Want to plan a wedding? Learn to bake a cake first!
So how will baking a cake help you with your wedding planning? The short answer is that it won’t but it struck us recently as the perfect analogy.
As Wedding Planners all our weddings work with fun but military precision and it’s easy to assume that all weddings go as smooth as our events. Over the August bank holiday however like many wedding suppliers we were due to have one of our busiest weekends of the year and I found myself out on the other side of our business helping one of our letter hire delivery teams.
On arrival to the venue we were first hit with limited access, the world’s largest letters and the world’s smallest winding staircase, upon overcoming this obstacle we then found that the dance floor hadn’t been installed with enough room for us and all power points were already taken (this despite clearly advising at the point of booking how much space and power was required). We eventually worked our way around all these issues and it was ultimately nobody’s fault but this got us thinking as to the number of times these incidents and others like it occur.
Like the time, for instance that the couple had booked caterers but no crockery to eat from, or the time the groom ordered ice to chill the toast drinks delivered the day before on a hot summers day in a marquee with no chiller booked – 30 bottles of fizz doesn’t chill very quickly in 15 bags of warm water!
Over the years we have seen it all, so much so we are often told we should write a book, so this is where our analogy takes us and where we realise as planners how much we actually achieve for our clients that even we now sometimes just take for granted.
Planning a wedding can be extremely stressful and its very easy to just start ticking off booked suppliers as if they were a set of ingredients;
Flour (Venue) – check
Sugar (Caterer) – check
Butter (DJ) – check
Eggs (Photographer) – check
But ultimately it takes some serious orchestration to bring these ingredients together in the right quantities, in the right order with finesse and technique to bake the ultimate cake otherwise all we have is a bag of ingredients on a kitchen table. There’s no wonder our couples are always so amazed at what we do and that other suppliers often find it very helpful working with a professional planner
Want to learn more visit our wedding planning services page
Cake Credit: The wonderful Nadia from Pretty tasty for providing this beautiful cake for one of our weddings back in 2015
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