Quiz: What a Planner Actually Does

Target: 70% or higher. Answer before opening each disclosure.

Section 1: Multiple Choice (1 point each)

1. Which four activities appear in every service tier?

  • A) Budget, design, vendor sourcing, event day
  • B) Timeline, vendor confirmations, rehearsal, event day
  • C) Discovery, budget, timeline, event day
  • D) Contracts, floor plan, rehearsal, wrap-up
Answer **B) Timeline, vendor confirmations, rehearsal, event day.** *Why B:* These are the floor of the profession — whatever else you sell, you always sell these. It is why the fee gap between month-of and full-service is narrower than the hour gap. *Why not A, C, D:* Budget, design, discovery, sourcing, contracts, and floor plans all drop out at the month-of tier. *Reference:* §2.1

2. In the 194-hour full-service breakdown, the largest single block is:

  • A) The event day
  • B) Client communication
  • C) Vendor sourcing
  • D) Timeline construction
Answer **C) Vendor sourcing** — 32 hours, and 46 when contracts are added. *Why C:* Nine categories at ~3.5 hours each: shortlist, RFP, comparison, meeting. Almost entirely invisible to the client and the first thing beginners underestimate. *Why not A:* The event day is 16 hours — about 8% of the engagement. *Why not B:* Client communication is 30 hours, second largest. *Why not D:* Timeline is 14. *Reference:* §2.2

3. "Day-of coordination" cannot be performed as described because:

  • A) Insurance will not cover a planner engaged that late
  • B) Running a day requires knowing what is supposed to happen, which requires 25–45 hours of prior work
  • C) Venues prohibit outside coordinators from arriving on the day
  • D) The rehearsal is the day before
Answer **B) Running a day requires knowing what is supposed to happen, which requires 25–45 hours of prior work.** *Why B:* Contracts must be read, vendors confirmed, and an executable timeline built. That happens before the day. Someone who genuinely does none of it is improvising, not coordinating. *Why not A and C:* Not the issue. *Why not D:* True but incidental — the rehearsal is one of the pre-day tasks, not the reason. *Reference:* §2.3

4. Which is not one of the three predictable failures in a couple-built timeline?

  • A) No load-in period
  • B) Photography given the leftover time
  • C) Zero buffer between items
  • D) The ceremony scheduled too early in the day
Answer **D) The ceremony scheduled too early in the day.** *Why D:* Ceremony timing is a real problem (Chapter 23 covers light), but it is not one of the three systematic failures. *Why not A, B, C:* These are the three. Every one of them is systematic — they arise from the same blind spot, which is that couples build the timeline from the parts of the day they will personally experience. *Reference:* §2.3

5. "Partial planning" is dangerous to scope primarily because:

  • A) Partial clients are more difficult than full-service clients
  • B) It is a description of the client's progress, not of the planner's work
  • C) It is illegal to advertise in some states
  • D) Insurers will not cover partial engagements
Answer **B) It is a description of the client's progress, not of the planner's work.** *Why B:* Two clients using the word identically can present jobs differing threefold in hours. The fix is to scope by deliverable — how many vendor categories, how many revisions — never by adjective. *Why not A:* No evidence for this, and it is beside the point. *Why not C, D:* Not real. *Reference:* §2.1

6. The chapter's recommended response to a scope-creep request has two parts. They are:

  • A) Refuse, then explain your rates
  • B) Agree, then invoice afterward
  • C) Yes to the person, terms on the work
  • D) Defer the answer, then consult your contract
Answer **C) Yes to the person, terms on the work.** *Why C:* "Happy to — that's outside what we scoped, so it'd be an add-on. Want me to send you what it'd cost, or would you rather handle it and I'll tell you what to watch for?" The relationship is never in question; only the work has terms. *Why not A:* Reads as rejection and invites a negotiation about your value. *Why not B:* Invoicing for unagreed work destroys trust faster than declining it. *Why not D:* Silence and deferral turn the request into an expectation and then a grievance. *Reference:* §2.5

