During the course of several of our Outstanding Wedding Planner Mentorships, our clients have gotten stuck on how to price their services. We will talk about pricing your services next week, but this week we want to talk about your TIME.
Do you know how much time you spend on average per wedding? If you say no to this question, you need to finish reading this post and then start tracking your time now. I can hear some of you grunting and saying already “Track my time every day for each different wedding or event…you must be crazy! I don’t have time for that!” (Believe me, I know how you feel! I came from the legal profession and we had to account for every minute and fill out our billing sheets. I hated it!)
Image by RHiNO NEAL
Well, unless you bill by the hour, you don’t need to track your time for every wedding, but in order to know how much time you spend on your weddings or events on average, you need to at least track time for a few different events. If you provide different “packages” (even though we hate them…that is for another blog post also) or provide different services for a few weddings, you should keep track of all of them to see how much time is spent on each separate one. Knowing how much time you spend on your events will be the first step for figuring out what you should really be charging. When our mentorship clients have done this and came up with a total number of hours per wedding and then divided that by the amount they charge, most were flabbergasted! Some clients were getting less than minimum wage per hour. It was a huge eye opener for several clients and it might be for you too!
So, in order track your hours, we suggest to either use a spreadsheet or you can use an online tracking system if digital tracking is more your style. If you prefer to keep a spreadsheet, include the task involved, the date you started and the date you finished, the amount of time spent each time you worked on anything for that client and then a box at the bottom for the total amount of time for that sheet.
If you want to learn about a few tools for tracking time, check out this post over at Sage Wedding Pros. (And if you are not following their blog, start now! Michelle and Kelly are super smart ladies that share great information about the business side of weddings and events too :)
Have you tracked your time before? Were you surprised by how much time you spent on each event? What have you found to be the best method to track your time?
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Great article. It’s not just wedding planners but many other wedding professionals how should start valuing their time – stationers, cake makers, photographers. I suspect there are many who make very little per hour.