The Most Important Things to Consider When Starting a Wedding Planning Business

For some people, everything about weddings is a joy. It doesn’t matter whether they have any connection to the people getting married; all they care about is the festivity of it all. If you’re the kind of person who never feels more at home than when they’re planning a wedding, there are plenty of people out there in need of your services.

But launching a new business in a field as competitive as wedding planning can be a big risk, especially if you aren’t prepared. Fortunately, as long as you have the following basic elements nailed down beforehand, you stand every chance of succeeding.

Your Startup Costs

Yes, accounting is boring – even accountants think so. However, if you are going to launch and sustain a successful business then you too need to learn to love the necessity of accounting. It doesn’t matter what else happens, you are going to need to be able to keep track of how much money your business is making, how much you have available to you, etc.

When you’re just starting out, you will have a whole bunch of costs that won’t apply later. For example, if you’re planning on getting a new car, perhaps even a company van, you need to factor in the cost of that against your startup capital. Your startup costs will usually mean that your business starts in the red, so you will need to make back these costs before you can be profitable.

Your Goals

The clearer you are about your long-term business goals from the outset, the easier you will find the remainder of the process. Every business should launch with a business plan, a document that details exactly what the business hopes to achieve, how it will achieve it, and over what timescale they expect it to be done.

A common mistake that new entrepreneurs make when writing their business plans is that they create their plan and then never revisit it. Your business plan shouldn’t be a static list of goals that you either succeed or fail at. Instead, it should reflect what you expect to happen in the future based on what has already happened in the past.

If you miss a goal, ask yourself whether it’s because of your own failings or whether it’s because you set yourself an unrealistic goal. Setting yourself overly ambitious goals won’t make you work harder; it will just leave you constantly disappointed and frustrated with yourself.

Your Marketing

If at all possible, you want to hit the ground running with your business marketing. Some people stumble into working as a wedding planner, but in many cases, it is a planned move. However, you come into this line of work, you need to be able to maintain a steady stream of clients if you’re going to stay afloat and pay yourself a wage. That means that, somehow, you need to be able to let other people know that you exist.

This is another opportunity to distinguish your business from the rest of the pack. Sometimes the medium through which you reach out to prospective customers can have a huge bearing on their response. A simple, unique, an effective way of promoting your business would be to include some handmade wedding favours for guests to take home. As long as you brand them tastefully and make them elegant, they can demonstrate so much more about your business than a regular advert ever could. There’s plenty of excellent guides online that tell you how to make your own wedding favours, so look for options that fit well with your branding.

Your Brand

Once you have established what you want to achieve with your business, you then need to decide upon the right vehicle with which to achieve it. The branding that you choose for your business will come to define you. If you hope to turn this into a business that pays you a full-time wage, then you need a strong brand.

Remember, you are going to be competing against a lot of other businesses in this area, many of which will already have a well-established foothold in the markets that you are looking to break into. You need to think about how you can distinguish your business from those that already exist. What’s your unique selling point? And don’t say yourself! That’s what every wedding planner thinks.

If you want to show everyone that you are a unique and distinct enterprise, you need to be able to identify exactly what it is that you and only you are able to offer your clients.

Start your wedding planning business off on the right foot and you will already have won half the battle. The next step is to develop a portfolio and do good work so that your clients will want to recommend to others.