Quiz: Starting Your Planning Business
21 items: 12 multiple choice · 5 true/false · 3 short answer · 1 applied scenario with rubric.
Answers in <details>. Attempt each before opening.
Part 1 — Multiple Choice (12)
Q1. Roughly what share of a solo planner's working hours can be sold to a client?
(a) About 90% (b) About 75% (c) About 60% (d) About 30%
Answer
**(c)** for an established solo planner — **35–50% in year one.** The rest is marketing, sales, bookkeeping, invoicing, chasing payment, and consultations with people who book somebody else. **Anybody who tells you 90% is not counting something.**Q2. In the worked example, a planner must bill $68.25 an hour to take home:
(a) $68.25 (b) $52 (c) $30 (d) $12
Answer
**(c).** $81,900 of revenue over 1,200 billable hours, **against 2,000 hours actually worked.** **The required rate and the take-home differ by more than a factor of two.**Q3. The step in the cost-of-an-hour method that everybody gets wrong:
(a) Estimating fixed costs (b) Adding tax (c) Dividing by hours worked instead of hours billable (d) Choosing a target take-home
Answer
**(c)** — and it **understates the required rate by about 65%.**Q4. Limited liability does not:
(a) Separate business and personal assets (b) Protect you from your own negligence (c) Affect how you are taxed (d) Require any ongoing administration
Answer
**(b)** — **that is what professional indemnity insurance is for.** 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.**Q5. $4,000 of deposits in February for September weddings is:
(a) Revenue (b) Profit (c) Deferred revenue — money received and not yet earned (d) Working capital you may use freely
Answer
**(c).** It is owed to clients and owed onward to vendors. **A planner who cannot say in ten seconds how much of their balance is theirs does not know whether they are solvent.**Q6. In §36.5's worked year, the business is:
(a) Loss-making and solvent (b) Profitable across the year and insolvent in May and June (c) Profitable and solvent throughout (d) Failing
Answer
**(b)** — **$4,200 of profit and a −$5,200 balance in June.** **And that is a normal, well-run seasonal event business**, not a failing one.Q7. The element of a payment structure that does most of the work:
(a) The non-refundable retainer (b) Automatic reminders (c) The late-payment interest clause (d) Milestone billing
Answer
**(b).** **Most late payment is not refusal; it is a person who has not looked at their email**, and an automated reminder resolves the overwhelming majority without anybody having a conversation.Q8. The test of a real niche:
(a) It has a high price point (b) Somebody who met you once can describe you accurately, in one sentence, three months later (c) Few competitors serve it (d) It matches your aesthetic
Answer
**(b).** *"She does weddings"* fails. **"She does the ones with three families and four languages and she's brilliant at it"** is a referral engine.Q9. Ownable niches come from three places. The most under-used is:
(a) Something you have already done a lot of (b) A community or culture you belong to (c) A competence most planners lack (d) A price segment
Answer
**(c)** — a language, a technical skill, accessibility expertise, a production background. **The most under-used and the most defensible.**Q10. Where do the first ten clients mostly come from?
(a) A website and social media (b) Paid advertising (c) People who already know you, and vendor referrals (d) Past clients
Answer
**(c)** — **four to six from people who know you, two to four from vendor referrals, and approximately none from advertising.** Past clients become the largest source by year three and are zero in year one. **So spend business-development time on venues and vendors, not on a website.**Q11. A planning platform should be bought:
(a) First, to establish good process (b) Fourth — after accounting, e-signature, storage, and a calendar (c) Never (d) Only by multi-planner firms
Answer
**(b)**, and not until client four or five. **A platform bought in month one encodes somebody else's workflow into a business that does not yet have one** — and it hides the seams. **A spreadsheet you built is transparent.**Q12. In §36.8a's arithmetic, twenty-six coordination clients versus seven full-planning clients differ in unbillable overhead by roughly:
(a) No difference (b) 60 hours (c) 285 hours (d) 900 hours
Answer
**(c).** **Every client costs 12–18 unbillable hours regardless of fee** — enquiry, consultation, proposal, contract, onboarding, invoicing, chasing, debrief. **Your billable ratio is a function of how many clients you have, not how much work you do.**Part 2 — True or False (5)
Q13. If everyone locally charges $3,500 for full planning, that is what you should charge.
