Wedding Planners NEED A Backup Plan | 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's the backup plan if you get sick or injured before the client's wedding date? This should be in your contract. You should probably make friends with another planner in your area, which is why I love this community so very much. I would look and see if there's anyone on the list that's already graduated from the mastermind that's in your area. Because they are going to be the people. Because they've gone through this program and they know how much we preach community over competition. They're going to be the people that say, absolutely, I will sweep in and I will help you with your wedding. If not, you might find yourself kind of scrambling at the last minute if you do get sick or you do get injured. Luckily, by the grace of God, I've never had this happen, ever. But in our proposal or in our contract, I should say see interchangeable. I say that it's our job, Wolfer and company's job, to find a suitable replacement or all monies will be refunded. All monies unused. Sorry. So if we've done all the wedding planning together, obviously they paid me for that time. They're not getting that refunded because they got value out of that. But I will refund them the cost of day of coordination because we cannot perform that activity. That has not happened. I hope it'll never happen because that would just be awful for the client. But if anything does happen, I provide the suitable replacement so I can go find someone who also runs their own wedding planning company, or I can pull from someone within our specific company and have them lead the day instead and then give the client as much notice as possible. Because regardless of. I mean, even if you can't help it. This will emotionally rock them. They were planning on having you there emotionally. They were excited about having you there. They've pictured their wedding day with you there and now all of a sudden that's changing. So give them as much notice as you possibly can. For sure. 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 oriented, 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 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 wolferenco.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 want to share with you guys. I don't know about you, 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. 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, Coon Bee 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 over to theunionpodcast.com legally set to check them out. Use code union for 20% off your contracts. Is it a bad look to try to intern with someone or assist on events while having the plan to then venture out on your own? If not, how long is a good amount of time to give before going out on your own? I would be very clear about your intentions to begin with because you're right, it is kind of like that. Like, hey, I don't plan on being with you for very long. Which, yeah, it's an awkward thing. I was very upfront with it the very beginning, but I also found that no one really wanted to work with me regardless. So not. I don't say that to discourage you. I say that to encourage you to be prepared to have your own means of getting the experience. Because for me, if someone interns with me and they're like, hey, I plan on starting my wedding planning business, I'm like, great, that changes how I'm going to treat tonight. I'm going to tell you everything. We're going to talk. I'm an open book. I can answer your questions as opposed to people who intern with me because they just want the experience of working an event and they're not quite sure if they even like it. I don't want to scare them terribly by being like this and this and this and this. It changes how I teach people. So that's the only difference. For me, that may not be the case. When you are working with someone, I just think it's a good idea to be upfront and honest about it. If you choose to not share that, I don't think that's necessarily dishonest, but I could see maybe working with them for a couple months. I don't know. Because I need to develop a relationship. Yeah. I just feel like it's one of those things that you just kind of have to say it from the get go, you know, I don't know what are your thoughts on it? Because if you're building a relationship with this person, you want enough experience to feel confident about your abilities moving forward, but you also don't want to leave them high and dry. Yeah, that's a hard one. That's kind of why I like the backup plan of doing things on your own. For sure. How do you recommend doing market research when determining our pricing for the area? Just find other local planners and see what they're charging. Is there a resource that says what the average wedding cost per specific area? I'm more East Texas and all the data I can get is for dfw. Very different vibes and price points across the board yet. For those who don't know, Texas is huge. East Texas is like a totally different demographic. What part of East Texas are you from? Let me know if you are, if you're here live. Because my grandfather was from Carthage, so, like, behind the line of the pines, real close to Louisiana. He had a real slow Southern accent, may he rest in peace. But you're right, there is a real different vibe between like, close to Louisiana border and dfw. That's Dallas Fort Worth. So I will tell you how I did it, although some people kind of frown upon it. But this is back when Facebook groups weren't as much of a thing as they are now. So I didn't really have the option of being like, hey, what do you guys charge in a Facebook group? So if I were you, I would ask in a Facebook group where you can get. Someone could consent to give you that information. Right? So we're not trying to like, dupe anyone into figuring out how much they charge. The nice part for me is, like, I was planning my wedding, so I was asking wedding planners how much they charge and whatever. So I was able to hold onto that information and then apply that. But I did contact a few other wedding planners after I was already married, just for a little bit more frame of reference. Here's why I don't love that now being a planner, one feels a little bit dishonest to me. I knowing what I knew then and the resources that I had then, it's the one that made the most sense. I did have some from my researching time from before we got married, but I didn't have like a whole clear picture just yet. Two, it feels like a waste of the planner's time when I especially when I have zero intent of booking them. And that just. I don't mind when customers ghost me or customers potential clients ghost me. I don't. It's okay. They inquired, they're gone. But I would feel probably a