How to Start a Wedding Planning Business

If you love weddings with a passion, go to them every chance you get, pitch in and help out - or practically take over completely - and are great with people, you might have wondered off and on if this is something you could make money from. Maybe others have told you you're great with wedding details, and you should charge money for all that you do. If this sounds like you, or sounds like someone you'd like to be, then you might wonder how to start a wedding planning business.

A wedding planner is also called a consultant or coordinator too, and wedding planners tend to be a full fledged business that many people start right from their very own home. Being a wedding planner can be very stressful and hectic, yet tremendously rewarding and fullfilling too. So let's look at some of the details involved with starting a wedding planning business.

First of all, you need to truthfully evaluate yourself. Professional wedding planners work very closely with a lot of people during stressful times, so if you don't like people much to begin with, it wouldn't be a good idea for you to start a wedding planning business.

Wedding planners also need to be very detail oriented, and able to keep track of everything. They need to be able to provide advice and direction to brides, grooms and parents; balance the wedding budget; make sure all the various traditions are incorporated where desired; arrange for and manage caterers, entertainers, photographers, locations and more; and sometimes they even have to tactfully steer fighting family members away from each other too.

So with all that said, you'd still like to know just how to start a wedding planning business, right? Well there are several ways you can go about it...

1. Get a job. This might sound like just the opposite of what you're looking for, but if you really want to start a wedding planning business, the first thing you have to do is actually learn about that business. It wouldn't be a good idea to sell yourself to someone as a wedding planner, only to botch up the job horribly because you weren't fully prepared for everything involved.

2. Go to School. This is another option that most budding wedding planners don't want to hear, but again: There are many things you'll need to learn about the wedding planning business before jumping in. Now you don't actually have to go to school to become a wedding planner, and there is no degree requirement for starting a wedding planning business. You can however, take clases which teach you everything you need to know about wedding planning, or you can buy books which teach you these things too. The goal is to learn though, regardless of how you go about doing so, be sure you learn all the intricate details of what's involved before trying to actually start your wedding planning business.

3. Volunteer your services. This is a wonderful way to start a wedding planning business, and it will allow you to actually jump in and start doing while you're learning. Offer yourself as a free wedding planner to friends and family at no charge. Let them know you're just starting out and you want to make sure you have everything down perfectly before you start selling your services. By making them aware that you're new at this, they'll also realize you could make mistakes along the way. And they won't mind as much since you told them up front and you're not charging them for your services.

Each time you provide wedding planning services at no charge, be sure to get references. Have the bride and groom - or their parents - write a letter praising what you did for them and put that into your portfolio. If you designed invitations, be sure to add one of those to the portfolio too. If you selected or designed the table arrangements, get pictures of those and put them into your portfolio too. Essentially, you want to create a record of everything you've done at each wedding, and put it into a business portfolio. Then when you start offering your services for a fee, you can show previous work to your new clients, along with praise from previous clients you've worked with.

There is much more involved with starting a wedding planning business of course, but these tips should help get you started and well on your way.