Playing Well With Others: Your Growing Team's Guide to Cultivating Great Vendor Relationships

Playing Well With Others: Your Growing Team's Guide to Cultivating Great Vendor Relationships

Guest Contributor
Relationships

(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.

Event Day Management: Destination Wedding Style

Event Day Management: Destination Wedding Style

Guest Contributor
Guest Posts, Wedding Industry

(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.

How to Sell Weddings on the Weekend (When You Happen to Work Weddings All Weekend)

How to Sell Weddings on the Weekend (When You Happen to Work Weddings All Weekend)

Guest Contributor
Clients, Sales

Couples: "We’d love to meet with you on the weekend to plan our weekend wedding that only happens on one weekend of our entire lives."

You: "I’d love to meet with you sometime during the week because I work almost every weekend on weddings that occur only on the weekend."  

I kid, but the struggle is real, for you and for your potential clients. You may not work every weekend or every day of the weekend, but let’s face it, you might want a weekend off every once in awhile or to recover from a long day by relaxing. It’s difficult to schedule meetings in this 9-to-5 (and exceedingly 9-to-9) culture when your business hours are slightly more ambiguous or the opposite of most of society's schedule. You also don’t want to fall in the trap of working seven days a week just to appease your clients, or neglect to schedule time off so you can recharge and get back to the grind the following week.  

Event Prep 101: Training Your Team to Avoid Event-Day Emergencies by Thinking Ahead

Event Prep 101: Training Your Team to Avoid Event-Day Emergencies by Thinking Ahead

Guest Contributor
Planning

As business owners, we tend to be full of passion and dedication to our work, and it's easy to assume that everyone we hire will feel exactly the same way. Unfortunately, this is a common mistake that often leads to under-training our team, a shortcoming we don't even realize until something terrible happens at a wedding and we're left to answer for it.

Sure, most of us with employees or contractors are fortunate enough to have fantastic, loyal, talented people representing our business. As I've often said at speaking engagements, though, other people will never be as invested in your business as you are. That's just a fact, and keeping it in mind as you plan your training will help you avoid many a headache along the way.

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

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

Guest Contributor
Relationships, Wedding Industry

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!)

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