We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carissa Metcalfe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carissa below.
Alright, Carissa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about how you identified some of your key partners/vendors and how you made those relationships work?
As a wedding planner, we are the quarterbacks of the wedding. We call the shots and are responsible for making the wedding day flow nicely. But just like a quarterback can’t win his game without a team of amazing players, we can’t execute a wedding without an amazing team of vendors and an awesome venue staff. Because of that, I actually require my clients to mostly use vendors from my approved vendor list. This not only ensures we’re going to have a good team of vendors on the wedding day, but it also ensures that my couples will have vendors who care about them and follow through on their word to help create a beautiful and seamless wedding. So it essentially gives all of us a peace of mind and confidence. I am at the point in my business where I don’t normally need to seek out a vendors, unless it’s something obscure. So most of the time, vendors reach out to me and are interested in working with me. To be honest, I usually don’t add people to my list until I’ve seen how they work. So the vendors who are more likely to get on my list are ones that prove to have good and timely communication, who seem to have follow through, and are reliable. The ones who get a fast-track onto my list are ones that offer to let me see them in action, because again, I want to know how they work and make sure that we will be a good team on the wedding day, and I unfortunatley can’t tell that unless I see them in action. So for photographers or videographers, this may look like them offering a complimentary shoot for me. For DJ’s, this may look like inviting me to see them in action at an upcoming wedding. For a florist, it may be a simple bribe of a free bouquet (I’m clearly a flower lover)! If they provide a good service and have the other qualities that I mentioned above, AND if I feel like I can put confidence in vouching for them with a client, then I will add them to my list and my clients will have the opportunity to book with them for their upcoming wedding!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Carissa and I am a Master Certified Wedding Planner and the Owner of Positively Charming Weddings! I feel like my story of how I got into the industry is such a classic one. When I was in 6th grade, I saw the movie The Wedding Planner (with J-Lo and Matthew McConaughey) and fell in love with the idea of her job as a wedding planner. I knew in that moment that it was what I wanted to do one day. Fast forward almost 20 years, and I finally made it happen by launching my business full-time instead of doing it part-time alongside my big girl job like I had been doing for the previous 8 years.
As with most planners, I’m extremely detail-oriented, and to be honest, I’m not 100% sure what sets me apart from other planners, other than being a Master Certified Wedding Planner, which isn’t super common. But almost every wedding that I have the pleasure of working with a new vendor, I’m told that I’m one of the best planners they’ve ever worked with. So I assume I’m doing something right! Some of the common things I’m told is that I’m able to get stuff done, but I’m relaxed, friendly and flexible, which I suppose is a rare combination in a planner. In my mind, that’s the only way to be on wedding days, especially because we need to be a good team player and we have to stay flexible for all the little hiccups that naturally come up throughout the day.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Because of the nature of my job, I’m constantly in a state of pivoting. Personally, once we get close to the wedding day (about a month prior), I don’t like having to pivot. It definitely stresses me out to have last minute changes, although I do my best not to let my clients or vendors see it! But then come wedding day, I go into it with a swivel-head mindset because things rarely go exactly to plan. Just this last weekend, I had a wedding and had to put out a literal fire. It was an outside wedding and the wind blew one of the paper table numbers over and it fell onto a votive candle. I saw a little bit of smoke and ran over in time to put it out before it truly burst into flames. But it still left some damage to the tablecloth, which I covered with a centerpiece (easy fix)! I also was lucky enough to have an extra table number. At another wedding, I was working at a hotel that had the reception on a rooftop. It was my first time at that venue, so I didn’t know what to expect, but we always plan for the worst so that we know how to fix these little hiccups. Turns out, it was one of the windiest days of the year and we had centerpieces that were tall and skinny. We also had tabletop paper items, such as table numbers, place cards, and menus. Naturally, everything started blowing away as soon as we set it up. We carry super heavy-duty double stick tape that truly saved the day. We had to tape down most things or find creative solutions for pinning them in place so the wind wouldn’t blow them away. We even had to zip-tie some of the centerpieces together so that they wouldn’t fall over and break. Not ideal, but you do what you have to do when nature takes over. Thankfully, the wind stopped right as we invited guests into the space, and it was truly a beautiful outcome. As much as I may not prefer the constant pivoting, I actually kind of thrive on it on wedding days. It’s kind of fun having a hiccup and trying to figure out how to save the day!
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
This year was the first year that my business hit a lull since opening full-time in 2020. Post-Covid, I was busier than ever with a fully packed schedule. Then, 2024 came around, and I went through a 3-month period where I didn’t get any new bookings. I had just done a website refresh in January, so I thought the inquiries would be flooding in. Hindsight is a wonderful perspective, because I didn’t see it in the moment, but now I’m far enough removed from it to see that there was a huge increase in costs within the whole wedding industry, and a lot of vendors were feeling the decrease. For example, the average 100 guest wedding in Southern California used to cost around $30,000. But now, you really can’t do a “normal” wedding at a venue for less than $40,000+. Towards the end of the 3-month dry spell, I started contemplating that it might be due to wedding costs, and now that I’m further behind it, I can see how that was most likely the issue. But my faith in what I was supposed to be doing with my life was definitely tested as I questioned everything about how I was doing business and whether or not I should continue. It was financially a very difficult time, especially because my family had some big “emergency” expenses that came up within those months. I was lucky to have support from my parents to help us get through it, and thankfully, that dry season did pass, as they usually do. I began speaking with other vendors in the industry, and realized that they all were going through dry spells as well. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone, which is always a nice reminder. Along with that, I had a grandma at a wedding during those months that came up to me at the end of the night. She looked me straight in the eyes, grabbed my hands, and said, “You did such an amazing job”. I thanked her and told her that I appreciated her saying that. She kept holding my hands and telling me over and over again in a slow and soft voice how talented I am and how good of a job I did. It felt like she knew all the doubts I was dealing with and kept repeating the affirmations until they sunk in. I really leaned on that encouraging interaction for that last difficult month. It gave me the fuel I needed to keep going. So here’s a little reminder to everyone that an encouraging word can go a long way!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.positivelycharmingweddings.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/positively_charming_weddings/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PositivelyCharmingWeddings
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/PositivelyCharmingWeddings/
Image Credits
Christine Li Photography