Hi everyone!

Yesterday, I had a realization at work. A realization like many other, it was a no-brainer, but often I overlooked it because it’s an obvious thing.

Well, yesterday, as I was giving yet another wedding tour, and like many other times, clients call me later accepting the proposal or rejecting it after they have slept on it and toured other venues, I booked two weddings back to back on the spot. Then, I thought, wow I guess I’m getting really good at selling events, and the the club is not one of the gorgeous venues around the Atlanta metro area? After of five minutes of congratulating myself, I started really thinking about what encouraged them to book us instead of other venues.

So, I feel like I have to start the story from the beginning…

In D.C., the market is very different than here, at least the area I’m at (not Atlanta downtown). When I worked at a popular wedding venue and off-premise catering, the clients that we usually got were not too concerned about how much they were paying for just the venue or just the food. In fact, they wanted to wow their guests and they showed it with the venue, design, and food and the open bar was never missing. Yes, they were working with a budget, but it was way more reasonable than the budgets I get here!

Here, the market is different. When I started working for the club as a private event coordinator, my main responsibility was to sell events. And so, when I came on board, I was adjusting a lot of things such as: menu, food presentation, the way events were coordinated, the vendors that we partnered with, etc. I was doing this because there wasn’t much in place for weddings.

After trying to sell and sell the first couple of months, I felt like I was being unsuccessful. So, then I started to really understand the types of inquiries I was receiving from potential clients. I later realized that this market doesn’t care too much about the decor, the different options of food, and many called me only a few months before their wedding.

With my unsuccessful wedding menus that were probably too high for the market here, I decided to do an inclusive wedding package that looked more reasonable, yet appealing so that the client felt like they are getting a better deal.

Long story short, the new inclusive wedding package I designed, after I started advertising it, was getting more and more attention and people started booking us. We also had to do a styled wedding shoot to update the marketing materials, but that’s for another story…

So, what to take from this long article? Study the market and don’t try so hard to change it. I accepted the fact that we probably wouldn’t get the clients that I wanted to get just yet and I was the one who needed to adjust to them.

With love,
Natalie