Wedding Planners: How To Determine Your Hourly Rate
As I work through pricing and package details with my wedding business coaching clients I'm blowing minds with just a little basic math.
Time and again, wedding planners are frustrated to realize they’ve been selling their services short at an hourly rate much lower than they wanted. For everything from consulting to planning and coordination packages.
How much are you actually making?
When was the last time you pulled out your calculator to work out your hourly rates and consider profitability?
Wanna give it a try?
HOW TO CALCULATE YOUR HOURLY RATE
Divide your Full Planning package rate by 200.
That number you wind up with is your approximate hourly rate. 💥 Boom!
I'm simplifying things, but you get the idea.
This is not an exact science, of course, because the hours worked from wedding to wedding are not an apples to apples comparison.
200 hours is the average number to plan and coordinate a wedding. While plenty of planners will tell you it's even more than that. Closer to 300 or 400, depending on the scope of event and your methods.
Is that number on the calculator making you cringe?
Let’s try another one to help you better understand your time commitment to a Full Planning package:
My average Full Planning client folder has about 700 emails once we wrap up.
📧 700 emails
✖️ multiplied by an average of 5 minutes each
➗ divided by 60 minutes
👉 equals nearly 60 hours just composing and processing emails for one project
A huge chunk of time, just sitting at your desk or on your phone reading and composing emails as they pertain to planning a client’s wedding. Not to mention all the other tasks in the planning portion of your work process.
You know, crunching budgets, formatting guest lists, vendor research and consultations, quote and contract reviews, building design proposals, drafting floor plans, managing RSVPs, etc, etc, etc. You know the list goes on and on.
And we haven’t even gotten to wedding day. When it comes down to it, your hours for wedding day likely go above and beyond that 10 or 12 hour coordination package according to the bullet points of your contract.
HOW DID YOU DETERMINE YOUR PRICING?
Those nice round numbers you’re popping in to a pretty pricing PDF, how did you land on them?
😬 Did it sound good?
😳 Was it comparable to what everyone else was doing?
😎 Did you write out your whole process and figure out your time commitment?
FORGETTING SOMETHING?
Remember that we haven’t even factored in all the work we do behind the scenes to build and maintain our business.
Everything from scheduling social media, creating graphics and sales docs, planning styled shoots, bookkeeping, and so on and so on.
These calculations don’t include your time spent running your business.
There’s no client package paying for all of that. So it factors in to the profitability of your packages as well.
Yep, that hourly rate just got even smaller.
WANT TO PRICE WEDDING PLANNING PACKAGES FOR PROFIT?
It’s a pretty simple strategy actually.