, I printed out every single piece of paper, every single contract. I took handwritten notes and created a binder for every single one of my wedding planning clients. Now, in theory, that sounds really cool and I thought I would look really cool showing up to these meetings with these binders that are full of all of these contracts with handwritten notes. But let me tell you, the chaos that ensued when I tried to stay organized on my own and got over five events at a time. It was a nightmare. Enter Honeybook. I am telling you guys, Honeybook was literally exactly how my brain was processing wedding planning. But but just in digital form. It's so easy to go in there and make any sort of customizations that you want. From adjusting your contracts to adjusting your packages, maintaining conversations back and forth that not only pop up in the app on the website, but also in your inbox as well. It's a great way to stay organized. So get out of the paper and get onto the Digital. Head to wolfraunco.com HB and use code Union at checkout to get the best deal. We interrupt this podcast because there is something extremely special that I wanna share with you guys. Uh, I don't know about, but for the last who knows how many years I have been using a frankensteined, googled, copied and pasted contract. And while that is extremely embarrassing to admit to all of our listeners, I know that there are people out there who feel the same as I do. And there were a couple things that kept me from actually getting an attorney drafted contract. Actually, no, there was one thing. It was so expensive and it seemed so out of reach. That's when I learned about Legally Set. You see, Coonby with Legally Set has created industry specific contracts for people like you and me working in the wedding industry. They're easy to customize. They're drafted by an actual attorney and not googled. Can you imagine that? And last but not least, they are so extremely affordable. So if you were like me and maybe using a less than appropriate and or legal contract, it's time to step up your game. You have no more excuses. Head on over to theunionpodcast.com. legal. Legally set to check them out. Use code union for 20% off your contracts. Next question. When was the last time you felt burnt out? What was the cause, if I may ask? I don't tend to feel burnt out physically. I tend to feel burnt out emotionally. And because I can do back to back weddings, no problem. Yeah, my body will be achy. It's usually when I run into emotional turmoil, whether it's in my marriage or. Or. I mean, I have teenagers now, so talk about some turmoil there. Right. Or things happening in my business or in life. I have a hard time kind of separating out emotions, which I think is part of my superpower. Right. Because I have these emotions and because I can bring them to the table, it helps me to relate to my clientele so much more. And it helps me to be a really safe space if they want to talk about things. Because wedding planning is really emotional. I think my emotions are a superpower. But they also have that negative side effect. Right. Where when I feel burnt out emotionally, it can be hard to get up and get going. And I'm gonna be totally honest, I'm feeling a little burnt out right now. What was the cause? My baby. The baby's hard. The baby is. Has a lot more requirements than any of my other children have. And I've had twins, so I think that just gets. That's where my burnout's currently coming in. I don't have any clients at the moment. And we did that strategically on purpose, because when this baby was born, I was like, oh, snap, She's a spicy one. And she's continued to be spicy. So that's kind of just what we're processing through right now. And that's kind of these life changes and these new stages of life where you have to pivot, you kind of have to mourn the season that you were in before and then make those pivots and make those adjustments. And what does life look like now? Right. What? How. How do I run my business now that I have a difficult baby? How do I run my business now that this season of life feels and looks different? Next question. Have you ever been involved in a lawsuit? Oh, goodness. If so, how did you handle it? And what was the outcome? How did you avoid it affecting your business credibility? No, no lawsuit. Which is great, actually. Well, we got into a little bit of a legal kerfuffle over the venue, which is such, like, a niche subject. We. We signed a lease for a venue, ended up being structurally unsound, and they tried to make Us stay. So it was basically our lawyer sending emails back and forth. That's it. How do we handle it? With grace, with dignity, with kindness. Covering it in prayer. What was the outcome? We got out of the venue, but it wasn't really a lawsuit and that wasn't wedding planning related. And how did you avoid it affecting your business credibility? It was small, it was minimal and we didn't. None of it was our fault. So it wouldn't even if somebody had something to say about it. It was very easily, very easily explained. Now, in this capacity, when you're talking about wedding planning, I, if it were me and a lawsuit looked like it would be looming, I would be doing everything in my power