7. When a client cannot afford the indicated service tier, the chapter says the amateur move is to:

  • A) Decline the engagement
  • B) Discount the fee
  • C) Front-load the hours
  • D) Substitute a deliverable for a service
Answer **B) Discount the fee.** *Why B:* Reducing price without reducing work teaches both parties that your price was arbitrary, and you absorb the entire gap in unpaid hours. *Why not A, C, D:* All three are legitimate professional responses. Declining is honest; front-loading puts hours where leverage is highest; substituting a deliverable trades a service for an artifact. *Reference:* §2.9

8. The five parts of a scope of service are:

  • A) Inclusions, exclusions, pricing, timeline, signature
  • B) Inclusions, exclusions, boundaries and terms, client responsibilities, change mechanism
  • C) Services, fees, cancellation, force majeure, liability
  • D) Discovery, design, logistics, execution, wrap-up
Answer **B) Inclusions, exclusions, boundaries and terms, client responsibilities, change mechanism.** *Why B:* Most planners write only the first, which is why clients are so often surprised. *Why not C:* Those are contract clauses (Chapter 8), a different document with a different job. *Why not A, D:* Not the structure. *Reference:* §2.6

9. Why does the chapter recommend à la carte services that do not consume a Saturday?

  • A) They are more enjoyable to deliver
  • B) They do not compete for the scarcest resource in the business
  • C) They require no contract
  • D) They convert to full-service at a higher rate
Answer **B) They do not compete for the scarcest resource in the business.** *Why B:* Chapter 1 established that the binding constraint is event days, not hours. Revenue that consumes hours but no Saturdays sits entirely outside the ceiling. *Why not D:* Consulting does convert well, but that is a secondary benefit, not the structural argument. *Why not A, C:* Not the reason, and C is bad advice regardless. *Reference:* §2.7

10. In the tent failure, the root cause was:

  • A) The tent company was unreliable
  • B) The venue's access rules were unreasonable
  • C) No one owned the intersection of the documents
  • D) The couple booked too large a tent
Answer **C) No one owned the intersection of the documents.** *Why C:* Every individual contract was fine. The venue permitted 2 p.m. access; the tent needed four hours; both facts were true and lived in separate documents nobody had read together. That intersection is exactly where the planner's value lives. *Why not A, B, D:* Nobody behaved badly. That is the point — this failure requires no villain. *Reference:* §2.3

11. In the §2.5 scope-creep table, one of the nine requests was genuinely inside scope. Which?

  • A) The rehearsal dinner
  • B) The welcome bags
  • C) Managing the mother-in-law who is calling the client directly
  • D) The reformatted budget for the client's mother
Answer **C) Managing the mother-in-law who is calling the client directly.** *Why C:* Standing between the client and family pressure is core planner work — it is Chapter 1's threshold concept in practice. That is precisely what makes creep difficult to police: it is a mix, not a stream of unreasonable asks. *Why not A, B, D:* Rehearsal dinners, DIY assembly, and reformatted deliverables for third parties are standard exclusions. *Reference:* §2.5

12. On the §2.8 tier matrix, the Reyes–Whitfield engagement scores 15, indicating:

  • A) Month-of coordination
  • B) Partial planning
  • C) Full-service
  • D) Decline
Answer **C) Full-service** (12–16 band). *Why C:* Long runway, raw site, everything unbooked, high stakeholder complexity, and real logistical distance. And — critically — this tells you what the engagement *needs*, not what the client will *buy*. At $42,000 total, full-service fees are 11–14% of everything they have. *Reference:* §2.8

Section 2: True/False with Justification (1 point each)

13. A planner who sells "day-of coordination" is being dishonest with the client.

Answer **Mostly false, and the nuance is the point.** The planner is usually not deceiving the client — most intend to and do deliver real service. The dishonesty, such as it is, is structural and industry-wide: the *name* describes a service that cannot exist, the price is set against the name, and the planner absorbs the gap in unpaid hours. The victim of the naming convention is generally the planner, not the client. The fix is honest scoping and honest naming, not accusing colleagues of fraud.

