🔬 Case Study 38.2: Noor Haddadi — Two Businesses, One Marketing Plan
📜 Tier 3 — Illustrative. Noor Haddadi and every figure here are constructed. The arithmetic is internally consistent; the numbers are the author's.
Where Chapter 36 left her
Six corporate events at $9,800 for companies of 60–250 people. Four weddings at $7,400.
Seven years of in-house corporate experience. No wedding portfolio. One employer-turned-client. $1,600 of marketing budget and roughly 900 non-billable hours in year one, of which perhaps 180 are available for business development.
And a plan that consisted of: a website, an Instagram account, and a directory listing.
The finding, in one table
She wrote out her recommender map (§38.1a) and it split immediately.
| The corporate line | The wedding line | |
|---|---|---|
| Who is asked the question | Heads of marketing, chiefs of staff, EAs, HR business partners — and other event planners | Venue coordinators, photographers, caterers, past couples |
| Where they are | In companies. Not at wedding fairs, not on Instagram | At venues |
| How they find a planner | They ask a peer at another company, or they run a procurement process | They ask the venue |
| What convinces them | Evidence of a business outcome (Ch.31) | Evidence of a calm day |
| The sales cycle | Weeks, with a procurement step | Months, emotional, two decision-makers |
| What her website must say | "I ran events in-house for seven years" | "I do this kind of wedding" |
🚪 The finding: these are two businesses with two audiences, two proof requirements, and two channels — and she had one plan for both.
Worse: the single plan she had was the wedding plan — website, Instagram, directory — applied to a business whose primary revenue line is corporate.
Every dollar and every hour of it was aimed at the smaller half.
The corporate plan
⚡ Recommenders, and where they actually are
Why How she reaches them Her own former colleagues — seven years, four companies' worth of network They know her work, not her portfolio Directly. Twelve messages The events people at companies like her old one They ask each other constantly A peer group, not a market AV production companies They work with every corporate planner and are asked Ch.34's relationships Hotels' corporate sales teams — not their wedding coordinators A different department entirely And nobody she knows has ever thought of them Her former employer Already a client Ask for one introduction Note row four. A hotel has a wedding coordinator and a corporate sales manager, they sit fifteen feet apart, and almost no planner talks to both.
📋 The Planner's Script: twelve messages, sent in week one
To former colleagues, peers, and the two people who ran events at companies she worked alongside:
"I've left Kestrel and set up on my own, doing conferences and offsites for companies of about sixty to two hundred and fifty.
I'm not asking you for work — I know you've got people.
What I would find genuinely useful is this: if you ever hear somebody complaining that their kickoff or their offsite is a nightmare to organise, I'd love you to think of me.
And if you want a second pair of eyes on anything of yours, free, I'd enjoy it."
What that does: it states the niche in one line, removes the ask, gives a specific trigger to remember (somebody complaining), and offers something.
Twelve messages. Two produced conversations within a month. One became her second corporate booking.
💰 The corporate proof problem, and how it is solved differently
A wedding client wants to see photographs. A corporate client wants to see that you understand their problem.
Which means the corporate marketing asset is not a portfolio — it is Chapter 31's argument, written down.
What she built, in about six hours:
A two-page piece: "What most kickoffs get wrong" The inherited agenda, the person-hours arithmetic, and the objective question. Chapter 31 §31.4 A worked example with numbers Anonymised, and it shows an agenda audit A one-page capability note Seven years, four event types, the sizes she runs She sent the two-pager to the twelve, unprompted, with no ask.
Two of the twelve forwarded it internally. That is the corporate equivalent of Tomasz's forty photographs — a thing that is useful to the recipient and makes them look informed to their own colleagues.
The wedding plan
Four weddings a year, no portfolio, and a genuine cold start.
⚡ What she actually has, and what she does not
Has Does not have Seven years of production competence most wedding planners lack (Ch.36's third niche source) A single wedding photograph A network — of corporate people, who also get married and have friends Any venue relationship Chapter 34's threshold — she can run a bare-site build A referrer A reason to be recommended that is not "she's lovely" Time — four weddings is a small line The plan follows from the third row of the left column.
