Case Study 2: One Order, Built From Scratch
🔬 Deep Dive. The complete Wildrye Farm rental order and load-in, built from the floor plan, the guest count, and the caterer's exclusions — with three conflicts the floor plan did not reveal. This is the most detailed single artifact in Part III and the closest thing in this book to watching a planner work.
Tier 3 — Illustrative. All prices are constructed for teaching at a mid-cost US market level. Re-derive locally.
The Inputs
From Chapter 5: 100 expected guests, from ~115 invited. From Chapter 11: 13 rounds of 8, a 15 × 15 dance floor, DJ, one bar, plating area, cake and gift tables — in a 40 × 60 tent for dining and dancing, with the barn as the rain plan and the meadow as the ceremony. From Chapter 12: Sundown Provisions, who include china, glass, flatware, and napkins and exclude table linens, and who cook on propane at 3.2 kW. From Chapter 10 and 8: access noon (negotiated to 7 a.m. at $300), removal by 10 a.m. Sunday, 32-inch interior doorway, two 20-amp circuits, no open flame, amplified music to 10:30.
The Order
💰 Run the Numbers: the complete rental order
Furniture
Item Count Derivation Unit Total 60″ round tables 13 From the plan $18 | $234 Chiavari chairs, reception 104 100 + 4 $6 | $624 Chairs, ceremony 104 See conflict 2 $6 | $624 Cocktail tables 6 1 per 17 $22 | $132 Plating / buffet banquets, 6′ 4 Plating area $12 | $48 Cake table 1 $12 | $12 Gift / escort table 1 $12 | $12 Bar + back-bar 2 1 station $180 | $360 Dance floor, 15 × 15 1 Ch.11 $480 | $480 Subtotal $2,526 Linens
Item Count Size Unit Total Round linens 13 120″ (for 60″ to the floor) $22 | $286 Cocktail linens 6 90″ round $14 | $84 Banquet linens 4 90 × 132 $18 | $72 Cake, gift, bar linens 4 90 × 132 $16 | $64 Napkins 0 Sundown supplies — $0 Subtotal $506 Tabletop
Item Count Note Unit Total China, flatware, table glassware 0 Sundown supplies — $0 Bar glassware 180 See conflict 1 $0.75 | $135 Subtotal $135 Infrastructure
Item Count Note Unit Total Tent, 40 × 60 frame 1 2,400 sq ft $4,400 | $4,400 Tent flooring 2,400 sq ft $2.40/sq ft | | $5,760 Sidewalls, standby 6 Not installed unless needed $45 | $270 Generator, 10 kW + distro 1 Sundown's propane figure $680 | $680 Fuel, 9 hrs ~12 gal $54 Cable ramps 4 Path crossings $18 | $72 Restroom trailer, 2-station 1 Ch.9 $2,100 | $2,100 Trash and recycling 8 1 per 12–15 guests $14 | $112 Hand-wash station 1 Outdoor food service $210 | $210 Path and parking lighting 1 set See conflict 3 $420 | $420 Subtotal $14,078 Total
Furniture $2,526 Linens $506 Tabletop $135 Infrastructure $14,078 Subtotal $17,245 Delivery (2 drops), setup, Sunday collection $1,620 Damage waiver, 9% $1,552 TOTAL $20,417 Against the Chapter 6 allocation of $8,890 for step items plus $1,900 for non-step rentals — $10,790.
The order is $9,627 over. That is the finding, and §"What to do about it" below is the point of this case.
Conflict 1: the glassware gap
Sundown's proposal says "china, glass, flatware, and napkins included." A planner reading that orders no glassware.
What it actually covers: table service at dinner. Water glasses and wine glasses set at 13 tables — perhaps 100–110 pieces.
What it does not cover: the bar, across a 5:15 cocktail hour, dinner service, toasts, and dancing until 10:30.
💰 The arithmetic
At 2.75 glasses per guest across a five-hour event: 100 × 2.75 = 275 glasses.
Sundown's table provision covers ~100.
Gap: 175. Order 180.
Cost of catching it: $135. Cost of missing it: a bar with no clean glassware from roughly 8:40 p.m., and plastic for the last two hours of a wedding where the couple's veto list says "nothing that looks rented."
How it was caught: by asking the question §13.1 says to ask in writing — "does your glassware provision cover bar service throughout, or table service at dinner only?" Sundown's answer, in one line: "Dinner service. You'll want bar glass separately."
Conflict 2: the ceremony chairs
The floor plan does not show this because it is a time problem, not a space problem.
Ceremony: meadow, 4:30. Reception: tent. Cocktail hour: the lawn between them.
Which means guests can see the meadow during cocktail hour.
⚡ The two options, costed
Second set Flip Rental, 104 chairs $624 | $0 Delivery share $180 | $0 Labour $0 4 people × 60 min Labour cost $0 | ~$280 Total $804** | **$280 Visible to guests? No Yes — the meadow is in view Requires named people No Yes, 4 of them, who are not the caterer's staff The flip saves $524 and performs itself on stage.
The resolution chosen: a second set — and the reason is not the money.