14. A clearly bounded scope makes a planner seem less generous and therefore less appealing to clients.

Answer **False.** The opposite is closer to true. Defined scope reads as professional competence and lets the client plan around known edges. Undefined scope reads as availability, generates guessing, and produces disappointment on a delay when the guesses turn out wrong. The generous-seeming planner is usually the one who becomes unreachable in month eleven.

15. Because timeline, confirmations, rehearsal, and event day are common to every tier, month-of coordination should be priced at roughly one-third of full-service, matching the hour ratio.

Answer **False.** Hour ratios alone under-price month-of. The common activities carry most of the *risk* and all of the event-day exposure, and month-of consumes a Saturday exactly as full-service does — the scarcest resource is spent identically. Pure hours-based pricing ignores both risk and opportunity cost. (This is exercise B.5.)

16. If a client misses three decision deadlines and a vendor's date is released, that is the planner's failure.

Answer **False, provided the scope document did its job.** Part 4 of the scope — client responsibilities — should state a response window and note that delays may affect availability and pricing. With that in place, the conversation is a reference to an agreed obligation. Without it, you are raising a rule under pressure and it will land as blame. The failure, if any, is in the document written in month one.

17. The event day is the most valuable part of what a full-service planner delivers.

Answer **False as stated, though clients believe it.** The event day is 16 of 194 hours — about 8%. It is the most *visible* part and the part with the least recoverable failure mode, so it carries disproportionate risk. But the value is overwhelmingly created in the 178 hours that make the day executable, and much of the highest-leverage work happens in the first three months. Closing this perception gap is the central communication problem of the profession.

Section 3: Short Answer (2 points each)

18. A client says: "Our venue has a coordinator, so we're all set." Give your response in four to five sentences, without disparaging the venue.

Sample Answer "That's genuinely useful — a good venue coordinator makes an event much easier, and I'd want to work closely with yours. Their job is the building: their staff, their rules, their space, and they're accountable to the venue for all of it. Mine is everything that isn't the building — your other eight vendors, the budget, the timeline that gets all of them moving together, and being the person your family comes to at four o'clock when something changes. The clearest way I can put it is that if the caterer doesn't show up, the venue coordinator has a problem and I have a job. Would it help if I sent you a one-page breakdown of who does what, so you can look at it without me in the room?" *Rubric — full credit requires:* - Affirms the coordinator's genuine value first - Frames the distinction as *scope of accountability*, not effort or quality - Names at least two specific things outside the venue's remit - Ends by offering to leave / lowering pressure - No disparagement of the venue anywhere

19. Explain why "unlimited email support" is a scoping failure, and rewrite it.

Sample Answer It cannot be exceeded, so it cannot be scoped. It is a commitment to permanent availability that you will honor for some months and then stop honoring, and the inconsistency damages trust more than any stated limit would. It also gives the client no way to calibrate — they cannot tell whether an 11 p.m. Sunday text is reasonable, so they guess, and their guess will sometimes be wrong in a way that feels to them like you let them down. **Rewrite:** "Email response within one business day, Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. Within 60 days of the event, text is available for time-sensitive matters." *Rubric:* Must identify unmeasurability, must connect it to inconsistent honoring, and the rewrite must specify both a response time and a window.

20. Describe the "front-load" strategy for closing a gap between what an engagement needs and what a client can pay, and explain why it works.

Sample Answer Sell an intensive engagement in the first three months — budget construction, venue evaluation, and the major vendor contracts — then a coordination package starting eight weeks out, with the middle months left to the client. It works because planning leverage is not evenly distributed across the timeline. The venue decision, the budget architecture, and the largest contracts are made early, they are the most expensive to get wrong, and they constrain everything afterward. A dollar of planner time in month two prevents more damage than a dollar in month eight. Case Study 1 in Chapter 1 is precisely this failure: a coordinator arrived at the correct time for the service purchased and far too late for the decisions that needed her. *Rubric:* Must describe the two-block structure and must explain the *uneven distribution of leverage* as the mechanism, not merely "early is better."