✅ Her wedding positioning, and why it is the whole strategy
"I plan the logistically difficult weddings — bare sites, marquees, multi-day, anything with a build — for couples who have chosen a beautiful place that has nothing in it, and what they get is a wedding where the infrastructure is not their problem."
Which is §38.9's third fix: it converts "excellent" into a category a buyer can evaluate before purchase.
And it makes the recommender map tiny and specific. She does not need forty venues. She needs the four in her region that are bare fields, barns, or estates with no permanent infrastructure — because those are the venues whose coordinators are asked, every year, by a couple who has just realised there is no power.
⚡ The four actions, in order
1. Identify the four bare-site venues Two hours. §38.1a Week 1 2. Ring each and ask Marisol's question — "what catches planners out here?" Eleven minutes each. And she can follow up intelligently, which most callers cannot Week 2 3. Be the second planner Offer to assist, paid, at a bare-site wedding. §38.5a Months 1–6 4. The employer's wedding-adjacent network A 400-person software company contains people getting married Ongoing Action 2 is the one that works and it is why her competence matters: when a coordinator says "planners always underestimate the generator," she can talk about load factors.
That conversation is not a sales call. It is two professionals discovering they understand the same problem — and it is the entire mechanism by which she gets on a list before she has run a wedding there.
The channel allocation
💰 Run the Numbers: $1,600 and 180 hours
What she had planned:
Cash Hours Website $900 30 Directory listing $500 2 $0 110 Business cards, misc $200 4 Relationships $0 34 What she does instead:
Cash Hours Line Website — two clear paths, corporate and weddings $900 26 Both The two-page corporate piece $0 6 Corporate Twelve messages, and the follow-ups $0 9 Corporate Corporate relationships — AV companies, hotel corporate sales, peers $260 (coffee, travel) 48 Corporate The four bare-site venues — map, calls, visits, follow-up $140 36 Weddings Being the second planner — assisting, paid, twice $0 34 (billable to somebody) Weddings Instagram — capped $0 20 Both Photographs and rights $300 1 Weddings TOTAL $1,600 180 The directory is gone. Instagram goes from 110 hours to 20.
And 90 hours — half the total — goes into the corporate line, which was previously getting almost none.
The website, which had to do two jobs
⚠️ The problem: a single site serving two audiences with opposite requirements
A corporate buyer wants competence, numbers, and evidence of a business outcome. A couple wants warmth, photographs, and evidence of calm.
A site that averages the two serves neither — and this is the commonest failure for planners with a mixed practice.
✅ What she built
A single landing page with two visible paths, chosen in the first screen.
"I plan two kinds of event."
[Conferences and offsites, 60–250 people →]
[Weddings on difficult sites →]
And then two entirely separate pages, with different tone, different proof, and different enquiry forms.
The corporate page opens with the person-hours argument. The wedding page opens with a photograph of a marquee in a field and the sentence about infrastructure.
It cost nothing extra and it is the single most consequential structural decision on the site.
Year one, as it landed
| Planned | Actual | |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate bookings | 6 | 4 |
| Weddings | 4 | 3 |
| Where the corporate work came from | — | 1 former employer · 1 from the twelve messages · 1 from an AV company · 1 from a hotel's corporate sales manager |
| Where the weddings came from | — | 1 from a bare-site venue coordinator (the phone call) · 1 assisting relationship · 1 from her old company's network |
| From the website, directly | — | 0 |
| From Instagram | — | 0 |
🚪 Seven bookings, and every single one came from a person.
The website confirmed four of them and originated none — which is exactly §38.4's claim and is the most common thing planners refuse to believe about their own site.
And the hotel corporate sales manager is the finding she is proudest of. She met him because she asked a wedding coordinator, at a venue she was visiting for the wedding line, whether there was somebody who handled corporate.
There was. He sat fifteen feet away. Nobody had ever asked.
Discussion Questions
DQ1. She had one marketing plan for two businesses, and it was the wrong one. How does that happen?
