All in Wedding Industry

Getting in the Zone: Making the Most of Your Event-Day Mindset for Maximum Success

Perhaps you’ve gone to school, taken classes or gotten a certification.  You may have worked as an assistant, apprenticed with someone or worked your way up through a company.  If you learned the hard way, you just launched a website, purchased the necessary tools and figured it out along the way.  Whatever method brought you to the place you are now, you gained useful knowledge regarding your particular service or product and consider yourself skilled enough to offer it to clients…for money.

There are so many schools, conferences, retreats and online courses that will teach you the specific techniques of your trade.  But what about the mental acuity that goes into running your business and preparing for those intense wedding and event days.  Let’s face it being a great chef, videographer or limo driver isn’t enough. You need to prepare hundreds of gourmet meals in record time, create stunning imagery among dozens of guests with cameras and transport loud, excited wedding parties to multiple destinations. Not to mention possessing a congenial and even pleasant attitude while performing these tasks. This is the aspect of our career that is the most taxing.  So how do you prepare for the intensity of the weekend? Here are my suggestions for getting in the zone mentally so you can handle whatever comes your way.   

Event Day Management: Destination Wedding Style

(Editor's Note: Today, we welcome a fantastic guest post from a faraway contributor - Fabrice Orlando of Cocoon Events Group, based in Morocco! Read more about Fabrice at the end of the post)!

No matter where a wedding is, there are a number of things that are the same when it comes to the planning process – whether it’s a few miles from your house or halfway around the world. That being said, destination weddings also come with its own set of specific considerations to keep in mind.

Flashback Friday: Wedding Pros' Event Day Irritants & Vendor Pet Peeves, Revealed

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!)

WeddingIQ Retrospective: Why "Wedding Confidential" Should Make You Proud, Not Mad, Revisited

(Editor's Note: Our monthlong look back at WeddingIQ's most influential posts continues today, as Jennifer revisits her January 2013 article, "Why Wedding Confidential Should Make You Proud, Not Mad.")

If there's one thing I've learned in almost 20 years in the wedding industry, it's that the media will apparently never tire of not only vilifying wedding businesses, but also thinking it's original to do so. The January 2013 episode of the ABC News program 20/20, titled "Wedding Confidential," was no exception.

While the program link in my original article no longer works (evidently, ABC didn't feel the show was worth archiving anywhere - which is no big loss, trust me), my feelings on the program itself remain the same.

WeddingIQ Retrospective: Why We've Said "No" to Wedding Venues' Marketing Brochures, Revisited

(Editor's Note: We're just two weeks away from a BIG announcement for WeddingIQ! In the meantime, we continue our look back at game-changing posts from our past. On the docket today, Jen's May 2012 post, "Why We've Said "No" to Wedding Venues' Marketing Brochures.)

Boy, was I hot under the collar when I wrote this one. I remember so clearly how excited my former business partner and I were when our DJ company started seeing referrals roll in from our favorite venues. It was so validating, like all our hard work was truly paying off, and paying off in spades.

And then, the calls started rolling in. We went from receiving a few requests to advertise in our favorite venues' new marketing books - beautiful, photo-rich books, to be truthful - to receiving dozens. The quality of our referrals dipped. And after a couple of years of this, we said "enough."