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:
If you've ever attended any type of networking event in our industry you've likely been inundated with tales of vendors and guests misbehaving. Sometimes I feel like it's a competition to see who has the most outrageous story or has survived the greatest offense. If you've been in business more than a minute, you've probably experienced at least one instance when someone made your job very difficult. You may have even been genuinely surprised by their actions. After all, aren't vendors supposed to be consummate professionals, working as a team? Aren't guests supposed to be rational, thoughtful adults who want to have a safe, fun time? If you're snickering, you know what I mean and could probably write this post for me. No matter your experience level, we all could use a little reminder of how to be diplomatic while getting the work done. Especially during the busy season.
(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: Today's post was submitted by a repeat contributor to WeddingIQ: the wonderful Kevin Dennis of Fantasy Sound Event Services! Read more about Kevin at the end of the post!)
Communication is the key to the success of any event, not only between the couple and the vendors but among the wedding pros themselves. A team that operates like a well-oiled machine is the key to a couple’s dream wedding and can also prepare everyone for any risks related to the special day.
So how does one ensure proper vendor coordination as you head into the Big Day?
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.
