One of our long term members, Isabel Smith has frequently written informative posts for our blog on life as a wedding planner. Last year she wrote an excellent one on valuing your worth as a wedding planner. In this new series for the UKAWP she is discussing her top 5 mistakes and how you can learn from them.

Once again, the time has come for me to show off how phenomenally stupid I have been in the past in the third of my ‘mistakes I have made and what you should learn from them!’ series.

TOP MISTAKE NO 3: Getting in the middle

A big part of our role is to mediate between client and supplier – of course!  The point of having us is to lighten the load of the bride so naturally we sit in the middle sometimes.  Likewise, sometimes with our ‘marriage counselor’ hat on, we can sit in the middle somewhat between partners or family members.

I had a lovely wedding some time ago.  I had been taken on by the bride’s mother who was paying for the event (and was chief planner in truth).  She insisted I be kept a secret since she was worried that the bride might have preferred that my fee be spent elsewhere so I didn’t actually meet the bride until the wedding day.

BIG MISTAKE

It turned out that mother and daughter had some really quite different ideas as to what a successful wedding looked like.  It mattered a great deal to Mum that the meal was the main focus, with coffees served to table at the end, whereas the bride was keen to get the dancing started as early as possible since it was a reasonably squished timetable anyway due to registrar availability.

The result was a bit of a tantrum on the day on both their parts to be honest, with me really stuck in the middle. It was the (rather heated) discussion they had together of course that fixed the problem.

Having not met the bride ahead of time did rather put me on the back foot since I had no relationship with her to help smooth things over.  I should have insisted on meeting beforehand to make sure EVERYONE was clear on the agenda.

I can’t tell you what a total failure as a planner I felt at the time (isn’t the #1 job on the day to make the bride happy!!!!).  I have given myself a bit of a break since (after all, there are limits to our ‘shrink’ role and it isn’t my job to fix the obviously long-standing issues between mother and daughter), but definitely lessons learned here!