to make sure we are stopping it before it even gets to that point. What does that look like? We are protected with a solid contract written by an attorney. We are not frankensteining this contract. We're not flying by the seat of our pants on this one. If you want to make sure people take you seriously, you need to have a serious looking contract. And the only people that read contracts are lawyers. So I would highly encourage that you check out legally set, which is going to be an investment. So not everyone's going to make this off the bat. I'm fully aware of that. But the best way to avoid a lawsuit is to have a really, really good contract. In addition to that, make sure you are explaining your services very, very well. What you do, what you do not do, make sure there is a list of those included in your proposal. So there's your proposal and there's your contract proposal. Here's what we propose to do for you. Contract. Here is the legally binding agreement between us as two different persons or two different entities. So they can often be put together or the terms are used interchangeably. Okay, here's the proposal, but have to have a contract in it, or here's the contract, but it happens to have a proposal in it, but it's those two components together. Be very clear about what you do and what you do not do. And if you see a boundary being crossed, try to find a way to say that's not what we do as politely as possible, as quickly as possible. What we tend to do, especially as newbie wedding planners, is we make a lot of allowances where we're like, I'll allow it. I don't really want to do this, but I'll allow it because I really want them to like me. I don't really offer that service, but I'm going to do it anyways because I want to make sure that I'm really creating a satisfied client, which is why I think it's the sixth one. The sixth part module is keeping clients happy. There's a reason we talk about boundaries first. There's a reason that we go through boundaries before we even get to keeping clients happy. Because if they don't know the services that you perform and what you do or do not do, then they're just going to kind of be guessing because we as wedding planners, like we're kind of all over the place with the services that we offer. So we need to be very clear with the people that we're working with. Here are the services that this company offers. We are not JLo from the wedding Planner, right? We not. We're not this company over here. Here's what we do for you. So kind of demystifying it, having really good boundaries. If you get to the point where someone's like, I'm going to sue you, we've got a good contract so we're protected there. We've been very clear, ideally in email, especially if a boundaries cross or something pops up. Email, email, email. Get that paper trail going. And then lastly, make sure you have liability insurance just as a protection. What you can do is you can get it from event to event if you want to. I think Event Helper is a great resource for that. That's what I use for years until I switched over to year over year insurance. And that's through Cover Wallet. It's just to protect you in case anything happens. That's it. It's really inexpensive. So it sounds scary. Limited liability insurance sounds very scary. But once you kind of like look at it and realize how inexpensive it is, it's just a good measure of protection. Now let's say there was this colossally bad lawsuit, right? And you've done everything that you can and you feel like you're coming out of the other side just wounded, right? And you're worried about your business credibility. One, most people probably are never going to know unless this person puts you on blast somewhere. That leaves reviews. Then you can go dispute the review, which is great that you have that option to do that. And if they're just smearing your name everywhere, you can dispute, you can write back, you can comment. If the concern is word of mouth credibility, there are other circles. Really and truly, I can understand how that would feel like a really big blow, especially in a small community. You might need to broaden your hurdle horizons of where you're working, kind of expand a little bit further. Go to your next biggest city. Anything within an hour and a half, I think is reasonable for wedding planning services. Like an hour and a half drive personally. So. And then as far as business credibility, that's. Yeah, I guess that would be the. The fixes that I would make for that. And if you had any gaps in any of the things that I just listed, you didn't have a good enough contract. You weren't really clear on your boundaries. You didn't have things in writing. You didn't have limited liability insurance. Get them now. Right. Like, now that you've gone through it, now protect yourself. Even better. Okay, that's all we have for this week's episode, guys. If you enjoyed it, do me a favor, screenshot that episode and share it on socials. Tag me in it. I would love to see Wolfer and Co. On Instagram. Let me know if you're enjoying it. You can also let me know if you didn't enjoy it, but I'm probably not going to reassure that one. I hope you guys enjoy this week's episode and we'll see you in the next one.