Imagine signing a contract for an event only to find out several weeks later that the venue double-booked your outdoor, cocktail-hour location and then neglected to tell you. And instead of bending over backwards to find an alternative location on the property, the salesperson's reaction to your dismay is, "Maybe our resort is not the right place for your event." Now imagine that the event is your own wedding!
This is what I experienced when planning my nuptials, just one of several obstacles I had to maneuver around. One other worthy of note: having to change the time of the wedding because even the church double-booked my ceremony. Fortunately, that problem was resolved before the stationery was printed. But after all that, my wedding was all that I hoped for, and I would not have changed a thing, except maybe the brief bouts of mental stress.
Perhaps if I were a meeting planner, it would have been easier for me not only with the problems I encountered, but also with negotiating the contracts for guest rooms, flowers, photography, food & beverage, and everything else. Doing all that made me wonder if planners are able to take the stress out of their own weddings because of their expertise. So I made a few calls to get the lowdown from married and engaged planners. Hopefully, their lessons will be useful to others who are soon to walk down the aisle.
Emotional Roller Coaster
Julie McCollum, an independent planner
in Kansas City, MO, says that weddings in particular create heightened emotions where the bride feels she must please everybody. McCollum knows this firsthand: She fought with her parents right until her wedding day, who gave her "no money, no support, no nothing." Says McCollum: "My parents and I stood on opposite sides of the reception room, and I didn't invite them to the official ceremony that took place a couple of months after the reception. It was a really difficult time for me, and after three years, I am still pissed off at them."
"Any planner can attest that planning your own wedding is much harder than planning one of your events," McCollum adds.
Ellen Carr, president of Carr Meeting Consultants in Scottsdale, AZ, recalls how enjoyable it was planning her daughter's January 2005 wedding at the Phoenix Art Museum. But she admits that "wedding planning is a special art, and not something I would want to do full time. Give me a continuing medical education meeting anytime—it's much less stress!"
Mary Ann Linder, meetings manager at APICS in Washington D.C., knows the feeling. "Planning for my wedding was different than planning for one of my professional events because of the emotions involved. Dealing with family is a lot tougher than customers. So when I didn't get the guest list from my in-laws in a reasonable amount of time, I couldn't just say 'Forget it, you missed your chance.' I had to bite my tongue and not complain to my husband."
"When planning a typical meeting, there's almost none of the emotional components that a wedding produces," says Deborah Gaffney, director of conference planning at Tax Executives Institute in Washington D.C. "The skill of being organized and paying attention to detail come with planning any type of event, but with weddings, the emotional investment is almost overwhelming. That's different from being mentally invested in my professional events."
Besides the heightened family drama that surrounds wedding planning, our sources also note how tough it was not to break the bank. The idea of using your own money and not someone else's was difficult to deal with, especially for planners like Gaffney and Andria Younger, who had always imagined having their receptions in a non-hotel setting, such as a museum or historic house. "One of my biggest obstacles, which stems from my being a planner," admits Younger, founder of Concierge Deluxe in Alexandria, VA, "is that I was resistant to the idea of having my wedding in a hotel because I literally work in a hotel. But I when I started looking closely at the cost of using an off-site venue that has no tables, no linens, and no china, it was really expensive. With my wedding, I was definitely working with a much tighter budget than any other type of meeting or event that I had planned. For some clients, money was no object; when I was the client, it was the main object."
Dissenting Voices
On the other side of the aisle is Carol Todd McCloskey, president of Great Spirit Eventures in Kalamazoo, MI, who astonishingly believes weddings are not as cumbersome physically or mentally. "Compared to the pressures of planning an event for a Fortune 100 company or having to deal with the egos at a top corporate law firm, my wedding was a breeze," says McCloskey. "I didn't think it was all that different from planning a corporate meeting or event." Michele Liston, senior meetings manager at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Bethesda, MD, even thinks planning a wedding is less stressful than planning an event because "we've all been through the ups and downs of meetings a thousand times, while our clients haven't. Planners know that things do go wrong, and that it's a matter of being experienced enough to not let it ruin your day, and to just roll with it."
On the purely business side, planners are less prone to breakdowns when planning a wedding because they are privy to the going rates of goods and services, what's negotiable, which vendors are reputable, et cetera. McCollum feels that her professional experience made her more relaxed and confident with her decisions. "I knew exactly the quality that I was getting and I knew that I could totally depend on the caterer and the florist since I had worked with them for years. There were no surprises."
Planning for Linder's wedding last October in Gettysburg, PA, began with the budget. "I did an anticipated, an actual, and a what's-been-paid-out-to-date budget," she says. "I knew that the venue marks up certain areas like food & beverage. And especially in the wedding business, some vendors gouge clients because they know brides are willing to spend huge amounts. So I fought hard to keep down costs. For instance, we ended up doing a small cake for the wedding party and had sheet cake for everyone else, just to fit our budget. And I found that the newer the vendor, the more willing he or she is to negotiate."
Carr's expertise also helped with her daughter's wedding, for which she used a friend who runs a DMC firm as the wedding coordinator. The friend worked on the day of the rehearsal and the event itself. With her binder full of details and vendor contacts always on her hip, "She did an amazing job; I couldn't have done it without her," says Carr. "Having her involved allowed me to enjoy myself as the mother of the bride." Further, her friend used her contacts to donate a limo for Carr's daughter's use as a wedding gift.
Carr's experience as a planner also saved plenty of money because of some well-crafted contingency clauses. "We had to reschedule the wedding for a couple of months later, but I was able to get good cancellation and penalty clauses into the contract. That helped make sure that I was able to reschedule and not pay half as much as I would have if I hadn't prepared for it."
Nice and Easy
Planners boast that they are not like a typical bride who makes unreasonable requests without really knowing what to ask for, and who are completely uninformed with the whole business of putting on a detailed event.
Tracey Ford, meeting planner for Strategic Analysis Inc. in Arlington, VA, is planning her wedding for July 2006 and notes that she is far from acting like a "bridezilla." "I was told that vendors enjoy working with planners more than regular brides because we understand their business and won't be asking for some ridiculous thing that they could not possibly get."
Also, the ability to fix a minor glitch without freaking out separates the pros from the schmoes. In the case of Donna Tschiffely, president of Conference Incorporated in Reston, VA, she noticed that the florist forgot to decorate her wedding cake with fresh flowers. Instead of having a meltdown, she acted fast. She found an extra flower arrangement, quickly tore it apart, and redecorated her own cake.
But even with their expertise, some planners simply don't know how to let go and enjoy the day; after all the events they've planned, it's just not in their nature. Some feel the need to watch over everything at their own weddings—like Gaffney. She felt compelled to double-check if the liquor was correct and if the table cards were put out. "I couldn't let it go," she says. "I had to be in control. I kept thinking to myself, 'This is the most important event that I am ever going to do, and I need to survey the bar and the decor.' "