Consider
**Because "wedding planner" comes with a marketing template and "corporate event planner" does not.** **Every visible example, every course, every industry article is about weddings** — a website, Instagram, a directory, a fair. **Noor absorbed the default and applied it to a business whose primary line was corporate**, where none of it works. **And the second mechanism is that she thought of herself as a wedding planner who also did corporate.** **Chapter 36's reversal changed the revenue but not the identity**, and the marketing plan followed the identity rather than the money. **Which suggests a diagnostic worth having: write down your revenue by line, then write down your marketing by line, and see whether the two tables look like each other.** **For Noor, 66% of planned revenue was corporate and roughly 5% of the marketing effort was.**DQ2. "I'm not asking you for work" is the second line of the twelve messages. Why is that the technique?
Consider
**Because the ask is what makes the message hard to answer.** **A former colleague who receives *"do you have any work for me?"* has to either produce work or say no**, and most people resolve that by not replying. **A former colleague who receives *"I'm not asking you for work; if you hear somebody complaining, think of me"* has nothing to decline** — and can respond warmly at zero cost. **And the trigger matters more than it looks.** ***"If you hear somebody complaining that their kickoff is a nightmare"*** **is a specific, memorable, recurring event**, and it installs Noor's name against a situation rather than against a category. **"Let me know if you need an event planner" installs nothing.** **This is §38.8's specificity principle, applied to a referral request rather than to a review** — and it is the same mechanism: **a specific thing travels and a general thing does not.**DQ3. The two-page corporate piece is called "the corporate equivalent of Tomasz's forty photographs." Unpack the analogy.
Consider
**Both are unsolicited, useful to the recipient, and make the recipient look good to somebody else.** **Tomasz's photographs solve a venue's actual problem — needing marketing material about itself.** **Noor's two-pager solves an events manager's actual problem — needing an argument they can use internally about why the agenda should change.** **And both work because they are forwarded.** **Two of the twelve forwarded it**, which means Noor's name arrived in front of people she has never met, attached to something useful, **carried by somebody those people already trust.** **Which is the general form and it is worth stating: the most efficient marketing asset is one your recommender wants to send to somebody else for their own reasons.** **And the corollary, which most content marketing gets wrong: it must be genuinely useful without you.** **A two-pager that is a disguised sales document does not get forwarded, because forwarding it costs the sender credibility.**DQ4. The wedding positioning is "logistically difficult weddings on bare sites." Is that a niche or a limitation?
Consider
**Both, and the limitation is what makes it work.** **It excludes most weddings in her market** — hotels, full-service venues, anything with power and a kitchen. **On four weddings a year, that is fine and on twenty it would not be.** **What it buys is enormous.** **A recommender map of four venues instead of forty.** **A reason to be recommended that is not "she's lovely."** **And a conversation with a coordinator in which she can talk about load factors**, which is §38.9's invisible-work problem solved at the point of first contact rather than after the event. **And the honest risk: it is a niche built on a competence she has and a market she has not tested.** **There may not be four bare-site venues in her region, or the couples using them may not hire planners.** **Which is why actions 1 and 2 are two hours and eleven minutes each.** **The niche is a hypothesis, and the cheapest possible test of it is four phone calls.**DQ5. Seven bookings, all from people, none from the website. Should she have built the website at all?
Consider
**Yes, and the case study's own data explains why: it confirmed four of the seven.** **§38.4's claim is not that a website is worthless. It is that its job is confirmation rather than acquisition** — somebody has your name from a person and is checking you are real, that you do their kind of event, and what it costs. **And the specific value here is the two-path structure.** **A corporate buyer arriving from a peer's recommendation and finding a site full of marquee photographs would have been confused**, and confusion at that moment is expensive because it happens after somebody has vouched for you. **What she should not have done — and did not — is spend 30 hours and expect enquiries.** **She spent 26 and expected confirmation.** **The honest test for any website spend: would this money and these hours produce more if spent on §38.2's six actions?** **At 26 hours, the answer here is arguably no, and at 60 it would clearly have been yes.**DQ6. The hotel's corporate sales manager sat fifteen feet from the wedding coordinator and nobody had ever asked. Generalise it.