You’re engaged (congratulations!) and you are ready to start making your wedding vision into plans. Have you ever wondered what you should do first? You’ve probably searched for information and were flooded with it! The truth is, there are a lot of arrangements you want to make quickly to ensure the most important vendors are available on your wedding date (and by most important, we mean the vendors that are most important to you – because we always create our vendor teams based on our couples priorities). Often times, when couples reach out to us to plan their wedding, they aren’t sure if they should book their venue first. This is such a common misconception we see as wedding planners and today we are going to talk about why it’s so important the first wedding vendor you hire is your wedding planner!

First, don’t worry if you’ve already booked your venue, you can still connect with us here if you are looking for a wedding planner! However, if you haven’t booked a wedding venue yet, we want to highly encourage you to book your wedding planner first!

Your Wedding Venue Takes Up a Significant Portion of Your Budget

As wedding planners, one of our jobs is to make sure we keep your budget on track. By booking your venue, you may have made more budget decisions than you realized. Even when your wedding venue doesn’t have a high fee, they may have restrictions you don’t realize can be quite costly (examples include having a required catering team or managing the rentals). With some venues, we may need to complete both the setup and take down on the same day which can be more expensive if it means bringing in a larger team or being charged late night take down fees (compared to a venue that might allow you to rent it for the entire weekend). You might think you are just booking the wedding venue, but often there can be more string attached than you realize.

We know what goes on behind the scenes.

We’ve all made purchases where the sales process didn’t match the reality. There are beautiful venues who can’t keep a venue coordinator for longer than a few months making the planning process is frustrating. We know which caterers are unreliable and which decor companies need to freshen up their linens because they are looking less and less like the pictures every year. As wedding planners, we work hard to curate a list of reputable vendors we love to work with and the reason we love to work with them is because they make our couples so happy! Bringing us in earlier in the process helps us guide you and suggest vendors who produce stunning work, both on Instagram AND in real life.

You might not know the right questions to ask!

We often take care of the entire communication process for our wedding planning clients, and we know the right questions to ask. Especially after last year, forgetting to ask specific questions about cancellation policies, postponements, what still constitutes as Force Majeure and more. We know that couples always try and do their due diligence, but like anything, you “don’t know what you don’t know” so it’s worth making such a significant decision with an expert.

Are you ready to book your wedding planner?

We hope this has shown you all of the reasons why bringing in a professional wedding planner sooner rather than later is a wise investment. At Borrowed and Blue, we are passionate about making sure every couples’ wedding day matches their vision. The earlier on in the process we are hired, the easier it is for us to do just that. For more information on our wedding planning services, click here. Want to browse our portfolio, we have a few of our favorite photos here. When you are ready to book (or if you have more questions!), you can contact us here.