Want to build your career as a wedding planner
A wedding is unique for everyone, whichever part of the world they belong to families want it to be nothing short of perfect. Whether it is the bride, groom, families, or the guests, everyone has expectations from the event, making them cherish the memories throughout their lives. When the expectations are soaring high, the event must take place without any glitch. This, in a nutshell, is the job profile of a wedding planner.
A wedding planner is a critical anchor for all the frenzied activity going on about them during a wedding. They are the ones who help the bride and groom transform their dream wedding into reality. A wedding planner must be involved in every aspect of the wedding starting from understanding the expectations, rationalizing it to the budget, sourcing vendors and drawing up contracts, ensuring that every event proceeds like clockwork with all the logistics in place and also taking care that a professional photographer captures the wedding. And if that is not all; the wedding planner may be involved in every aspect of the wedding, including making crucial decisions for the couple and their guests. Under extreme conditions, they may even be expected to play agony aunt to the anxious couple.
Wedding planning or any event management business totally relies upon your clients, experience, and how well you can serve your clients. A full-stack wedding organizer needs to sort out everything from the first ceremony till the bride and the groom leave for their honeymoon. Sometimes, past that too. As a wedding organizer, in the event that you are sorting out a full-stack wedding, then you are answerable for nearly everything from start until the absolute last function. Decoration, catering, clothes, travel appointments, pickups and drops, venue choice, dance choreographer, music, and makeup artists are a couple of significant things on the list of things a wedding organizer needs to plan and arrange for.
If organizing, time management, people management, and creativity are close to your heart, this can be a great field of work for you. With the trends of weddings getting modernized by the day, this presents an excellent opportunity for people to look for an excellent alternate career. The work of a wedding planner can be extremely exhausting both physically and emotionally, but the joy of a well-done wedding will give you immense satisfaction.
Once you wish to start up as an entrepreneur, the following are a few important strategies that will help you with your business:
1. Experience the work first hand
Giving the best services to your clients and networking are significant. Prior to beginning your business, it is exceptionally advisable to work with an organization and be a part of the entire process. Some experience is important to get into this business. No two weddings are the same, and so the challenges also cannot be identical. Before getting into the business head-on, it is always better to get some hands-on experience, do an internship, and get a formal certification. This is beneficial in two ways:
- You get to face the situations first hand
- You get to network and make new connections
2. Plan your moves
When starting a new business, planning plays a key role. Figure out the target audience, the financial aspects, and the challenges you can foresee. What will be your next action points for each of these, work that out? You should put resources into a decent laptop with high storage. This should cost you INR 20,000 or above. First of all, you can either decide to work out of your home or move into a little office or a co-working space. Leasing a work area in a co-working space should cost INR 7,000 or more. Everything else is ordered from vendors dependent on your necessity. Nonetheless, having an initial capital of anything around INR 5-10 lakh might be required to put in initial orders with vendors. You should make a dependable system of vendors for supply, as they will come handy in a crisis. Preparing ahead can help you get a foothold for taking your business to newer heights
3. Make it legal:
Hire the services of a lawyer, who can get the legal work done on your behalf. From registering your company, drawing up contracts for your clients and vendors to any liability that you may have to guard yourself against, this is a critical step.
4. Make a marketing strategy:
The wedding planning business is all about style and sophistication and your brand must reflect that. Invest in marketing in such a manner that minimizes costs and can get you the maximum benefits. An identity for your brand, a logo, and letterheads go a long way in creating an impression. Putting resources into marketing would be fitting once you have organized a couple of functions and have something to feature. Word-of-mouth recommendations are the best marketing techniques in this case. Instagram accounts and Facebook pages are your closest companions. Setting up a website would likewise be useful.
5. Invest in formal training:
When starting with your own business in a super-competitive industry like wedding planning, it is imperative that you build your foundation with some experience and formal training to boot with. At wedding planning institutes like The Wedding School, students are trained and groomed to be professional wedding planners. Right from the ideation to the execution of a wedding, students are given ample training of the complete cycle of wedding planning. With a focus on learning from industry experts, such personalized professional training can do wonders for someone who is planning to start their own business in wedding planning.
How Much Can A Wedding Planner Earn?
In the wedding planning business, income is additionally totally dependent on your customer base and the functions you organize. A full-stack wedding planner can acquire between 10-15 percent commission of the total wedding budget. Thus, for a wedding budget of INR 10 lakh, one can without much of a stretch procure at any rate at least INR 1 lakh.
Wedding planning requires creativity, people skills, good time management skills, and working at absurdly early times. As an entrepreneur, you’ll have to wear numerous hats and take on many roles. You’ll be a wedding organizer as well as an accountant, a marketing executive, and a customer service expert. At the point when you pull off a fruitful ceremony, you’ll see the difficult work will be well worth the challenge. On the off chance that your caterer cancels a day before the D-day, you have to step up and fix it. On the off chance that there is a power failure or the sound system is defective, at that point you need to deal with the circumstance. You will struggle to build your reputation when you start out. Be that as it may, when you have exhibited your ability and organized fun functions, your praises will spread, and profits will just stream in.