At 100 guests with a 4:30 ceremony and a 5:15 cocktail hour, the flip window is 45 minutes. Four people moving 104 chairs 200 feet across grass in 45 minutes is achievable and tight, and the four people available at 5 p.m. at a raw site are the planner, two assistants, and somebody's cousin — which means the planner is carrying chairs during the hour when they should be watching the room.
$524 buys the planner's attention during cocktail hour, which is when the caterer needs a decision, the DJ needs the go-ahead, and the couple's photographs are being taken.
🔍 Why Does This Work? The flip is cheaper on paper and more expensive in practice, and the reason generalizes: labour that has no dedicated owner is charged to the planner's attention.
Any task at a raw site that is costed at "we'll handle it" is, at the moment it happens, competing with everything else the planner is doing. On a day with sixteen hours and no slack, that competition is the actual cost — and it is invisible on a rental order.
The test: for any task costed at $0, ask who specifically does it, and what are they not doing while they do it? If the answer is "me," it is not free.
Conflict 3: the walk to the cars
Not on the floor plan, not in the vendor matrix, not in any template.
Guests park in a field. The event ends at 11:00 p.m. The walk from the tent to the parking field is roughly 220 feet, across grass, in the dark, in September, at the end of an evening with a full bar.
There is no lighting of any kind between the two.
⚠️ The cost of noticing versus not noticing
Path lighting, festoon or bollard, 220 ft $420 A guest falling on uneven ground in the dark Chapter 9's chain of liability The planner's exposure Coordinated the event; specified the layout $420, and it is the single highest-return line in the order.
How it was found: by walking the route. Not by looking at a plan — the plan shows a tent and a parking field and a distance between them, and a distance on a plan is not a walk in the dark.
The site-visit habit that catches it (Chapter 10 §10.3): walk every route a guest will take, and then imagine doing it at 11 p.m. having had three drinks.
What to Do About $9,627
The order is $9,627 over allocation, and this is where the case becomes about judgment rather than counting.
⚡ Options, in order of what they cost the wedding
1. Reconsider the tent entirely — $10,430.
The tent and flooring are $10,160 of a $20,417 order. The barn seats 89 at 12 sq ft (Chapter 11) against 100 expected.
At 89 guests, there is no tent. The entire dinner and dance happens in the barn, the meadow is the ceremony, and the lawn is cocktail hour with a small marquee for shelter.
Cutting 11 guests removes $10,160 of rental.** That is **$924 per guest, which is the most extreme step cost in this entire book and which Chapter 5's step map did not capture because it was built before the tent decision existed.
2. Reduce the flooring — $2,880.
Floor the dining and dance areas only, leaving the perimeter and bar area on ground matting. Saves ~1,200 sq ft. Risk: a wet September and a muddy perimeter.
3. Smaller tent — $1,600.
A 40 × 50 at 2,000 sq ft, which requires losing the plating area from inside the tent and putting the caterer under a separate small marquee outside. Sundown would need to agree, and it is a reasonable ask.
4. Trim the order — $600–$900.
Fewer cocktail tables, standard chairs rather than chiavari ($416), no sidewall standby, cheaper linens. This is the option planners reach for and it is the smallest.
5. Raise the budget.
What was recommended, and why:
📋 The Planner's Script: presenting a $9,627 overage
"The rental order came in at twenty thousand four hundred against about eleven that we'd allocated. I want to show you where it went, because it isn't what you'd think.
The tables, chairs, and linens — everything you'd picture as 'rentals' — are three thousand dollars. The tent, the flooring, the restrooms, the generator, and the path lighting are fourteen thousand. You're not renting furniture. You're renting a building.
So the biggest lever isn't the furniture. There are three real options and I want you to see all of them.
One, and I'm showing it to you because you should know it exists rather than because I'm recommending it: the barn seats eighty-nine. You're expecting a hundred. If we got to eighty-nine, the tent goes away entirely — ten thousand one hundred and sixty dollars. Eleven people, ten thousand dollars. I've never had a number like that to put in front of anyone.
You already cut this list once and I'm not asking you to do it again. I'm telling you what it's worth so it's a choice rather than something you find out afterward.
Two: a smaller tent. Forty by fifty instead of forty by sixty, with Sundown's kitchen under a separate small marquee outside rather than taking two hundred square feet inside. That's sixteen hundred on the tent and about twelve hundred on flooring.
Three: floor less of it. Floor the dining and dance areas and use ground matting at the perimeter and behind the bar. Twenty-eight hundred. The risk is a wet September and a muddy edge, and I'd want sidewalls on standby if we do it.
Two and three together are five thousand six hundred. That leaves about four thousand, and I think the honest answer is that some of it is a second conversation with Sam's parents and some of it comes out of the design budget."
They took options two and three, kept the hundred guests, and found $2,800 — half from a second parental contribution and half from the floral allocation, which the couple had ranked sixth.
The tent stayed. The plating area moved outside under a 20 × 20 marquee, which Sundown preferred anyway — a field kitchen with its own cover and no guests walking past it is better for them than a corner of the dining tent.
