We recently connected with Sarah Torres and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, appreciate you joining us today. Alright, so we’d love to hear about how you got your first client or customer. What’s the story?

Getting our first client was a little tricky. The business had been open for about two months before we finally had someone book with us. I was a bride myself in 2021 so I knew a lot of couples found their vendors on Facebook. I was able to use this to my advantage and rejoin all of the Michigan bride pages. I posted constantly about deals, photos of events I’d worked in the past, etc.. This led to a few inquiries and I was able to successfully contract the weddings! The physical wedding was on September 16th even though it was contracted in December- our business opened the October before – but we worked our first official event as Torrick Events Wedding Coordinators on January 21st. Only 4 months after opening!! It was a hectic and scary time as a new business owner but we had a lot of faith in ourselves!

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Sarah Torres and I am the owner of Torrick Events LLC – a wedding planning and coordination company! I’ve been in the industry since 2014 training with Banquets, serving , hotels, event planning, menus, you name it! After Covid, my husband and I sat down and decided that we were now going to try and open our own business.

I spend so much time planning my daughter‘s birthday parties, Friendsgiving‘s, events for our family, that he figured I might as well take my talents and help, other people do this on their special days. We never could’ve imagined that it would blow up the way that I did. We ended up finishing our first year open working 60 weddings and we’re keeping ourselves busy by working anywhere from 45 to 60 a year still!

I’m very lucky to have the support from my husband that I do. As well as the support from one of my closest friends and my two sister-in-law‘s – all three of them have been with my since the beginning and I couldn’t do this without them. This past year we’ve been able to broaden our horizons and work more weddings a weekend as well as traveling around the state of Michigan more. We’ve also hired on two new employees making our team of four now a team of six. We are very excited to continue growing and being able to work with these amazing couples every single weekend!

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Honestly, it was very tricky. We did not have much when we started other than a simple dream. Eventually, we would like to open up our own wedding venue, but we were unable to do that from the start. We decided we would open a travel wedding planning business and see what that could do for us in the meantime. As stated before, I didn’t think it was going to get as big as it did so quickly and we are very thankful. Now I’m to the point where I don’t know if I want to open up a venue or continue on down the path of travel day of coordination. It’s definitely an option in the back of my head to open the venue one day though and keep the traveling aspect open for our team in case they want to be able to continue to travel around and meet new people!

As far as start up funds, we pretty much just used our credit cards and the money we were bringing in from our daily jobs to get business T-shirts, business cards, open up a website, etc. Most of the stuff I actually designed, printed, and executed myself to save money. Being a wedding planner I’m sure you can understand that I actually do enjoy the creative side of planning so being able to create all of my business logos, T-shirts, etc. was a lot of fun for me!

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

At the beginning, I heavily relieved on Facebook and Instagram and it was the main source of growing my clientele. There are a lot of groups online where couples are looking for vendors for their weddings. I was in these groups already from planning my wedding previously and started giving out discounted pricing to couples in need of planners/coordinators in order to gain my clientele, reputation, reviews, you name it! Now, I’m thankful to get most of my clients through word of mouth from past couples we worked with!

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.torrickevents.com
• Instagram: Www.instagram.com/torrickevents
• Facebook: Www.Facebook.com/Torrickevents

Image Credits
Torrick Events Team