How Fay Raised Her Planning Prices Without Losing Bookings
When Fay started her Toronto, Ontario wedding planning business, it was with years and years of special events and hospitality experience already under her belt.
Weddings and special events were not new to her. But the marketing and running of a business absolutely was.
We first connected in the summer of 2024, when we she had one wedding under her belt, unpaid.
In her own words, she felt lost, knowing there was a lot of structure to build up in order to connect with and support new clients through planning systems.
Fay dove in to my signature program, Design Your Dream Wedding Business, and built something pretty incredible.
She knew her prices were too low. And there was lots to do in order to launch her business more officially with a website and a marketing strategy to bring consistent leads.
Here’s how we grew her business from one unpaid wedding in 2023, to a fully booked calendar and flourishing freelance career
before coaching, in her own words:
“On my own I had no direction, no idea where to start or what to prioritize. Or even what my process was. I thought I knew about running a business by watching other people do it and helping where I did, but I had no idea once I was on my own.”
This is the tricky part a lot of wedding pros won’t talk about openly. Fay wasn't bad at planning weddings. She was great at it. That was never the problem.
The problem was every single thing surrounding it.
“Being good at what you do is such a small part of the job. It takes so much more to make your business reliable and viable.”
Yeah. That part. Eek!
How do you take the service you love and excel at, and turn it in to a sustainable, growing business?
What she actually built
Fay came into Design Your Dream Wedding Business with a skill and no structure.
She left with the actual backend of a business — a website she could send people to without wincing, a CRM holding the process instead of her memory, a sales workflow, and a marketing strategy she wasn't reinventing every Monday morning.
“I literally could not have launched my new beautiful website without Krista’s help. Her templates and advice saved so much time and energy.”
But the website was never the point. The website was the evidence.
“Having all the assets in place like my website, my CRM, and my social interactions is my silent sales pitch.”
That right there is the whole mechanism. (The one she had no idea how to build on her own, or where to even start.)
When your assets do the convincing before the call, you stop having to convince anybody so dramatically on the call.
The six words that moved the numbers
“After DYDWB, I'm not underselling myself.”
Watch what those six words did over the next two years:
Fay raised her Full planning fee: $4,800 → $7,450. Up 55%.
Average client wedding budget: $50,000 → $90,000. Up 80%.
Her fee as a share of the budget she's managing: 6.9% → 8.3%.
That last one is the one I'd frame and hang on a wall. In just two years she’s closer than ever to the 10% benchmark.
She’s working directly with her own clients she loves, freelancing on the luxury side as a reliable and fully capable planner-coordinator, and confident in what she does and how she sells it!
Bigger weddings would have raised her fee on their own — that's just math. But Fay's fee grew faster than the weddings did. She isn't only working with clients who spend more. She's charging a bigger slice of what they spend.
That's not a market shift. That's a positioning shift. (From the layered marketing strategy we built together in her Design Your Dream Wedding Business program, and continued with KJ Alumni.)
And it holds on the other side of the sale, too:
“I have so much confidence sending clients proposals, invoices and contracts knowing that I don't look like an amateur.”
You cannot charge more while apologizing for it.
Fay proved her value, to match her experience.
Photo by Tami Klein
Photo by Tami Klein
Photo by Tami Klein
The part that's genuinely rare
Here's what normally happens when a planner goes from 1 wedding to 9 in three years.
She gets cheaper. She says yes to everything. She stops qualifying anyone, because a booking is a booking. The volume climbs and the average sinks, and by year three she's making less per wedding than she was in year one — while working nine times as much.
Booked and burnt out. The usual story.
Fay's numbers went the other direction on every single axis: More weddings. Bigger clients. Higher fee. Better capture rate.
That combination doesn't happen by working harder. There is no amount of hustle that raises your price and your volume at the same time. It only happens when the positioning underneath changes — when the website, the process, the packages, and the pricing all finally point at the same client.
Where she is now
“Planning a wedding is entirely different from running a wedding planning business. Now I'm confident as a one-woman shop, wearing all the hats: social media manager, IT department, sales team, finance department. Thanks to DYDWB I have the tools to handle all those different roles myself.”
Still a one-woman shop. Still wearing all the hats herself. But now with a plan and confidence. (No team, no agency, no army of VAs.)
Just a business that finally knows what it's doing.
“My investment in coaching was returned tenfold. The tools I have, my website, my strategy for social media and my process is all because of Krista. 100% worth it.”
Design Your Dream Wedding Business opens for its next cohort soon.
If you're somewhere in Fay's year one right now — good at the work, lost in the business — that's exactly who it's built for.
