Becoming a wedding planner can be a fun and exciting job, but also a high-stress one as brides of every type come to you for help in planning what should be the most special day of their lives.
Every bride wants her day to be perfect. The trouble is that perfect means different things to different people. Some brides will want the best of everything, while others will want a more simple wedding, and one that reflects their own style and personality, or of both she and her spouse.
If you have a romantic side and enjoy planning and organizing, and in particular planning live events, becoming a wedding planner may be an ideal career to consider.
The first step will be to become as familiar as possible with the wedding industry. And yes, it IS an industry. There is big money to be made in weddings, even in a bad economy. People may scrimp and save in some areas of their lives, but a wedding will usually rate splurging even if they have to max out the credit cards to get what they want.
You can find a variety of top wedding planning guides online that will give you many ideas about the kinds of things that are considered essential, and which are only optional, when it comes to planning a wedding. Creating a checklist so you can run through all the essentials first, with gold, platinum and diamond level options, as it were, for each essential, can help the bride and anyone else involved in planning for and paying for the wedding all get on the same page.
Traditionally, the bride’s family would pay for the wedding, and in some cases this might still be an expectation on the part of the bride’s family, in which case you might also have to deal with parents as well as the bride in reference to cost and final decisions.
Modern couples, especially those who have already established a household together and might even have children with each other already, will usually pay for the wedding themselves, but might have a range of particular needs because of this, such as being more frugal, or wishing to incorporate their children into the ceremony as much as possible. So if you are great with people, and detail oriented becoming a wedding planner might be ideal as part time or full time consulting work.
In the second part of this series, we will look at other aspects of becoming a wedding planner to see if it is right for you.
