Reduce Stress on Your Day
I know planning an event as important and life-changing as your wedding day can be very stressful. There are a few things you can do to reduce stress the day of and increase your enjoyment on your day. I am sure other people have a lot more tips and suggestions; so please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
- Time - There really is no substitute. This is the key to almost everything else to follow. Don't rush. Give yourself plenty of time to plan so you can have what you want. You may have been planning your wedding and reception for years; but now you have to move from planning to implementing. Time to visit the perspective venue. Time to research, interview, and select your vendors (more on this to follow). Time to pick your dress, work on invitations, wedding party, family, etc... Time is key. The less time you have to plan; all the more critical the following suggestions become.
- Trust Your Vendors - Hopefully you had Time to research potential vendors and interview them and ask key questions. (A Skill Set Q & A Guide To Obtaining Your Ideal Event Entertainment) This does not apply just your entertainment, but all your vendors. Do not hire a vendor you are uncertain about. Once you select your vendors and review your expectations you should feel confident they will meet or exceed your expectations. If you do not have this confidence in them... reconsider and find ones you trust. When you find the ones you trust... let them do what you hired them for and rest assured they will do what they do best.
- Day of Coordinator - Whether you hire a professional coordinator (recommended, even if just for day of) or have that appointed trusted friend, give them your expectations and let them live up to them. Your coordinator should not be a member of the wedding party (mother of bride or groom included, let them enjoy the day as well). A member of the wedding party is already busy just being a member of the wedding party and cannot effectively coordinate or help resolve last minute potential issues while having their picture taken. Make sure you provide the coordinator all the contact information for your vendors. Ask your vendors to reach out to the coordinator. A good coordinator is like a orchestra conductor making sure all the individual components work together as a whole to produce a great concert. This leads us to the next key suggestion... Communication
- Communication - Like Time there is no substitute. Most of this can be handled in advance of the event and make sure everyone has a copy of their schedule. Give all your vendors your entire schedule for the day. If they want to reduce it to just their tasks, let them do that. But; this way you know you (or your coordinator) gave them all the details. This also helps reduce your work of creating a separate schedule for each vendor. This is an example of trusting your vendors to do what they do best. Events generally shift to some degree at receptions and should be expected, keeping all the vendors informed so they can adjust as needed is very important.
Let me give some examples based on experience why I chose to focus on the on some of the above above:
The first one, Time is self-explanatory and can vary from person to person based on their schedules I would suggest a 6 month minimum though for planning an event as important as a wedding and reception. Trusting your vendors is also kind of self-explanatory why risk such an important day to a person or persons you do not trust?
At a destination wedding I was hired for; the coordinator was a member of the wedding party and was fantastic at setting everything up, prior to the reception. Through no fault of their own, they were unable to effectively communicate with the other vendors when the time came. The photographer took significantly longer than expected with photos after the ceremony; what was scheduled to take 45 minutes to an hour turned into 1 hour 45 minutes. The coordinator who was in the pictures was unable to communicate to the venue, caterer, and myself what was happening. The caterer was concerned about the food since they can only leave food out for so much time before they have to take it up and cook again from scratch. While a delay of 1, 20 or even 30 minutes can be handled an entire hour delay is very concerning. This delay also pushed back the dancing portion of the evening, so some events were pushed together sooner than scheduled and made this part of the reception seem shorter and crowded by so many room focus events stacked back to back to back. While everything was pulled off in the end it was obvious the couple was more stressed than they needed to be that day.
Please feel free to comment and offer your suggestions. I look forward to hearing from you. Best Wishes.
At Your Service,
Ron Swain
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