Have you decided to become a Wedding Planner, and you are wondering when to start? How to create a wedding-planner business? What does it take to set up a wedding planning agency? What status and how to make yourself known? Do you want to set up as a wedding planner, a self-employed person, or a company? You are in the right place! To guide you on this adventure, we guide you on the steps to be taken: from market research to the wedding planning business plan.
As a good organizer, you would like to properly plan, create, and launch your activities to maximize your success chances. In this article, I will try to answer your questions by dissecting the different stages of creating a wedding business.
Wedding planner definition:
A wedding planner is a professional who advises and helps the couples, with planning, organization, and management of budgets by negotiating with them. Note that the wedding planner does not replace the different providers, but coordinates them. Some wedding planners, however, take care of the decoration of the event themselves.
Wedding planners carry a heavy responsibility on their shoulders. It is a stressful job that requires a lot of thoroughness and commitment.
This is a commercial activity, so you will need to register with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Note that there is no qualification or experience required to be able to practice.
What should be the Qualities of the wedding planner?
The wedding planner will need to develop the following qualities to be successful in his business:
- Ability to communicate, interpersonal skills,
- Ability to gain confidence in its interlocutors,
- Imagination and creativity (knowing how to come up with original ideas but not necessarily expensive),
- Managerial and project leader qualities: management, coordination, negotiation, optimization, budget monitoring,
- Stress resistance: there is the pressure you put on yourself and the pressure that customers will put on you!
Creating a wedding-planner agency, therefore, requires a lot of skills and know-how. This will involve capitalizing on the references.
When to start: how long to build your project?
First, let’s take a look at how long it will take you to build your business.
Training, market research, and business plan
Do you want to enhance your chances of success? If there is one step that should not be overlooked, then this is it! Training and the business plan are two essential foundations. These are bases that you can rely on in the following steps. Knowing how much time to spend on these steps helps you better define when to get started. These steps can be longer or shorter, depending on the time you can devote to them.
If you are wholly dedicated to the project, it will take about 3 to 4 months. In fact, you will be able at the same time to follow your training and carry out your market research as well as your business plan. If you are still working or on parental leave, for example, and cannot devote yourself 100% to the project, it will take at least six months. In this case, I advise you to do one thing after the other: focus on the training first, then the business plan.
Prospecting time
Once your project is in place and your Wedding business created, you are surely wondering how much time passes between the first communication actions and your first serious prospects to know when to get started?
To reduce this time, you must have worked well on your communication plan and your prospecting plan. Training will help you! But keep in mind that there is still an incompressible minimum time.
Indeed, the benefits that surround marriage are not part of impulse purchases. For example, selling low-cost gadgets online, whose initial results are likely to be quick with aggressive advertising campaigns, and selling a wedding planning service are two very different things. Be aware of this. It takes time for your message to reach your target, then enters these bride and groom’s minds and finally invites them to take action by contacting you.
Becoming an independent wedding planner: conditions for success.
The main difficulty for a wedding planner is identifying potential clients early enough, that is to say, individuals who plan to get married in the coming months.
Several solutions for this:
• Carry out a sufficiently broad market study to detect and get in touch with potential customers,
• Work in a network with other wedding providers: they can play prescribers’ role for your services, and you can give them a lift by calling on them for the various wedding tasks:
- Caterers,
- Florists,
- Decorators,
- Pastry chefs and designers of wedding cakes,
- Videographers,
- DJ and entertainers,
- Hairdressers,
- Beauticians and makeup artists,
- Artists and musicians,
- Owners of event venues,
- Accommodation owners,
- Fireworks, etc.
Put in place an effective communication policy, for example, through quality and well-referenced website or blog. You will need to find a way to get the contact details of qualified visitors through your site so that you can contact them again – for example, by offering to download a wedding guide, against entering the contact details.
Take your time to find couples that match you.
If you want to work on weddings that are right for you, you will need to have a well-targeted marketing strategy. The more precise your target, the more it will be limited in number, and the longer it will take to reach it. But being patient will pay off if you want to work on great projects and have a positioning, in terms of range, which allows you to ensure a comfortable income. Conversely, by targeting too large a target, you will very quickly have many prospects. But will they match the projects you want to work on? Will they allow you to make your business profitable?
If we recap, you will need to allow a minimum of 6 to 9 months to build your project. Now that you know the average time to prepare for your launch let’s try to answer the question concretely. When to start?
The best time to get started
When to get started: wedding season
The peak wedding season runs from May to September in the USA. In Asia, the popular time of marriage is during the colder months between November and March.
When to start: how long it takes to organize a wedding
On average, it is estimated that the couple starts their wedding organization with a Wedding Planner around 12 to 9 months before D-Day. Therefore, couples start their prospecting for a wedding planner approximately 12 to 15 months before the wedding.
When to start: THE answer!
Based on these two observations, we can conclude that the 2021 bride and groom will start looking for their Wedding Planner between spring and summer 2020. To have appointments in spring/summer 2020, you must have already implemented your actions communication for at least three months. Therefore, it is ideal to launch between January and June to fill the season of the following year.
Don’t panic if you get started between July and December. It will then be necessary to have a communication strategy for winter weddings. You should also be aware that the following season will probably only be half-booked.