}
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3 Systems Every Wedding Planner Needs
You love what you do. Who wouldn’t love spending all day flipping through pages of beautiful wedding designs and sharing your expertise with happy couples? It is a wonderful industry to be part of. But it doesn’t come without its challenges.
You have piles and piles of inspiration spread out across your studio, your phone keeps buzzing with new distractions, new potential clients and new things keep popping up on your forever growing and out of control to-do list.
With a few simple steps, you could have it all under control and continue to focus on inspiring your clients and building your wedding business. But where to start?
In my business, I collaborate with wedding professionals to help them create a business they love. Over the years, I have tried and tested many methods to keep my projects flowing smoothly and I have narrowed them down to a few favorites. By combining and consistently sticking to these methods, I now have all the time I need to focus on what is important to me and my clients.
Managing Your Time
When putting together a system that will serve you, it’s important not to get carried away with creating systems, which in and of itself is entirely time consuming. Time management should be your friend and an aid you. Two simple methods to organize your time and ensure that you are spending it on the things that are important are Google Calendar and ScheduleOnce.
Google Calendar is a very straight forward time management tool. It’s easy to log in your appointments and is cloud based, so you can access it from any device on the go. One great idea is to arrange regular ‘meetings’ with yourself in Google Calendar and use that time to check things off your to-do list.
Google Calendar is very collaborative, so you can open it up to your team, where you can all jot down important meetings and events. There is even the option for color-coded calendars that can be sorted by category, which is perfect to see both personal and business commitments at a glance.
One of the common obstacles wedding planners face when trying to arrange meetings with their clients is miscommunication and the time it takes to finally agree on a date and time with all involved. ScheduleOnce is the answer to this, as it allows you to share your calendar with your clients, where they can then choose a few preferred dates and times for you to approve, ultimately creating a seamless schedule and saving hours of time.
Managing Your Projects
Now that you have a handle on managing your time, you will want to find the perfect way to organize your client projects. Trello has proven to be just that, allowing you to view all of your projects at a glance. It effectively works as a digital whiteboard, where you can manage your projects on your own or collaboratively with your team.
With Trello, you can create individual boards for each client and zoom out to stay on track of all your projects. It provides you with complete clarity, as you can use Trello to save your inspirations, set to-do lists and plan all your projects in one simple place. The best thing is, Trello can be downloaded from the Apple apps store, so you organize your life and projects on the go.
Managing Your Relationships
Once you have successfully put in place these strategies for managing your time and projects, you will begin to see that you have all the time you need to focus on your clients and grow your business, and that’s when you can start to develop the consistency of your social media marketing. The best tool for the job is Buffer, a social media management app specifically designed to schedule your content, so your business can gain traction while you sleep.
It is extremely simple to use and you can direct your content to your Twitter account, Facebook page, Google+ profile and LinkedIn profile with the click of a button.
Buffer is free to use but has the option to upgrade to the ‘Awesome Plan’, which allows you up to 12 unique social profiles and you can even add two different team members to help out with scheduling. It has proven to be the best social media management app that I have used and you can find out more about how Buffer can help you transform your Social Media strategy in the free PDF you can access when you like Evolve Your Wedding Business on Facebook.
It just goes to show how simple it is to manage your business once you consistently combine these three methods. You can also create an easy, cohesive and seamless schedule to organize your life and business by devoting just a little time each week to them, and by doing so, you are sure to free up 2-5 hours which you can spend on doing the things that are important to you.
Why not schedule an hour with yourself this week on your Google Calendar to ensure that you have all the tools in place to have an effortless routine? It could be just what you need to free up your time and start focusing on all the things that you love about your business.
Today’s post is a guest post from Heidi Thompson. Heidi is the founder of Evolve Your Wedding Business and a marketing maven for wedding pros who want to kick ass in business and get out of the dreaded feast or famine cycle of doom. She teaches these awesome entrepreneurial ladies and gents how to do amazing marketing on a tiny budget and create a consistent flow of leads because in business, it doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do if no one knows about it. Heidi is launching a course on bridging the gap between attracting website visitors and booking weddings.
A complete set of templates, checklists, and tools for professional wedding planners.
Business
Wedding Planning
Marketing
Day in the Life
Self Development
Friday Favorites
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[…] 20. 3 Systems Ever Wedding Planner Needs […]
Trello is easily the most useful tool on this list. I recommend it to everyone I know. Thanks!
Thanks Scott!
[…] 20. 3 Systems Ever Wedding Planner Needs […]
Great post!
I have previously tried out Trello on my iPad, iPhone and desktop. I find it overwhelming all the ways you can organize. Do you have any templates or suggestions for entering in details for a basic wedding?
Thanks!
I don’t have resources for a template for Trello but perhaps Heidi can suggest ideas.
Hi Denis! There are two ways I can see working well. You could create a board for each wedding and then a list for each large part of the wedding that needs to be tracked and managed. Alternatively you could put all of your weddings on 1 board and then just have 1 list with cards for each wedding. The way that is right is the way that works for you 🙂
Thank you for those great advices !! So helpful ! Kate, from France xoxo!
I’m glad it helped Kate!
Thanks for commenting Kate!
Just signed up for Trello – I hadn’t heard of it. Thank you! Seems to be perfect for our needs.
That is great Jen! I am planning to try Trello too.
It really helps me because I can lay out the process of several projects or larger tasks and see at a glance what I need to be working on.
Thanks for sharing this! I already use google calendars and it’s amazing! I use hootsuite for my social media management and I really like it! So much better then having to do it all manually!
That is great Amanda! Thanks for sharing.
Hootsuite is great isn’t it? I use both Hootsuite and Buffer. I use Buffer to post and Hootsuite to interact live or to check in with Twitter lists that I monitor. The people at Twitter could learn a lot from the Hootsuite interface!