As a wedding expert, I can tell you that putting on a wedding is a bit of an educational process and with that challenge of putting on a great wedding are some things that even the professionals won’t often tell you, it comes with experience, trial and error.

Carole and I working a wedding in May 2021.

Well today, I’m going to share with you 10 planning tips that you will not find anywhere else on the internet. You can use them to help your own wedding planning process, making it a better success for the wedding day!

Use a Range for Your Wedding Budget Line Items

My first tip for couples is to understand the wedding budget and allow a variance for each line item within it.

This is what I mean.

If the budget for the wedding venue is $5,000, create a range of plus or minus 10% for the budget. In this example, that means you should look for venues that are between $4,500-$5,500.

What this does is slightly open up the budget funnel to allow a little bit more flexibility for the wedding vendors that you choose.

Many couples will figure out a budget and stick to it no matter what. Allow a little wiggle room so you can get a better selection of vendors when you seek them out.

If you don’t have a wedding budget or know where to start, use our online wedding budget tool.

Treat your wedding vendors like a guest, sorta

One thing I can tell you is that wedding vendors work hard throughout the day to pull off your wedding. It’s nice when we can take a small 5-minute break here and there or when we have a place to eat dinner.

My point here is to make sure that your vendors are taken care of with a place to eat dinner and give them the ability to take a couple of small breaks throughout the day.

Many times vendors need the following:

Time to recharge themselves
Photographers and videographers need a few minutes to change batteries, lenses, and the like
DJ’s will need a few minutes time to line up requested songs, eat dinner and just get a breath
Catering companies will need a place to work and even a place to take a break when serving or maintaining meals.

While you don’t need to put vendors with the guest tables, it’s nice to just know that we’re human and need a couple of minutes here and there throughout a long 8-12 hour day.

Pricing is based on total hours worked, not just the day of your wedding

Something that couples most times don’t see is the hours that go into the wedding before and after the fact.

Take a wedding florist or catering company. They take many man-hours before your day to prep the food and prep your bouquet, centerpieces, and other flowers.

Photographers and Videographers take a few hours to prep but usually spend double or triple the amount of time after the wedding to get your media done.

Wedding venues take many hours to set up the chairs, tables, and prep the venue the way you want it set up.

If couples get sticker shock, that’s usually because they are just looking at the wedding day itself and not all the additional time it takes to produce for the wedding day. Sometimes couples will say something like:

“well…. our wedding is only X amount of hours…it shouldn’t cost so much money…”

And while that’s true, there is also a “Y” Amount of hours to create the day, and the “X” amount of hours couples think about is only a part of the equation.

Think about what we do for a minute, wedding photos and films.

A 10 hour wedding day means Carole and I spend about 2 hours beforehand to prep the gear, 4-5 hours to work things out with the timeline, the business set up with making personalized web pages for the couple, and keeping up with their account.

General hours worked for couple

Then for every hour, we’re at the wedding, it’s usually 2 hours for me in the edit bay and about 3 for Carole editing images. That’s another 20-30 hours of work that couples are paying for but generally don’t see.

Bribe the Flower girls and Ring-bearers

When you’re dealing with little ones, especially those that need nappy-time during the day, you want to try and keep them on track with the daily routine at hand if you can.

Otherwise, you’ll have a screaming, crying toddler at the ceremony and no one wants that!

We suggest a couple of things.

First, try to keep their schedule of eating and have a place for them to nap with mom or dad nearby. A hotel room, a car with A/C, a private room, or the like.

Also, when it’s time to have them come down the aisle, use a toy, a yummy snack or candy to get them to come down the aisle. Have your best man or family in the front row hold out a candy bar or toy and get their attention to walk down to get it.

More times than none, families that take the time to do these things tend to have better success with the little ones than those that don’t.

Have a fake exit earlier and here’s why

There are a couple of reasons why you should highly consider having a faux or fake exit at your wedding reception.

Perhaps the most important reasons is that older guests and those with young children are not going to stay around until 10 or 11 pm at night Your elderly guests will typically leave after you cut the wedding cake, somewhere about 7-8 pm, perhaps 8:30 pm.

Those with small children, especially toddlers are going to leave the wedding early too in order to get them to bed at an early time frame.

Second, it might actually be cheaper for your wallet to have a faux exit. See, the photographer, DJ, and wedding videographer will be waiting on getting your exit while you party the night away.

Well, that’s money that you’re paying for and you might be able to negotiate for less time, which turns into less you have to pay. Not all vendors offer a cheaper rate for fewer hours, but it’s worth a try to ask!

The benefit is that you can still party the night away afterward too!

