All tagged teamwork
Happy Friday, everyone! For most of you, the weekend has plenty of work in store - and plenty of opportunities to interact, positively or negatively, with other wedding professionals on the vendor team. In that spirit, today we're revisiting some of our past posts on the topic of building great relationships with other wedding vendors:
(Editor's Note: Today's post concludes our three-part training series on event day management!)
Earlier this month, I wrote about how to train your team to avoid event-day emergencies, simply by creating systems to prepare for events and cultivating a mindset that makes such preparation a priority. Unfortunately, the fact remains that emergencies do happen at events. They happen all the time, sometimes even in spite of our best efforts to avoid them. In my own company, we've dealt with major weather catastrophes, power failures, vendor no-shows, and (worst of all) sudden medical crises involving guests.
(Editor's Note: Here's part two of our three-part training series on event day management topics! Check back next Monday for the final installment!)
As I'm working with my business coaching clients on strategically growing their teams, one of the most common concerns I hear is that business owners are afraid of sacrificing their professional reputation - specifically, that the larger their team grows, the weaker their relationships with other vendors will become.
It's not an unfounded fear. After all, plenty of bridges have been burned by a boneheaded contractor flagrantly violating a venue's regulations or acting like a jerk to the rest of the vendor team. Fortunately, though, this kind of issue is entirely avoidable through good training. With a little effort and communication, you can grow your team as large as you want it, without giving up that solid "friendor" foundation you worked so hard to build.
As our loyal WeddingIQ readers know, we eagerly solicit anonymous rants from our colleagues in the wedding industry, with the purpose of bringing other professionals' real feelings into the spotlight. Let's face it: sharing our real thoughts can be hard, especially when we don't want to jeopardize our referral relationships or make our next networking event even more awkward.
Collecting anonymous submissions from our readers enables us to bring up problematic issues and actions for discussion here on the site, and to determine what's important to the people who follow our blog. (With that in mind, we invite you to submit your own anonymous rant, or, if anonymity isn't your thing, email us directly with what matters most to you!)
Earlier this week, we outlined how to create systems and workflows for your wedding business, and how to write job descriptions for yourself and everyone else on your team (including people you'll hire in the future). In today's post, we'll put together those things with some other important information to create your own company manual.
I know: "company manual" sounds pretty impersonal, doesn't it? Whether you call it that, or a handbook, or a field guide, or a bible, it's an important part of running a successful business of any kind. You probably received one in many of the 9-5 jobs you had before diving into the wedding industry, and it can benefit your business in many of the same ways it benefits the corporate giants.
