Did you know wedding planning is largely a female-dominated career filled with women who fell in love with planning their own wedding and then decided to take on wedding planning as a full-time job themselves? 💍

Not saying any of you male planners can’t totally make it in this realm because hats off to you – I’m totally into the idea of more male planners! 😉

Whether you are a bride who rocked her wedding and now you want to start your own wedding planning business, or you’re just an amazing planner and organizer and love weddings (I mean who doesn’t?!), getting started as a wedding planner can be tough.  I know when I first got started in wedding planning I went in circles with all the things I was “supposed” to be doing.  There were no guides or steps on what to do first or on what needed to be done in what order. 

Personally, I love step-by-step guides.  Especially the kind that give a quick overview and then are super detailed inside each step.  

I do all of this in my wedding planner course but I know that some of you are eager to get started now, so here are a few quick simple steps to get started building your wedding business.  In order of course 😊

7 Steps to Start a Wedding Planning Business

• ⑴ Take care of the Business Basics – Decide on a name, get legal – LLC vs sole prop., register your business in your state. You’ll want to do all these things FIRST, get the basic business structure set so that when you do start booking weddings you can do so legally.
  
• ⑵ Set up your Finances – Get a SEPARATE business bank acct, a business credit card, set up PayPal, and QuickBooks. I made that sound easy, but it will take some time. This was something I did not do right at the start and willy nilly’d it over the first two years, making it very difficult at tax season to separate out my business expenses. It’s kind of the annoying thing you don’t want to spend time on, but if I could start over I would definitely do all of this right at the start.
  
• ⑶ Website + Branding – Build a website, get a logo, create a look/feel for your brand, work on SEO, start social media accounts. Another thing that will take a lot of time and effort and it will be an ongoing work in progress, so get started on it early and do a little every day.
  
• ⑷ Marketing – Advertise in all the free places first (yelp, google directory, WeddingWire), then look into paid (Facebook and Google ads), meet other vendors, get on wedding directories, connect through social media. This is another thing you will be working on every day, slow progress = big results!
  
• ⑸ Experience – Ok, now that you have a serious wedding business set up, you need some experience. When you’re just getting started you need to put it out there that you have a wedding business and take whatever work you can get … offer to help friends and family plan their events, be an intern for another planner, caterer, or photographer anyone who can get you behind the scenes of an actual wedding, build experience one event at a time.
  
• ⑹ Learn – Research and learn what wedding planners do, understand their duties, how to plan a wedding, how to connect with vendors, how to design different types of timelines, how to work with budgets, etc.
  
• ⑺ Offboarding – Once you’ve completed an event (even if it’s not a wedding and it’s just a family reunion) get a review! Make sure to ask for reviews after every event – reviews from vendors, brides, venues, anyone who you worked with. Reviews are like gold and will bring you in more business than you know

Create a plan and stick to it. Having a clear path and direction not only helps you from wasting time it also helps you to get there more quickly. If you’re anything like me, you probably hate wasting time, so I hope you found this list of steps helpful. 🙌🏽

For more tips on getting started as a planner, definitely grab my FREE report “How to avoid the mistakes I made even getting started in wedding planning”.

If your considering wedding planning and have any questions do drop a comment

~ Nicole 🤗

Photos: Jenna Lee Pictures
Coordination: Best Day Ever Hawaii