Newbie "Wedding Planners"

I recently read an article in Special Events Magazine and felt it was worthy to share on our blog. Our consultants are constantly learning of the "newbies" in our market. Any one with the finances to participate in a wedding show, purchase advertising or build a website are calling themselves a "professional planner." Many boast of years of experience, yet the seasoned professionals have never heard of them.

We encourage our clients to check vendor and client references on the wedding vendors you are considering hiring, search the Internet but dig for the true facts. Find out if the planner you are considering hiring is in fact a professional or assisted one of her sorority sisters with their wedding or just planned their own wedding, enjoyed it then decide to become a "wedding planner".  Both of these things are honorable, but do not make for a professional planner.

Interview your planner.  Some questions to ask:

How many weddings have you done?
How extensive is your vendor base?  How do you develop your vendor base?
Is this a full-time career or something you do on the side?
Tell me about your first wedding?
Tell me about your most challenging wedding?
Tell me about the weddings represented on your website/Facebook/ blog?

Additionally, if you are comparing several planners and one is providing you with a proposal that is much lower than the others, this is a red flag. Not only do you want a qualified professional to execute your plans, but you want some one that demonstrates knowledge of his or her industry.

Enjoy the insert from the article...let us know what you think!!

Newbie "Wedding Planners" Plague the Professionals
by Lisa Hurley

Along with price-shopping brides who haggle over every penny in the wedding budget, veteran wedding professionals face another headache these days: the newbie wedding planner. Often armed with little experience—other than their own wedding—the newbies drive down fees and taint the value of experienced wedding pros, many in the business say.

Newbies are not a recent phenomenon, explains Joyce Scardina Becker, president of San Francisco-based Events of Distinction and founding president of the Wedding Industry Professionals Association. "However, they do come in waves," she says, "and right now it feels like a tidal wave!"

The San Francisco Bay area sees "at least one newbie a week," says Jenne Hohn, founder of Napa, Calif.-based Jenne Hohn Events. Although the recession has pushed the newly jobless to try to break into weddings ("I've heard of corporate planners who said they would never touch weddings now seeking advice on how to plan them," Hohn says), she thinks the problem started while the economy was still healthy. Many planners and vendors "saw that the wedding planners were doing well and decided to add planning to their repertoire a way to get a piece of the pie."

DAY-OF DILEMMA
One of the most galling trends, Scardina Becker says, is the low-cost, "day of" wedding coordination service many newbies offer.

"I'm not sure how the term 'day of' coordination originated, but it is a term that needs to be eradicated from the vocabulary of the wedding industry," she says. "No wedding planner of sound mind, experience and education would simply show up on the day of a wedding, wave their arms in the air like a symphony conductor and expect everything to flow flawlessly." Instead, she says, a professional wedding planner would spend from 30 to 45 hours a month out from the wedding date, making sure all plans are in place.

To read more please visit this link:  http://specialevents.com/weddings/newbie-wedding-planners-plague-the-professionals/index.html