The Time It Takes

For brides wondering why it is that coordinating and design packages cost what they do, a recent article (linked above) puts the time of planning a wedding at approximately 250 hours of work.

Now, hiring a coordinator with some experience, will hopefully trim that number by maybe 50 hours, but it often still does clock in at 250 hours, sometimes 300 hours to provide full coordinating services to a client.

So for anyone who's thinking they're overpaying for their coordinators services, even at a lower range budget of $20,000 for a wedding, and a 15% fee for your coodinator, that means you are paying your coordinator $12.00 per hour.

Even at a $40,000 wedding, we're still talking about only $24 per hour, and if a wedding coordinator was booked year round at that rate, that's less than $50,000 a year for a business owner that still has to pay for their own office, travel time, gas in running clients around to locations, and paying their own healthcare expenses.

Think about that for a minute in the context of all the other money being budgeted for your wedding, where you are paying your DJ $1000 or more for 6 hours of work, or the photographer & videographer thousands above that for many hours less work.

So for anyone who thinks that an event coordinator is an extravagant expense, try to think about it in context when you're budgeting for your special event or wedding.

We try very hard to craft packages for clients that are fair, and save brides time and money, and often times doing that while keeping a real business afloat means that I work extra hours for the company that are never billed, and Brynn works many extra hours so that we can keep providing the service that she's passionate about.

In fact, our full coordination packages don't even bill for hours unless it goes over 500 hours in our full package. On top of that, we do not, and will not ever accept kick backs from vendors. Your $1500 coordinator may only take you to two or three vendors for your location, and they may very likely get money paid back to them by those vendors for taking their clients there, and that's how it works.

Encantare does not engage in this practice in any way as we believe it can only lead to limitation of our clients choices and has the potential to create conflicts of interest.

One of Brynn's recent clients was taken to over 17 different sites before choosing one. This just comes with the territory, but we have to package and bill fairly for these kinds of things.

It's important that we keep our "interest" in our client's event the first and foremost consideration in every transaction and appointment.

We hope that those hours spent result in a memorable and stress-less event for our clients.