The Revised Order
💰 Run the Numbers: 100 guests, 40 × 50 tent, partial flooring
Original Revised Δ Tent, 40 × 60 → 40 × 50 $4,400 | $2,800 −$1,600 Flooring, 2,400 → 1,450 sq ft $5,760 | $3,480 −$2,280 Kitchen marquee, 20 × 20 (new) — $780 | +$780 Ground matting, perimeter — $340 | +$340 Sidewalls, standby → 6, and now genuinely needed $270 | $270 — Everything else $6,815 | $6,815 — Subtotal $17,245** | **$14,485 −$2,760 Delivery, setup, Sunday collection $1,620 | $1,620 — Damage waiver 9% $1,552 | $1,304 −$248 TOTAL $20,417** | **$17,409 −$3,008 Against $10,790 allocated: still $6,619 over.
Closed by: $2,800 found** (parental contribution and floral reallocation), and **$3,819 absorbed by re-cutting the Chapter 6 allocation — the rentals line was under-allocated from the beginning, because Chapter 6's benchmark treated a raw site's infrastructure as a rentals line rather than as a venue line (§6.2's raw-site benchmark error, arriving as an invoice).
That last point is the honest finding of this case. The order was not extravagant. The allocation was wrong, and it was wrong in exactly the way Chapter 6 warned about and the planner nonetheless did not catch — because a benchmark error is invisible until something is priced against it.
🔍 Why Does This Work? The under-allocation is worth dwelling on, because it is the most common structural budget error at a raw site and it survived a careful Chapter 6 build.
Chapter 6 §6.2 says: allocate venue and rentals together at 18–30% and then split. At Wildrye, venue ($5,040) plus rentals ($10,790) is $15,830 — **38% of $42,000**, already above the top of the band.
A planner who had run that single check in month two would have known, before any vendor quoted anything, that this venue's infrastructure load exceeded what the budget could carry — and the gap conversation of Chapter 6 §6.7 would have had a fourth path in it: the site itself is the problem.
The check takes eleven seconds and it was not run. That is not carelessness; it is what happens when a rule appears in a chapter as a caution and not in a worksheet as a line.
What Carries Forward
100 expected guests. A 40 × 50 tent with 1,450 sq ft of floor, sidewalls on standby, and the kitchen outside under a separate marquee. The barn remains the rain plan and now seats 89 against 100 — which is a real shortfall and is Chapter 28's problem, not this chapter's.
The load-in still runs the full dependency chain, still needs the $300 early access, and now has one additional item: the kitchen marquee, which goes up in parallel with the main tent and is not on the critical path.
Discussion Questions
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The tent decision was worth $924 per guest. Chapter 5 argued that guest count is the master variable; this is that claim at an extreme. Is there a level at which a step cost is so large that a planner should raise it before the client has invited anyone?
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The flip was cheaper on paper and rejected, on the grounds that "$524 buys the planner's attention." Construct the case that this is the planner buying their own convenience with the client's money. Then respond.
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The path lighting was found by walking the route, not by reading a plan. Design the site-visit routine that would catch it every time — and be specific about what "walk it at 11 p.m. with three drinks" means as a checkable procedure.
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The $2,800 was found half from a second parental contribution and half from the floral allocation, which the couple ranked sixth. Chapter 3 said a second ask of a payer belongs to the client, not the planner. Did the planner overstep by proposing it?
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The case concludes that the allocation was wrong rather than the order extravagant, and that an eleven-second check in month two would have caught it. Design the worksheet line that makes that check unavoidable — and say why a caution in a chapter is not enough.
Mini-Project
Build one complete order for a real event.
Pick a real venue in your market — ideally a raw site — and a plausible guest count. Get an actual rental price list (exercise C.1). Then build the whole order: furniture, linens, tabletop, infrastructure, delivery, and waiver.
Then do the three things this case did:
- Find the gap. Whatever the caterer says is "included," ask what it does not cover. There is always one.
- Find the time problem. Something on your order is a scheduling decision disguised as a purchasing one — a flip, a second delivery, a standby item with a deadline.
- Walk the guest routes and find what is not on the plan.
Finally, compute the single largest step in your order — the one thing whose removal saves the most — and express it as dollars per guest.
If that number is over $500 per guest, it belongs in a conversation before the invitations go out, and knowing it is the most useful thing this chapter can give you.
References
Tier 3 — Illustrative. All prices, counts, and the Reyes–Whitfield scenario are constructed for teaching at a mid-cost US market level.
Tier 2 — Attributed practice. Tent flooring at $2–$4/sq ft installed, glassware at 2.5–3 per guest, trash receptacles at 1 per 12–15 guests, and damage waivers at 7–12% all reflect commonly reported industry patterns and vary by supplier and market.
Related chapters: Working capacity and the barn's 89 — Chapter 11 §11.1. Guest count as the master variable — Chapter 5. The caterer's inclusions — Chapter 12 CS2. The budget allocation this is measured against — Chapter 6. Barn lighting, which the released money funded — Chapter 18. The rain plan the barn now also serves — Chapter 28.