Small Business Special: Hospitality - A wedding planner can make all the difference to you
IN these austere belt-tightening times the days of the extravagantly expensive wedding planner are over. In fact before 1999 a wedding planner was a concept that hardly existed in the UK, although our American cousins had been using them for years.
Our British equivalents are well and truly available now to make sure everything about the best day of your life goes just how you envisaged, whether you have hired them for full planning from the beginning or merely want a helping, authoritative, calm presence on the day.
They work as a go-between with suppliers, they source the perfect venue, flowers, catering, cake and dress, co-ordinate timings and if something goes wrong they are there to deal with it. In short, for up to 18 months they become your family and your best friend rolled into one.
Julie Tooby runs the Berkshire-based company Essentially You, winner of the 2009 Wedding Ideas Wedding Planner of the Year award. She says: “Wedding planning is not a career – it’s a lifestyle. It’s a 24-hour-a-day job. For instance, if a bride phones me in a panic at 2am she doesn’t want to wait until the next evening. I am there to help relieve the stress for her.”
We don’t charge a percentage of the budget, we charge according to how much or how little the couple want us to do
Tooby acknowledges that a lot of wedding planning stress is self-inflicted but family and society often have a part to play as well. As a self-professed lover of stress she soaks it up so the bride and groom do not have to.
“If someone is being sick in a corner of the marquee (and it does happen) then I am there so that the bride and groom are blissfully unaware of it. That’s my job.”
Essentially You turned over £1.25 million in 2009, not bad going for a small enterprise, and Tooby says that the business is holding firm through the recession.
“We keep it affordable,” she says. “We don’t charge a percentage of the budget, we charge according to how
much or how little the couple want us to do.”
The cost of a wedding often tops the £20,000 mark. Tooby says the amount of brides asking for her services decreased slightly after peaking at more than 100 in 2008 but business is increasing again. She says brides are now going more for the “help on the day” option. She adds: “After all, most of the time the couple know where they
want to get married and what caterer they want to use. As well as my presence on the day they both get unlimited
e-mails and phone calls prior to the wedding.”
Tooby has personally trained consultants around the UK so travel never gets too expensive for the couple.
“If they seem too far away I ask them if they would prefer to have a consultant nearer them and this works really well. It is important that they have the same planner from start to finish. Plans are afoot to take the business into Scotland this year.”
Yorkshire-based Beau Belles’ owner Carol Dennis takes on no more than 12 couples a year on a full planning basis. Dennis started her company in 1999 and was among the first in the UK. Her background of cake decorator, photographer and flower arranger brought her to the wedding planning business.
She says: “I was constantly doing favours for friends’ weddings for free until my husband noticed that I was working 80 hours a week for nothing. I mentioned it to a friend and she said she would have paid me anything to organise her daughter’s wedding the year before, so my business began.”
Dennis says she prefers having full planning control with her couples and she takes on no more than 12 brides every year so she can offer them the personal attention they deserve. She mentions lack of control when doing “on the day” weddings can be problematic. She laughs: “I turned up at one event and the couple had ordered the worst-quality chair covers I had ever seen. They were awful. Yet of course everyone would have thought that I had chosen them. I prefer to have a bit more input – it prevents them making mistakes.”
According to Dennis, the trend for hiring an “on the day” planner has increased largely as a result of customers’ fi nancial constraints.
She is still more than happy to give thisservice despite its drawbacks. For Dennis the business is not, in her own words, that lucrative. “But that could be because I don’t charge enough!” she laughs.
Beau Belles charge from £275 for this service and Essentially You charges from £350. Both women describe this as the price of peace of mind. As Tooby says: “We’re there for everything from telling the mother of the bride at a very expensive wedding that maybe she shouldn’t be carrying a carrier bag for the photos to hiding amorous couples who get caught in the act on a floodlit lawn. Everything happens at weddings.”
WEBSITES:
● www.essentially-you.net
● www.beau-belles.co.uk
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