Section 4: Applied Scenario (5 points)

21. You sold month-of coordination for $2,400, starting at week −8. You are now at week −7. Reading the contracts, you find: the venue permits load-in at 1 p.m. for a 4:30 ceremony; the couple has rented a 40×60 tent (four-hour install); the photographer's contract covers 6 hours starting at 2 p.m.; sunset is at 6:52; and there are 14 family photo groupings with no time allocated. The couple has no rain plan and the forecast is irrelevant this far out.

Produce: (a) your gap report to the couple — the actual text, three to six bullets; (b) which of these is the most urgent and why; (c) whether any of the fixes fall outside your scope, and what you do about that; (d) the sentence you use to raise (c) without souring the engagement.

Sample Answer **(a) Gap report:** > Hi both — I've been through everything and it's in good shape overall. Five things I need to flag, in order of urgency: > > 1. **Tent vs. venue access.** The tent takes about four hours to install and the venue permits vendor access at 1:00. Ceremony is 4:30. That does not fit. I need to ask the venue for earlier access — likely a fee — or move the ceremony. I'd like to make that call this week. > 2. **Photography coverage vs. sunset.** Coverage runs 2:00–8:00. Sunset is 6:52, which is your best light of the day and lands in the middle of dinner as currently planned. We should either move dinner or accept that the golden-hour photos don't happen. > 3. **Family photos.** Fourteen groupings is roughly 35–45 minutes with a photographer who moves fast. There is no time allocated for them at present. We need to place them, and I'd recommend before the ceremony if you're open to seeing each other first. > 4. **No rain plan.** We need one, and we need to decide now who makes the call and by when — not on the day. > 5. **Guaranteed count.** Your caterer's guarantee is due in three weeks. I want to be sure we know the number by then. > > Items 1 and 4 I'd like to solve this week. The rest we can take in order. **(b) Most urgent:** the tent/access conflict. It is the only one with an external party whose availability is finite, it may require renegotiating the venue contract, and every other fix depends on the ceremony time, which this may move. Everything else is internal scheduling. **(c) Outside scope?** Yes — negotiating a change to a *signed venue contract* is contract work, not coordination, and depending on the outcome may require a paid early-access fee and a revised agreement. Rebuilding the timeline is inside scope (it is one of the four universal activities). The rain plan is arguably inside — it is part of the run sheet. The photography restructuring is inside. So the honest position: four of the five are yours; the venue renegotiation is an add-on. In practice, most planners will make this call for free because it is one phone call and refusing looks absurd. The right move is to **do it and say so**, which buys standing for the larger boundary later. **(d) The sentence:** > "I'm going to make the venue call myself — it's outside coordination strictly speaking, but it's one conversation and I'd rather just handle it. If it turns into a contract renegotiation I'll come back to you before I spend more time on it." *Rubric:* | Criterion | 0 | 1 | 2 | |---|---|---|---| | Gap report (a) | Missing items or no prioritization | Lists the gaps | Lists, prioritizes, states what *you* will do and when, and asks for nothing the client cannot answer | | Urgency reasoning (b) | Picks arbitrarily | Picks the tent | Picks the tent *and* explains external-party dependency and downstream effect on ceremony time | | Scope analysis (c) | Ignores scope | Notes something is outside | Correctly separates the four in-scope items from the contract renegotiation | | The sentence (d) | Confrontational or absent | Raises it | Does the small thing free, names it as free, and pre-places the boundary for the larger version | *Scoring: (a)=2, (b)=1, (c)=1, (d)=1.*

Scoring and Next Steps

Score Assessment What to do
Under 50% Needs review Re-read §2.1, §2.3, §2.6. Redo Part A.
50–70% Partial Review flagged sections. Do B.1, B.2, B.3.
70–85% Solid Proceed to Chapter 3 — but write the scope document (C.1) first.
Over 85% Strong Proceed. Deep Dive: case-study-02.md and exercises E.1–E.2.

Regardless of score: complete exercise C.1. Chapter 3's consultation assumes you have a scope of service to describe out loud.