Happy Tuesday Everyone!

Wedding season is fast approaching which means I am getting into my busy season, which also means I may make a mistake and forget to post my blog post on Monday morning, such as I did this week! Keeping with the theme of this blog post I am going be honest and talk about event mistakes, and how not every event is perfect, but how I can make you believe that it is perfect.

All events are thrown a curve ball at some point or another, it may be a small curve or it may be a big curve but no matter what the event will go on! To start this blog, I will talk about some of the curve balls that have been thrown at me in the past.

One of the first weddings I ever coordinated by myself was on a cold winter Chicago night and of course mother nature was not our best friend and it decided to snow. Although I was prepared and double checked everything, the officiant still arrived an hour late. I had worked with this officiant before and they were always on time but when we were 30 minutes from the ceremony and the officiant was still not at the venue I knew something was wrong. So I called the officiant who completely forgot about the wedding and was an hour outside of town. Because it was snowing and on such late notice getting another officiant was going to take even longer, so we had to back up the start time by an hour. In order to calm the nerves of my bride and groom I suggested giving them an extra hour at the end of the event, paying the DJ an extra hour and paying staff to stay the extra hour. As well as finding transportation for the guests to the hotel after the event. Making up for the mistake of the officiant was not an easy task, but the bride and groom came back to the venue the next morning and said they had to most wonderful night, and I gained high praise, no one even gave the hour back-up a second look.

Another mistake that happens a lot with corporate events is timing. For example, I was planning a convention and we had multiple tours lined up during the day, I had planned the tours and travel time down to the second but unexpected events always happen. Unfortunately one of the tours took a lot longer than expected and the convention attendees time to eat lunch was taken away. Myself and other convention organizers had to think quick on our feet and we ended up ordering pizza at one of the tours to make up for the missed lunch hour.

As seen with these 2 examples, event planners, need to have the ability to think and take action quickly because inevitably something will go wrong at an event, its just a matter of how and when. My goal as an event planner is to deal with the mistakes and make the event seem perfect in the eyes of all attendees. There are many things that happen behind the scenes that my clients may never now about because I fix the mistake before it is noticed. Event planning is not an easy or stress free job, but it is my job to keep that stress from creeping up on my clients and their attendees.