A Type A Bride Might Very Well Need A Planner
BEING CAPABLE OF PLANNING YOUR WEDDING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD HAVE TO.
I saw this advice given to brides today:
"If you're Type A, organized and accustomed to a high-intensity career, skip the full-service wedding planner. You can handle it yourself." Of course you can. That's not the point. Some of the most capable people I've worked with over the past 23 years have also benefited the most from excellent full-service planning. Not because they couldn't find a photographer. Not because they couldn't read a contract. Not because they couldn't create a spreadsheet, negotiate a price or manage a timeline. They hired someone because they didn't want wedding planning to become another job. And that's where I think our industry needs to be very clear about what “full service” is supposed to mean. It shouldn't mean forwarding a contract and asking the client what she thinks. It should mean reading it first. It should not mean automatically accepting every proposal a vendor presents. It should mean understanding what matters to your client, knowing where there may be room for discussion, and advocating appropriately. It shouldn't mean protecting industry relationships at the expense of the person who hired you. This is the post in it's entitity, just for clarity--
Do not get a wedding planner
If you are a Type A person who is used to organizing things or has a high-intensity job, I would say do not get a wedding planner. Definitely get a day-of coordinator to help execute your plan, but do not get a full-service wedding planner.
In my experience, they do not add much value beyond their contacts. Once you find a vendor you trust, that vendor can usually recommend other contacts from their network, so there is no real need to hire a wedding planner.
A wedding planner’s incentives are not aligned with yours. Their incentive is to maintain good relationships with vendors so that the vendors recommend them in the future. This means they are not incentivized to negotiate on your behalf or push the vendors in any way.
The industry itself is not regulated and there are no standards nor governing body. When I was interviewing wedding planners, one of them told me that a particular venue did not negotiate, while another told me that she had gotten she got $10,000 off the minimum from the same venue for the same dates.
My expectation for a wedding planner is that she would help us negotiate pricing with different vendors, read vendor contracts, keep things organized for me, handle the details so I wouldn’t have to. Instead, she just forwarded contracts to me and told me that luxury weddings do not negotiate prices. To me, that meant she was saying yes to everything and not really thinking about what we wanted. This goes to the point about incentives.
Just my two cents for all the other Type A girlies. Had I known this, I would have saved myself months of frustration.
I would recommend getting a day-of coordinator and have conversations with that person about how the day will go. Anyway, I hope that’s helpful. Thanks!
Hope that helps
The problem here was not "Type A women should not hire a wedding planner, because they have no value." The problem was "My full service planner did not provide the value I expected or paid for." That is the issue here. A competent and engaged planner IS a great value!
Your primary responsibility is to your client. And it certainly shouldn't mean that an exceptionally organized client ends up managing her planner. A good full-service planner doesn't replace a client's intelligence or decision-making. We use our experience so she doesn't have to personally carry every detail required to make those decisions well. There's a distinction there that matters:
Delegation is not inability.
Busy, accomplished people delegate important work every day, not because they can't do it, but because their time, attention and energy have value. Wedding planning should be no different. If a couple pays for full-service planning and comes away thinking, “I should have done this myself,” I don't think the lesson is that capable people don't need planners.
I think our industry needs to ask why the service failed to demonstrate its value.
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