Preparing For The Pros: 4 Steps For Dealing With Wedding Professionals
There are probably no other times in your life when you are going to have to deal with as many different varieties of professionals than when you plan your wedding. From officiants to florists to DJs to photographers, you will be pressed with meeting tons of people with different communication styles, agendas, and skills.
And that’s just counting standard wedding pros.
You would also be well-advised to find some fun, unique niches for your wedding. Such a niche-fulfillment is provided by Paisley And Jade, the best purveyors of artifacts, collections, and just plain cool stuff in the southern Mid-Atlantic region. Whether you want vintage furniture or 1,000 guitar picks to feature at your wedding, they are the people to call.
Wedding Pros TV was lucky enough to sit down with Morgan Montgomery of Paisley and Jade, and in her words of wisdom, we can glean some tips on finding the right professionals, communicating with them optimally, and utilizing them properly for the best wedding possible.
1 || CROWDSOURCE FEEDBACK FOR YOUR IDEAS
This applies to both what sort of professionals you want to hire for your wedding, and your ideas for utilizing those professionals, from DJ playlists to floral arrangements on down.
It’s never a bad idea to gauge if your ideas are truly smash hits that will go over tremendously with your guests, even if you’re determined to march to the beat of your own drum.
Just you, your Mom, and spouse-to-be aren’t enough of a consensus, because they are likely either biased in your favor or you share something of a group mind with.
The question you should be asking yourself, according to Montgomery, is, “I think this is really cool, you think this is really cool…is it really that cool?”
2 || GOOD PROFESSIONALS WILL LET YOU DO MOST OF THE TALKING
…and that’s not just because of your beautiful, dulcet voice (sorry). It’s because they need to listen before they can guide, and let you navigate while they steer.
Some brides and grooms know exactly what they want, and others go to pros to find ideas and inspiration.
A good wedding professional can work with both, and more importantly, finds out what you’re looking for before saying anything. They do not try to shoehorn in their own plans without being asked.
“When we meet with brides, we always let them talk first…hearing it from their perspective is a really great first step for us,” says Montgomery.
3 || UTILIZE THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF SOCIAL MEDIA
There’s no reason why not to take advantage of our modern social media world to create the best wedding possible. It will help you accomplish #1 in this handy-dandy article quickly. It will help you accomplish #2 conveniently. It also gives you a chance to scope out the work of prospective pros for free, whether you’re looking at wedding videos or floral arrangements.
The visual element of today’s social media landscape cannot be understated, and Montgomery particularly advises putting Pinterest to good use: “Talk about a tool that puts everybody on an even playing field. It’s the great equalizer. Clients come to us and say, ‘check out our pinterest boards that we put together for our wedding,’ and you almost get to skip that step of ‘do we have this right? are we intrepreting what they’re saying right?'”
4 || KNOW THE TRENDS
So what are the cool kids doing these days?
It’s good to know for two opposing reasons: either you want to heed them, to create the best chance of a popular, modern wedding for your guests, or you want to buck them, because you’re a got-dang individual who never had much use for fads.
Whichever is true in your case, a good professional should be able to go either way, and should be able to demonstrate a familiarity with trends whether you intend to make use of them or not, because it shows they don’t just rest on their laurels.
Sayeth Montgomery, “We keep an eye on things outside of the wedding and event industry. Things like home decor, fashion, makeup and beauty trends. Those things all end up translating back to the wedding and event industry.”
Got all that? Great. You now have my permission to get married.
If you want more tips on how to make your wedding something the guests will talk about for years, sign up for your FREE copy of 3 Things You’re DJ won’t tell you about how to take your wedding from average to Legendary!
Then, make sure you come back here and…