There are so many amazing opportunities out there today for people wanting to venture into the world of event planning and management. If you take a step back and review all of the different aspects and areas of event planning, you may become overwhelmed with how many types of event planning there are today.
Some people may enjoy consulting as a living, so smaller events may be right up their alley! Or, if you’re more of a social butterfly, getting hired by a larger corporation would be a great fit in order to be hands on with large-scale trade shows and events.
There are tons of opportunities out there for event planners – which one do you think you are or are aspiring to be? Below are a few different areas you can test out if they sound appealing to you!
The Consulting Free Bird
How many times have you woken up and considered working for yourself as a living? Consulting gigs are awesome for those who don’t want to feel tied down at a larger corporation, or drive long distances to an office every day. You can create a very fun career path for yourself as a consulting event planner, signing on smaller jobs to keep your projects moving and due dates met on time. It may become too much for work one person alone to manage larger events while consulting, but if you have a small team working with you out of your home office, or remotely, it could be worth looking into planning larger executive meetings, dinners, and parties.
The idea around consulting is to offer your professional services to a person or group of people – you’re providing them with your amazing creative talents, ideas for ways to make their events shine, and show them how to stay on track to meet deadlines, set goals for before, during and after the events, and trust you will hire the best vendors in town to help pull of a great experience for them!
The Team Lover
Being in an office is extremely fun for some event planners. They prefer to wake up, get dressed, grab a cup of coffee, and get started around larger teams at companies that attend trade shows, regional events, host webinars, roadshows, and perhaps even host their own annual corporate event! The office event planner is very organized, has a day-to-day agenda for scheduled meetings to attend, vendors he or she loves to work with on events of all sizes, and knows how to keep track of budgets. It’s important to keep checklists for events to not only keep the planner on track, but also the team helping with the event. Their extended team usually consists of marketing members, sales, and sometimes execs. You will want to build relationships with these other team members as you start your corporate role as a planner to ensure there is trust between you, and you can all work easily and smart together to ensure successful events from beginning to end.
Planning events at a corporation is not an easy task, and for bigger brands, you will be planning events on a monthly, sometimes even weekly basis. Having the right attitude and personality is essential for working in the corporate planning world.
The Social Butterfly
If you’re looking for something a little bit more social and upscale from corporate planning or consulting gigs, the perfect fit for you might be in the area of wedding and party planning! These types of events can sometimes feel super stressful and overwhelming as you enter in your first couple of weddings or parties. There is the expectation from clients that they will “want the very best” when it comes to their wedding day or party they are planning. Clients usually come with ideas swirling around in their heads, so the perfect planner will be open to these ideas, and willing to guide the client into the right direction to ensure money is saved and they get exactly what they are looking for without going too over-the-top.
Wedding and party planning can be a ton of fun; so having vendors in mind that you like to work with is always handy when meeting new clients. You want to impress clients with the best of the best, and at the same time save them money.
In Conclusion
Event planning is not for everyone, and no matter what type of planner you decide to be, it’s important to note that all planners have the same guidelines and tools they follow when planning events. The areas may be completely different – weddings can take a year to plan at times, while smaller dinners or exec events may only take a month to plan.
The one thing to keep in mind is that all planners are very organized, personable, have a great attitude, have great vendor connections, and at the end of the day really love their jobs! It takes someone special to deal with the back and forth questions and answers, tight deadlines, frantic changes on design items or vendor decisions, and be able to sift through it all and prioritize what’s important and what’s not. Now which type of event planner would you like to be?
