January, February and March have been a blur. I have actually lost count of the number of brides I have met with. For those of you new to weddings, either as a bride or a wedding professional, there are a huge number of brides who get engaged between Christmas and New Years. The next big push is after Valentine's Day. I always appreciate brides who do their homework. These are the brides who read the whole ad or the whole website before they call or come in for a visit. There are other brides who see an ad or stumble onto a website and pick up the phone, send an email or drop by without doing ANY homework at all. I can't tell you how many times I find myself giving out information that was right on the screen in front of them. For the brides who are reading this entry, please make sure to take the extra 1 or 2 minutes to read the information available before you call, email or go to see a wedding professional. If you are looking at any of my three websites, you will get the answers to most key questions before you talk to me.
Doing your homework involes a lot of important things when planning your wedding. How many guests do you want to attend your wedding? What will it cost to host a wedding as large as you want? Who is paying for what parts of the wedding? What time of year do you want for your wedding? Have you allowed enough time to plan your wedding? Are you planning a wedding too far in advance? (Chances are that if your boyfriend has not proposed, it's too soon.) I shouldn't know about your wedding before he does!
Wedding professionals tend to be very busy people. We work odd hours. We work long hours. We work during the day and during the evening. We dork during the week and during the weekend. Some of us even work when we're on vacation--BlackBerrys and iPhones let us/make us take our weddings with us everywhere we go. A dedicated wedding and event professional will welcome your calls and emails--that is if he or she wants to be sucessful. What we need from our clients is consistency. We need you to get a handle on what you want, when you want it and how you plan to pay for it. We can guide you, we can counsel you, we can help you...but in the end you still are the ultimate wedding planner. We cannot and should not plan your wedding. We should help you to plan your wedding.
So, if you want your wedding planner, officiant, photographer, caterer, cake designer, florist, musician, DJ, limo company, rental company, venue coordinator and all the others to help you have a great wedding...then help them do their jobs by being a good client. Be organized. Be focused. Be realistic. Be willing to work work with them when things don't go as planned. Realize that your wedding will not take place in a vacuum. Bad things happen to good people, and to good weddings. One of my cardinal rules of wedding managment is that something always goes wrong in every wedding. NO wedding escapes this rule. Sometimes the one thing, or the two things that go awry are so small and so insignificant that nobody even notices, sometimes not even the bride. Sometimes big things, obvious things go wrong. Good wedding professionals and good brides will do everything possible to avoid this in advance with good, detailed planning, but sometimes life gets in the way of our best laid plans. As brides and wedding professionals our goal should be excellence, not perfection.
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