We recently connected with Jenna Buenger and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jenna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.
The wedding industry is loaded with options to adorn the celebration with anything a couple could possibly want. Weddings have evolved from “simple but elegant” to “meticulously coordinated and extravagant”. Such is life. But something our company has done from the very beginning is prioritize the relationship. We tell couples that we are hired by them to make sure they have a truly unforgettable wedding day but we ultimately care more about their marriage. During the wedding planning process we tell couples that if they’re not having fun and experiencing stress, they need to refocus. Most businesses are contractual and product based. We offer personal service and our relationship with the client is our product. So, it’s extremely important that we treat our relationship with them and their relationship with each other as the number one priority.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Mitch and Jenna Weddings offers wedding planning and officiating services for brides and grooms in Wisconsin and Illinois. Our company started 11 years ago as an offering for family and friends and quickly became reputable with local wedding venues and vendors and grew from there. The best gift a bride can give herself is a wedding planner. No matter how organized and productive a bride may be, there is nothing as relaxing as showing up on the day of your wedding knowing that everything is being handled and managed by someone else. And we also believe that the most important part of your wedding day is the ceremony. If that doesn’t go the way it should, everything else seems to lack. We’re most proud of the reputation our company has earned for great customer service. Our team goes above and beyond every weekend to give their couples an even greater experience than they thought they were paying for. While we wish every wedding we attended went on without any mistakes, the truth is any event large in scale will have certain details fall through the cracks. Our job is to make sure that those mistakes get addressed immediately. And if it means our team has to fill in for a job they weren’t expecting to do, they do it. Our wedding planning services cover the coordination of all vendors, including the venue and so we end up representing their services by association. Which means, if another hired vendor shows up and fails to provide what they were contracted for, even though it has nothing to do with our services, it reflects on us. The opposite is also true. If we do everything we can to make the entire experience successful for the Bride and groom, even the parts we aren’t truly responsible for, it reflects well on us. And at the end of the day the greatest compliment we could get is “thank you”.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
Before we started offering wedding planning services full time, I was still employed as a full time nurse. I was working my full time job at the hospital, raising 3 boys in elementary school and then COVID hit. My job became part of the epicenter for chaos in the peak months of COVID. My children were doing school from home and so now I had to become their teacher too. My husband was working full time as a firefighter, riding the ambulance and experiencing COVID in the same worst way as I was in the hospital. And to make matters worse, the city he serves in had a weeks worth of rioting that burned buildings to the ground in their city for days. It was after this season of life that I knew I couldn’t and wouldn’t do it all. I had to focus my energy on something that was sustainable long term, healthy for my family, my marriage and my children, and offered me the flexibility to grow something for myself. I did not go to school for business and so starting a business was scary to me, especially considering I wasn’t sure where my next paycheck would come from. But through trial and error, lots of failure and trying again, we grew from a start up wedding planning services of 2 people to a team of 10 in just two years.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Honesty and integrity and treating people with respect. It may seem over simplified and cliche, but it’s the truth. Everyone will experience a moment or several in their business when they face an ethical dilemma. It was crucial for us that we made decisions with integrity and honesty at every crossroads of conflict. It’s much easier to cheat. It’s much easier to be dishonest. The temptation to get ahead looms over every business because profit is powerful. We have had to make hard decisions that hurt our bank account. But it paid dividends in the realm of reputation. Every time we owned up to a mistake, and sometimes paid for it, we gained more trust with our clients. We make fewer mistakes than we did when we started, but it was because we operated on these principles early on that we don’t suffer from mistakes of dishonesty today and our clients and our counterparts in the industry trust us.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mitchandjenna.com
- Instagram: @mitchandjenna
Image Credits
Brittany Schmidt Photography
Nicole Morisco Photography