little bit more miffed. It was if it was a wedding planner just trying to figure out what I charged. Instead, I would rather have a wedding planner email me be like, hey, what do you charge now? What you might find is you might find that a lot of people are not going to want to tell you that. That's why I would go into a Facebook group. I would go into the forums that we have here, ask the other planners what they're currently charging, what did they start out at? What was the rates that they started with? If you can find some planners in your area with pricing listed that's fantastic. I will say usually anytime, regardless of where the wedding planner is working. If it's under $1,000 for a day of coordination, that is an orange flag for me. That's where I go, okay, you're new, you're new. 800 bucks is nowhere near sufficient to do the amount of things that you need to do. Driving appointments, et cetera. And it's just day of coordination, or as we like to call it, month of coordination. Because you should never just show up on the day of somebody's wedding and be like, hey, I'm here, I can plan things. Now, you should probably have at least one meeting beforehand. So with all that broken out, all that being said, I would recommend starting at about 1,000 for a month of coordination. And then I would also jump into a Facebook group of planners or of wedding professionals. It doesn't matter necessarily if it's in your area, especially if you could get a broad scope, like a more national scope, because then you can find places that are slightly more rural, slightly more populated, like dfw, and do some comparison there. And when we talk about pricing in that module, I'm very clear about how I started at 1000, 2000, 3000 for my packages respectively. So month of coordination, partial planning, full planning, and that's a really good number to start off with, to kind of gauge from there. Now, with all that being said, we're gonna kind of tuck that off to the side for a sec. We also talk a lot about having an hourly rate that we can refer to to make sure that you are getting your money's worth, but you are getting paid, not your money's worth, that you're gonna be paid what you're worth. So again, in that module, I talk about how I charged $100 per hour. I'm using aggressive air quotes on this because it's not every single hour that I worked was at $100 an hour. It was in how I framed it. And the reason that you want to have this clarity and the specificity is because you want to know if you work an extra hour at their wedding, what's going to cost? If they want an extra meeting, what's it going to cost? So I called it $100 per face time. Not actual, like digital FaceTime, but for the amount of times that they had access to my face, does that make sense? So for month of coordination, we usually had a two hour meeting before their big day, and then I'd work their big day for eight hours. Obviously there'd be a rehearsal for some, not for others. But I didn't really add them to the FaceTime because it was less than an hour. So usually it's like 30, 45 minutes for a rehearsal. Again, I'm just coming up with a framework that I can hold onto so I know how to remove or add back on. So that was 10 hours worth of work, theoretically two hours for the meeting, eight hours for day of boom, $1,000. You see how that happened? And then for my partial planning, I had five meetings. Each of those consisted of about two hours. And I didn't necessarily communicate this to my clients because I did in the beginning until I had a lawyer who's like, so this appointment was 30 minutes shorter than the designated time. What are you going to do to make up for that cost difference for us? So I ended up letting her use my candles for free because she had found enough of the time that we hadn't used up. So the partial planning was five meetings at two hours each. That's 10 hours plus the rehearsal and then day of coordination. That also evens out to about 20 hours. 20 times 102,000. Right. Did I do that math right? Yes, I did. And then full planning was 10 meetings at two hours per meeting. So I would find a good medium of all of those. A hundred dollars an hour sounds absolutely asinine. When you are first getting started, you're like, I could never charge that. I couldn't. Yeah, if you don't, you're going to look pretty new again with that orange flag that we were talking about earlier. And this is not including all of the email time, all of the research time, all of the drive time. This is not counting communicating with vendors or a mother in law who calls or a whole myriad of things that you're going to end up doing. Administrative hours. All of the time that it takes you to actually acquire a client, responding to emails to potential clients. You need to be paid per hour of what you're doing. So when that is averaged out, you could be looking more at like, you know, 20 to $30 per hour because you have all of these hours that you've worked that aren't being paid by anybody, but they still need to be covered. Your admin hours need to be covered. So that's where that number really comes in handy and helps to kind of COVID a lot of those costs as well. So I would go two routes because that was a lot. It was a long, heavy explanation. Go into a Facebook group, go into our forums, ask planners what they charged in the beginning and what they charge now. And if you want to figure out their location, you totally can. And then you also need to come up with your hourly rate and really stick to that because when you make allowances and that. And we talk about boundaries a lot in this program, there's a reason for that. Because I have left events feeling okay. I think we're just have a real talk moment. They say what's with me? In air quotes today? No clip. They say that event planners tend to only stay in the business for five years. Right. And I don't think it's because it's such a stressful career. I think it's because planners don't have good boundaries and don't say no and don't say yes and don't change what they're charging accordingly. I think that burnt out feeling is not a given, it's just a lack of saying the word no or charging accordingly. So I think that if you can find that sweet spot of what to charge per hour and what people generally charge across the board, you will feel a lot better about what you have going on. If you would like to find what planners in your area charge, you can feel free to send them an email. You may not get a response. That's okay. That's why I like going to Facebook groups specifically, because oftentimes they're there to to help a little bit more than if you are cold calling or cold emailing. Cold emailing a wedding planner. 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.