Wedding Day Help Without the Stress: Catering Staff, Coordinators & Delegation | Wedding Q&A

Well, hello, lovely humans, and welcome to Engage, a wedding planning podcast for the modern-day couple. I'm your host, Jamie Wolfer, and I truly believe that wedding planning does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. I kind of picture these episodes like jumping on a quick phone call with your wedding planner. You get your answers and you go on your merry way, because sometimes not all of us have an hour to dedicate to listening to super long podcasts or super long intros. So without further ado, let's just jump right on into it. Today's episode is going to admittedly be a little bit all over the place. You see, every single month I sit down with all of the I was going to say constituents. They're not constituents. The people over in the Master Plan course and answer your questions in lifetime. So if you find yourself struggling and really need to sit down and speak with a real life wedding planner, I would love to be a part of your wedding planning journey. Join us over in the Master Plan today to get your questions answered. Until then, take a listen. What is the best way to find catering staff to hire directly? We're DIYing basically everything, but I want to hire a couple of people to make sure the Crock-Pots and chafing dishes stay warm. And trays get replenished if necessary. I've looked online, but mostly what I see are actual catering companies, not catering staff specifically. Any tips? Yes, you want to search waitstaff, um, or a bartending company will have servers. So just independent bartenders that you can hire oftentimes will have servers as well. That's usually the best bet that you can find, and that's very common. It's just that specific language of what you're looking for, right? So if you say catering staff, it's going to show up with catering. So if you say waitstaff, or bartenders. Oftentimes bartending companies will frequently get asked, well, do you have waiters as well? Because that's usually the kind of event where they're kind of piecemealing some things together. So that would be the avenue that I would suggest checking with that one. And that's our favorite for DIY events. Whenever you're kind of bringing stuff together and you need extra hands, but you don't have family or friends that you can sacrifice— I mean, offer to do those things— that's when we would bring in professionals. So Seb, I hope that helps. Um, cause that's what we do. Even us as professionals, I will look for, uh, waitstaff. Sitting here listening to a podcast is all fine and dandy, right? But sometimes you need an actual person to be asking some of these questions to, and you may be sitting there going, you know what, Jamie, actually, yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense. I would love to be able to ask you these questions. Guess what? You need to join the Master Plan. You've heard me talk about it, but do you know why I love it so much? You get over 10 lessons that walk you through planning your wedding with videos and spreadsheets and other detailed resources along the way. Join me and my virtual clients over in the master plan and get all your wedding planning questions answered. Literally thousands of couples have gone on this journey with me, and I'd love for you to be next. Check it out at wolferandco.com TMP. That's wolferandco.com TMP. Listen, wedding budgets suck. They're just like the actual worst. And the hardest part for me is that weddings are not cookie cutter. They're not one size fits all. And I think it's important to make sure that you're budgeting according to your priorities. Build a budget that works with your vision and you'll be on the path to planning a wedding that you really want. So if you want my recommendations for making your perfect budget for you and your partner, head on over to weddingpriorities.com. I'll likely be hiring a coordinator who is newer to the industry. I seem to recall that there was a video or a podcast episode where you had tips specifically for interviewing new vendors. Anything I need to keep in mind? There is probably a podcast or video where I talk, uh, where I talk about that. Um, that's the hard part about making content for so long is I'm like, I hope I'm not contradicting myself, but I think this is what I said because this is kind of what I've always believed, right? Um, so, uh, I would say you kind of want to look for— well, you want to look through their proposal. You want to see what their offerings are. Um, if anything seems weird or kind of questionable, or it seems like they're tacking extra things on, Just be aware, usually what we run into in the industry with new planners is they overextend themselves, they overcommit. And so I would, I would encourage you to get proposals or quotes from experienced and inexperienced so they can kind of see what an offering would look like. And trust me, some people are like, oh, that's wasting the more professional or the longer-term planners' time. We don't see it like that. I don't see it like that. If someone just wants to figure out how much we cost and what we're doing, that's okay. That's, that's normal. That's part of the wedding planning system. We'll get, we'll get inquiries all the time that don't book us. That's perfectly fine. So I wouldn't concern yourself about that too much unless you're like, listen, I can't sleep at night if I do that. But my encouragement would be try to get multiple quotes. You're going to— by quotes, I mean proposals. You're going to want to see who you jive with the best. You're gonna wanna see, okay, what are the offerings? What's the cost? What's the breakdown here? How much setup do they do? How much teardown do they do? How many hours are they available? You will find with newbie planners, they'll be there for a lot longer. They'll do a lot more setup. They'll offer more hours. They're a lot more lenient with their boundaries. Not that we— that I'm not encouraging you to take advantage of those. Those are— why do I know this? Because that was me. That's also— I train planners. So through the mastermind that we have, I literally teach planners how to do this, and all the time I'm talking to planners who are like, yeah, so I didn't stick to my boundaries super well. And I was like, that's okay, it's normal, it happens in the beginning. So try to find kind of a comparison, try to find a couple planners in your area that you can look through the different packages and look through the different options. And then if you look at this newbie and you're like, okay, I get more with you, it's less hours, and you also should be aware of their newness to this. But my phrase was, what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm and affordability. So, you know, I might be a year into this, but I'm here and I'm caffeinated, so you're welcome. Um, we don't plan to have a day-of wedding coordinator due to our limited budget. Yep. Do you have any tips to help us coordinate with our multiple vendors day of? We are— we already are planning to ask one family or friend to be the point of contact for each vendor. To help us bring the event. All right, Keiko, I would say that you're already doing it. Yeah, if you have one person who is aware, excuse me, of the vendors that you have coming in, that, and you have a well-written timeline, um, and you've communicated and passed off the baton, ideally at least 2 weeks ahead of time to your vendors of all the details you want from them. You have those final detail calls, final meetings, walkthrough, etc. Everything's compiled. If you're a binder gal, then obviously you've got your binder ready to go to pass off to somebody else. I would also encourage you to have a deep, like a meeting with that family member or friend. Right? So it's not just like, oh, I made a binder. Here it is, Dev. Congratulations. And also good luck. And thank you for doing this for us. We want a conversation ahead of time. It feels like overkill. It feels like you're asking a lot when you're already asking a friend or a family member to volunteer to do this for you. Right? It's not because you're equipping them with information so they don't feel like they're flying blind. So you want to have some sort of conversation with them ahead of time. Here's what I'm looking at. Here's what our schedule is. Here's what we're anticipating from these vendors, because the timeline's great, but you also need a conversation. Um, so that would be my recommendation is yes, pick one person. That's fantastic. Have everything as organized as possible. Try to get the details from your vendors a couple weeks in advance. Two is kind of like the sweet spot. And then meet with this family member or friend. You are not being a burden if they've already committed to it and they're already saying yes. It is not asking too much if you grab an iced latte, head over to their house and just be like, okay. I just want to go over this with you because I would rather you be over-informed than under-informed. If at any point I'm overwhelming you or it's word vomit, just let me know. But, you know, grab on to whatever information you need and forget the rest. If you are struggling with wedding planning and you have questions and you just need someone to listen and to chat with, come join us in the Master Plan Community over at themasterplanwed.com. I would love to have you in there. Thanks so much for listening. If you haven't done so already, Subscribe, jump on over to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a 5-star review so we can let the podcast people know that Jamie knows what she's talking about sometimes. And until next time, bye guys!