We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Krystina Stefani a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Krystina , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

My friend Jessica was planning her wedding to Dave and she was very overwhelmed. She had recently lost mom. Although she was excited to marry her Dave, the thought of planning her wedding without her mom was unbearable. Since I was in the industry and just started my company, I offered to help her plan her special day and use the contacts I had in the industry. I connected her with a florist and a linen rental, which helped paved the way to the clear vision Jessica had of her wedding day. Once it all started coming together, she started getting more excited for her wedding day. It became easier for her to plan her wedding without her mom because I was there to help her along during this difficult, but exciting time in her life. That is when I knew wedding planning was for me. I not only get to plan and design beautiful weddings, but also get to help my clients during the most special time of their lives.

Because of how much Jessica appreciated the help from me, which I would do over again, she referred me to her friend Kelly. Kelly was my first paying client. I learned a lot of what not to do during Kelly’s wedding in terms of pricing myself and quoting rentals. As a wedding planner starting out, it is hard to justify how to price yourself. You have to consider not only the day of, but the value in your time during the preplanning process and day of coordinating. For Kelly’s wedding, I made mistakes on the quote for the rentals and had to eat the cost, which is every business owners worst nightmare. However, it was a great way to learn and doublecheck what is coming from vendors.

Both Jessica and Kelly showed me how much I love doing what I do and that I want to build my business. After both of their weddings, Jessica and Kelly referred me to other people and my business began to grow even more. I learned how to price myself fairly and properly quote out rentals. It wasn’t until probably year 5 that I made a pure profit from my business since a lot of my revenue went right back to building my company to get to where my business is today.

Krystina , 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?

I started as a server in a banquet hall in high school. One of my friends begged me to work with her at the hall. As a sophomore in high school, weddings and banquets were not even on my radar. My true passion at the time was fashion and I thought that was where my future career was going. I fell in love with weddings because I got to see so many during the summer. The owner of the banquet hall noticed my passion and my work ethic and started showing me the ropes of what it was like start to finish in banquets from meeting with the clients, putting the menu together, and all the small details in between. I learned how to communicate with vendors, setting up and communicating setup times, where they needed to go, which doors to load in and out of, when setup needed to be completed, and the overall flow of the reception from the back of the house.

After that, the economy was not that great and weddings started to not be as frequent. I wanted to explore other avenues in the industry. I would later work for a linen and rental company. I learned about the ins and outs of rentals, quoting, availability, what can be held, and how it goes from an order to fulfillment to preparation of the order. After that, I went to work for a floral company to learn that part of the industry. All of this came back to planning because it all started in banquets where a lot of planning takes place.

Over the years, I have honed my skills and developed my own unique style of planning and how I represent myself and my clients both before the wedding and the wedding day. It has always been important to me to build relationships. The relationships I have built over the last 18 years have blossomed into friendships that have inspired me to be a better person not only in the industry but in my personal life.

I am most proud of my persistence to keep on going. This industry is not for the week. There are lots of ups and downs. The downs could have determined my fate and it would have been easier for me to just give up a lot of the time. It was always seeing my couples on their wedding day and seeing the joy and excitement on their face when they saw all the details we have been planning come together that makes it all worth it. The best feeling is not only seeing the happiness on the couples face, but having guests come up to you to say that it was a beautiful wedding and such a wonderful event to attend.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The pandemic was a huge pivoting point. We were not able to do events, but it sparked other ways to make money in the industry and pushed me to utilize my skillset in a different way. It was a learning curve to not rely on one stream of income, but to have many. Right now I have the studio and the planning business, which is two streams of income. Learning different ways to bring in money and not depend on one aspect of the business to supply income is important and a shift because you never know what is going to happen in the economy or if a pandemic happens and shuts down everything.

How did you build your audience on social media?

There was a shift in Instagram and it became more of a space for business accounts, when it used to be for more personal accounts. I started to build my following when in 2019 when Instagram Stories was released and there was a big shift in business accounts. In the beginning of 2020 before the lockdown, I was really focused on gathering professional images, how I was going to use them to market, and then everything came to a screeching halt. During this time, a lot of people were going on Instagram Lives. At this time I just happen to start filming YouTube videos with vendors and the idea came to me. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, instead of focusing on YouTube I could focus on Lives. This is when I created Coffee with Krystina Lynn and Friends. Each morning I would highlight different vendors and talk for 30 minutes, answer questions, and have a conversation just like we would if we were friends and grabbing coffee in person. After this, my page grew by 500 followers, which was huge. It helped scale my business more because I had more people following my page, liking my posts, and interacting with content even after the Lives stopped. My page continues to grow slowly, but the right people are following my page.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://krystinalynn.com/
• Instagram: @krystinalynnweddingandevents

Image Credits
Dave & Ang Penny Ralene Photography Delaney Viau Photo