It Pays to Go Pro if You Can

One thing that I can tell you is that hiring a professional vs. an amateur will make a huge difference at your wedding.

You are rolling the dice.

Sometimes you can’t hire a professional and you need to rely on someone with much less experience, perhaps a friend or a family member that can help out.

I will tell you that it’s taking a big risk if you hire an amateur rather than a professional.

I’ve seen couples have good luck with hiring someone to help with the wedding that normally doesn’t work for them, I’ve also seen the flipside where couples hire someone cheap and the wedding reception turned out horrible.

A few years ago I filmed a wedding for free alongside someone who was hired to film them. I was able to convince the couple to let me come and film the wedding at no charge as they passed me up to hire someone for about $350. At the time, I was charging right at $1,200 for the same ceremony video.

In the example, you can see a huge difference in the video, but also the audio. Notice how the camera on the right is not level, washed-out looking and you can’t hear the pastor or the couple.

When I shared this with the couple, they saw that although I was more expensive, I provided a much better experience.

And that’s what it’s about, an experience for your wedding.

Offer a Late Night Snack

Couples often forget that people get hungry during the reception when there is dancing.

Sure, you think of food for dinner and while your guests are waiting while you’re doing family portraits, but many times your guest will have the late-night munchies while dancing the evening away and long after the wedding cake has been served and eaten.

Carole and I recommend that you have a late-night snack bar with something to nibble on. It could be a candy bar, a Chex mix snack delight, or something easy to chomp on to help keep your guests happy. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top, just an easy snack to keep everyone happy.

Having a little extra for the wedding guests goes a LONG way at the wedding reception and you don’t have to spend a pile of money either, for less than $100 you can have a very nice snack bar or candy bar.

Think popcorn, Hershey bars, Reese’s, Smores, Chex mix, and the like too.

Your Wedding Budget, we’ll… it’s Unique

Couples often make the mistake of asking others how much was their vendor was and ask for a recommendation.

To a point, that’s a good thing to ask, but what you’re paying for your wedding is going to be different than your friends or people getting married up the road.

If for example, you have a wedding photography budget of $1,500, having someone tell you that you need to hire their $3,200 wedding photography really isn’t of any value to you.

You’re not going to book a $3,000 or $4,000 photography on that budget, but you’re also not going to book a $500 photographer either.

Our point is that every wedding has a unique budget and with that, you’ll seek out vendors within you’re budget range.

One thing you can do is be specific when you ask people on social media and use that range we talked about earlier.

What not to do:

“Looking for a wedding catering company for my October wedding…”

What you should do:

“Looking for a wedding catering company for our October 9th wedding. Our budget is in the range of $2,100-$2,600 and we’re having about 100 guests.”

The more detailed you can be when communicating, the MORE likely you will find the vendors that best fit your budget and you can go from there.

If you are generic, you’ll get literally everything under the sun and it’ll be hard and time-consuming to find the right vendor.

Stay Hydrated All Day

One thing we can tell you is that you need to stay hydrated throughout the day.

Drink water and have plenty of it on hand, especially if you plan to drink alcohol during the reception and into the evening.

If you’re getting married during the summer months, you need to drink plenty of that good H2O. Carole and I stay hydrated a lot throughout the day and we recommend that you and your guests do too.

I will also tell you that during the wedding photos right after the ceremony, the bride and groom will both be thirsty, appoint someone to carry bottled water for the couple.

Too many times someone has had to go grab something for them because they were too hot from the ceremony, the emotions of the day, and the picture taking too.

Let the vendors do what they do best!

My final tip for couples is to not be overly picky about what vendors do.

Sure, there should be some things that you need to be picky about, the type of music played at the reception and ceremony, the flow of the day, what you’ll be eating and what the day will look like.

However, also know that the professionals know what they are doing, so allow them some wiggle room to do their job and be at their best for you and the wedding.

I’ve seen some couples that had such a tight grip on the vendors they hired that it actually had a profound effect on the rest of the wedding day.

Here’s what I mean:

We did a wedding a few years ago where the couple had a list of every single shot the photographer needed to take. That’s good but to a point. Instead of the images beyond the generic list of shots professionals take (after doing it a couple of years you just know), they had 10 pages of images and it was far beyond the wedding party.

Think something like this: ‘bride plus the mothers, sister’s 3rd cousin and husband’

Well, the photographer gladly took the shot, but instead of a 45 minute to an hour-long photo session, it turned out to be a 2-hour session and it held up the reception. Many guests left after waiting around for two hours and didn’t stay.

Let the vendors take control when they need to, sometimes it means working with other vendors, sometimes it means they need to take control of their part of the wedding which is perfectly fine.