Today on the blog we want to give you insight into what happens during initial meetings with prospective clients. We get this question a lot, so we figured there was some merit to writing a post to shed light on the topic. Many wedding professionals offer an initial consultation or meeting to discuss details pertaining to the wedding. This first meeting is usually free, and requires no contract or obligation at the end of the meeting.

Are we a good fit?

We do a lot of hands-on work, like this styled engagement shoot, so it’s important that we are a good fit for you and your fiancé!

Here at Whim, we use initial meetings to get to know our potential clients and see if we are a good fit for one another. Michelle and I believe strongly in fit, and we think that all couples should have initial meetings with every vendor to determine the same, especially with a wedding planner. Fit is incredibly important because we end up spending a ton of time together during meetings, and we’ll spend some time corresponding about the wedding. We want our clients to be comfortable with us, and we want to feel comfortable with you, too! We like to start off by inviting you to our office to talk about how we got into weddings and events, our backgrounds in education and professional life, and why we love what we do. We want to hear about you and how you met, too!

Initial Meetings – What Happens?

We sit with you to discuss your wedding vision and determine if we’re right for each other.

Initial meetings are a great chance to learn more about what we actually do. It’s easy to say that we plan weddings and events, but what does that really mean? We take the time to show you examples of client binders that we have created for our past weddings, and these binders are offer a comprehensive view of the time and effort it takes to plan a successful event. Our binders contain everything from our notes at our first meeting, colour schemes and storyboarding we create to fit your colours and theme, examples of budgets, vendor questionnaires and answers, copies of our correspondence with clients and vendors, copies of all contracts, vendor contact lists and itineraries.

We also take the time to introduce you to our emergency kits and the contents within. If you have any questions at all about what the items are used for, we can explain it. We offer some fun anecdotes about our favourite products and how they came to have that status.
The initial meeting is also when we talk to you about how you and your honey met, and about your vision for your wedding. We want to hear everything – from what you are most afraid of to which part of the whole process is the most meaningful to you. We want to walk out of that meeting with a good idea of who you are as a couple, and how we can help bring your magical day to life.

At the end of the meeting, we’ll go over the details of our contract. Many clients sign the contract at the first meeting, and some clients are still in the vetting process and want to wait a little while. Like we said, it’s a no-obligation initial meeting. We want to get to know you, and we won’t push you to make a decision if you aren’t ready.

What Doesn’t Happen?

We know you’re super excited to get started on planning, but the real planning gets started after the initial meeting!

Now, what we don’t do at an initial meeting is: provide vendor recommendations, work up budgets, verify vendor pricing, create timelines, etc. That’s the work that happens once you have decided to hire us as your planning team. While we do want to help all of the couples that reach out to us, it would be unfair to our paying couples for us to divulge that information.

We’d love to meet with you to determine if we are a great fit for your wedding vision! Leave us a comment to let us know what you think of our initial meeting process!

Whim Event Coordination and Design provides wedding planning and design services for fun, quirky, and whimsical couples in Toronto and the surrounding GTA. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you plan your dream wedding!