Answer
**False.** **The market price is a constraint; your cost of an hour is a floor** — and a meaningful fraction of the people charging $3,500 are not making money. **If the floor is above the constraint, you have a positioning problem, not a pricing problem.**Q14. Coordination is the easiest service level to build a viable business on.
Answer
**False, and it is the opposite of what new planners assume.** It is less work per event and **not less work per dollar** — twenty-six events is twenty-six sets of vendors, run sheets, Saturdays, and clients, **and the unbillable load scales with client count.** **It is a good place to start and a hard place to stay.**Q15. A business that made a profit over the year did not have a cash-flow problem.
Answer
**False.** **Profitability and solvency are different questions**, and in a seasonal event business the money arrives in a shape unrelated to when the work happens. **The worked year makes $4,200 and is $5,200 down in June.**Q16. A styled shoot is an effective way to generate bookings.
Answer
**False as a business strategy.** **A shoot demonstrates aesthetic taste, and almost nobody hires a planner for aesthetic taste** — they hire because somebody told them to. **Do it for the relationships built on the day, and count the images as a byproduct.**Q17. You should have your contract reviewed by a lawyer before your first client.
Answer
**True.** A few hundred dollars, against discovering the gap during a dispute. **A template from the internet is a starting point and not a contract**, and it is the one document in the core set that must not be one.Part 3 — Short Answer (3)
Q18. Give the cost-of-an-hour method in full and explain why the required rate exceeds the take-home so dramatically.
Answer
**Take-home · plus self-employment or corporate tax · plus fixed business costs · = revenue required · ÷ billable hours (hours worked × billable ratio) · = the floor.** **Two multipliers separate the rate from the earnings.** **Overhead**, which adds fixed costs and tax on top of what you want to keep. **And the billable ratio**, because only about sixty per cent of the hours you work can be sold to anybody. **$60,000 take-home + $9,800 tax + $12,100 fixed = $81,900 over 1,200 billable hours = $68.25 an hour billed, $30 an hour earned.**Q19. Explain deferred revenue and the two-account protocol, and say why it matters.
Answer
**A deposit is money received and not yet earned** — owed back to the client if things go wrong and owed onward to vendors either way. **It sits in the account looking like success.** **The protocol: a second account, and unearned client money lives there. It moves across as it is earned, on a written schedule.** **It matters for two reasons.** **Solvency** — spending deferred revenue is the mechanism by which most small event businesses get into trouble. **And structure** — a company whose owner mixes client money, business money, and personal money has weakened the separation their structure exists to create.Q20. Where do a new planner's first ten clients come from, and what should year one's business development actually be?
Answer
**Four to six from people who already know you. Two to four from vendor referrals. Zero from past clients, since there are none. Zero to two inbound, and those were usually half-referred already. Approximately none from paid advertising.** **So: spend the time on venues and vendors.** **A venue coordinator sees twenty planners a year and can name three**, and being one of the three is worth more than any marketing spend a new business has. **What gets you there: leave their venue better than you found it · send them photographs of it, unprompted · be easy on the phone · and ask, once, directly — *"what would make you comfortable giving somebody my name?"*** — which almost nobody does.Part 4 — Applied Scenario (1)
Q21. A planner in year two. Ten events: two full planning at $5,200, three partial at $2,900, five coordination at $1,700.** **Revenue $27,600. Fixed costs $11,400. Drawn personally: $12,000. Hours worked ≈ 1,900; tracked billable ratio 46%. **$3,100 of personal savings left; a partner earning.** One client is nine weeks late on a $2,600 instalment and is still being served.
Produce: the cost-of-an-hour arithmetic and the gap · what the service mix is doing · what you do about the late client · and the three changes, in order.