Start Your Own Wedding Consultant Business

Your Step-By-Step Guide to Success

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• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781613081679
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Say "I Do” to Success From wedding bells to wedding bills, gain an inside look at the billion dollar wedding industry and learn how to earn your next pay check coordinating the "big” day of today’s brides and grooms.Discover the newest wedding trends, such as destination weddings, tapas-style catering, disposable video cameras, wedding logos and more. Plus, learn everything else you need to know to start and run a successful wedding consultant business, including:How to market your services and find customers
Using social media to attract and communicate with clients
Tips from the pros for handling the unexpected
What licenses and permits you need
How to avoid common mistakes
How to negotiate with vendors and suppliers to get the best prices
The most important contacts to make
And more!You don’t need an office or a lot of startup money. With your creativity and help from our experts, you’ll be well on your way to success!

1

Here Comes the Bride . . .

and the Wedding Consultant

Once upon a time on a perfect summer day, guests in colorful wedding finery filled an old cathedral. The fragrance of dew-kissed blossoms wafted through the air as melodious organ music played. A radiant bride walked up the aisle on the arm of her father to meet the handsome groom waiting at the altar. . .

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Royal wedding or fairy tale? Neither. It’s the perfect day every bride dreams of—and wedding consultants help to make those dreams come true.

The wedding industry is a $72 billion business, with nearly 542,000 businesses serving it, according to The Wedding Report, a provider of wedding statistics and market research for the industry. Those businesses run the gamut from bridal salons and tuxedo rental stores to florists, photographers, reception facilities, and, of course, wedding consultants.

Yet the wedding industry is not without its challenges. The first decade of the new millennium saw a decline in wedding spending during the darkest days of the recession. According to surveys by The Wedding Report, the average wedding cost $28,730 in 2007. By 2009, that figure had dipped to $19,580. But in 2010, wedding spending had risen nearly 19 percent to $24,070, and the outlook is bright again for the future.

Wedding consultants have had their own challenges as well, from the slow economy and a plethora of information available on the internet for determined DIYers to competition from wedding venues that offer complete bridal packages. But people will always get married—in fact, there were nearly 2.2 million marriages in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s “2011 Statistical Abstract of the United States.” So even if the economy goes south again, many women, who are simply too busy juggling the demands of their professional and personal lives to oversee the multitude of details inherent in wedding planning, are still likely to have a wedding consultant on their wedding services shopping list.

The “2010 Real Weddings Survey,” published by The Knot Inc., a lifestyle media company, bears this out. Results showed that nearly one-third used a wedding planner, and more than half those brides (52 percent) engaged a planner for wedding day coordination. Even the economic news wasn’t quite as dire as you might think when it came to matters matrimonial. Fewer than one-third (31 percent) of the surveyed brides said that the economy impacted their wedding budget. Those who did feel the pinch compensated by reducing their guest list from an average of 149 guests in 2009 to 141 in 2010.

And there’s even more potential good news, thanks to the echo boomers, the largest generation of young people since the 1960s. While it’s true they’re waiting longer to get married—the average marriage age is now 26.1 for women and 28.2 for men, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—experts are predicting that the wedding industry is on the brink of a new marriage boom that will bring many new opportunities for industry professionals like wedding consultants.

Since no one formally tracks the figures, it’s difficult to pinpoint an exact figure for how many wedding consultant businesses there are nationwide. The best guess is approximately 10,000, a figure based on the number of people who pay for memberships to the various professional wedding associations, as well as the number of people on mailing lists available from list brokers. If you do the math—2.2 million possible opportunities annually for 100,000 wedding planners—you can see there’s exciting potential for an aspiring wedding business owner like you.

Earnings Potential

Because wedding consultants are, in essence, independent contractors, it’s hard to gauge how much a novice in the field can expect to earn, and what published information that does exist varies widely. What is known, however, is that the industry’s standard fee is 15 percent of the wedding budget, although some consultants prefer instead to charge a flat fee for custom wedding packages they create. You’ll find information about wedding packages in Chapter 2, “Here Comes the Wedding Consultant.”

But some assumptions can be made about earnings potential. Robbi Ernst III, founder and president of June Wedding Inc., in Guerneville, Californina, says a novice consultant can usually coordinate 10 weddings a year. So if the average wedding budget is $24,000, as discussed earlier, that would yield a gross income of $36,000. Here’s the math:

$24,000 x .15 = $3,600 x 10 weddings = $36,000

But, of course, not every bride will have that much to spend—and happily, some will have more. “The earnings potential for wedding consultants is awesome,” says Richard Markel of the Association for Wedding Professionals International. “Those who are better connected and better educated will do the best in this business, as will those who network as a way to build their reputations.”

Stat Fact

Research gathered by the Association of Bridal Consultants indicates that around 270,000 couples hire wedding planners each year. That equates to roughly 20 to 30 percent of all weddings that are coordinated by a wedding planning professional.

Profile of a Wedding C...

Table of contents

• Additional titles in Entrepreneur’s Startup Series
• Title Page
• 1 - Here Comes the Bride . . .
• 2 - Here Comes the Wedding Consultant
• 3 - Strategic Market Research
• 4 - Business Basics
• 5 - Getting Professional Help
• 6 - Tools and Equipment that Make Dreams Come True
• 7 - Establishing a Vendor Network
• 8 - Certification and Professional Development
• 9 - The Advertising Rules of Engagement
• 10 - Cyber Resources
• 11 - Generating Positive Press
• 12 - Matrimonial Money Matters
• 13 - Living Happily Ever After
• Appendix - Wedding Consultant Resources
• Glossary
• Index
• Subscribe to Entrepreneur Magazine
• Copyright Page