Key Takeaways: Starting Your Planning Business

The one thing

You must bill sixty-eight dollars an hour to take home thirty.

Only about sixty per cent of the hours you work can be sold to anybody — and the rest is marketing, sales, bookkeeping, chasing payment, and consultations with people who book somebody else.

A planner who has never computed that number is pricing against a fantasy.

The ten claims

1. Compute the cost of an hour in six lines: take-home · plus tax · plus fixed costs · = revenue required · ÷ billable hours · = the floor. Step five is where everybody goes wrong, and dividing by hours worked understates the rate by about 65%.

2. The market price is a constraint; your cost of an hour is a floor. If the floor is above the constraint, you have a positioning problem, not a pricing problem.

3. Limited liability does not protect you from your own negligence — insurance does — and it does not survive commingling. The structure is a container, insurance is the protection, and a separate bank account is what makes the container real.

4. Deposits are deferred revenue. A planner who cannot say in ten seconds how much of their balance is theirs does not know whether they are solvent.

5. A profitable event business can run out of money and frequently does. The worked year makes $4,200 and is $5,200 down in June — and that is a normal, well-run seasonal business.

6. Automatic reminders do most of the work in getting paid, because most late payment is somebody who has not looked at their email. And the day-14 chase is a phone call with an offer to restructure.

7. A niche passes the test if somebody who met you once can describe you accurately, in one sentence, three months later. "She does weddings" fails. Ownable niches come from what you have done, a community you belong to, or a competence most planners lack — the third being the most under-used.

8. The first ten clients come from people who already know you and from vendor referrals. Approximately none come from advertising — so spend year one on venues and vendors, not on a website.

9. Your billable ratio is a function of how many clients you have, not how much work you do. Every client costs 12–18 unbillable hours regardless of fee — so twenty-six coordinations carry 390 hours of overhead where seven full plannings carry 105.

10. Leave with three to six events contracted and deposited, the number computed, the foundation set up, and your employer as a future referrer.

Threshold concepts

🚪 Only about sixty per cent of the hours you work can be sold to anybody.

🚪 A profitable event business can run out of money, and frequently does — because the money arrives in a shape unrelated to when the work happens.

🚪 Your billable ratio is a function of how many clients you have, not how much work you do.

Which is the strongest argument in this chapter for fewer, larger engagements — and it has nothing to do with prestige.

The arithmetic to carry

The foundation, and the order

Register · a separate bank account on day one · insurance (public liability and professional indemnity, at the limits venues require) · an accountant before you need one · bookkeeping from transaction one · a contract reviewed by a lawyer where you work.

Plus the seventh: find out what licences or permits apply to you, locally.

And the tools, in purchase order: accounting · e-signature · storage with a folder convention · a calendar you will open · and only then a planning platform — which new planners buy first and should buy fourth.

What this chapter added

Noor Haddadi, seven years running corporate events in-house, leaving to plan weddings at $4,500 for 85 hours.

The plan was 41% underpriced against a required rate of $89.83 — and then arithmetically impossible, because 85 hours was an employee's estimate of a job. Her first event took 148, and twelve weddings at 148 hours is 1,776 billable hours against 900 available.

The 85-hour figure came from corporate work where somebody else did the selling, contracting, invoicing, and client relationship — she had been inside the 60% all the time and had never seen the 40%.

Then the reversal. "What can you do that most wedding planners cannot?" — "I can run a 250-person conference with an AV budget and a procurement department." The competence she was treating as the thing she was leaving behind was her only defensible niche.

Corporate became the primary line and four weddings stayed, at $7,400, because she wanted them.

And the weddings turned out to be load-bearing. Corporate pays at 60 days from an invoice raised after the event; March and April had zero income — and the weddings, kept for pleasure, bridge the Q1 gap exactly. She did not design that; the cash-flow forecast found it.

Deepest cash point: −$11,300 in August, against $21,000 of savings. Survivable and not comfortable, and a planner without a forecast would have found out in August.

She asked her employer to become a client and they said yes — $8,400 for the customer advisory board she had run six times, contracted before her last day, and the largest single thing in her first year.

And year one still lands at $37,600 against a target of $58,000, 352 billable hours short of the plan — stated rather than solved, because the answer is Chapter 37's.

What is still open

Spaced review

From Chapter 2: service levels become the thing your proposal must define with explicit exclusions — because the gap between what a client thinks "partial planning" means and what you meant is where unpaid hours live. A boundary you cannot state in one sentence will be scoped by the client, always upward.

From Chapter 8: scope and exclusions · payment schedule and late payment · cancellation and postponement · limitation of liability · and the right to photograph your own work, which cannot be obtained retrospectively.

From Chapter 9: insurance rather than structure is the actual protection — and venues frequently require specific limits and a certificate naming them, which is a booking blocker if discovered late.

From Chapter 30: the finding log, because year two's advantage over year one is entirely made of things you wrote down.

From Chapter 31: corporate payment terms, arriving in your own accounts — and the three defences: deposits that match your outgoings, milestone billing, and the client contracting vendors directly.

Before Chapter 37

Chapter 37 is pricing, and it takes this chapter's floor and asks what sits on top of it.

Bring the number. Chapter 37's argument is that flat fee, percentage, and hourly are not three pricing models but three different bets about who absorbs uncertainty — and that the one most planners choose is the one that transfers the risk to them.