Unlike most startups, you can start a successful event planning business with a fairly limited startup budget. There are many different types of events you can offer your event planning services for, including:
- Corporate and Education: conferences, meetings, seminars, and graduations.
- Promotional: product launches, fashion shows, charity events, and fundraisers.
- Celebrations: birthday parties, weddings, sports-related events, local fairs, festivals, and other special events and social events.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can start an event planning business with very little money up front. We’ll cover everything from start to finish including identifying your target market, developing a business plan, pricing your services, marketing your business, developing a business plan, and carrying out operations.
Let’s put everything into context before we begin.
Basics of an Event Planning Business
Basics of an Event Planning Business
Event planning is all about helping individuals, groups, organizations, and businesses plan, organize, and execute events. It involves everything from conducting market research and finding a suitable venue to making sure everything goes as planned on the day of the event. The list is exhaustive and varies from one event to the next.
Event planners are often charged with a number of responsibilities. Once they understand what type of event their client wants to host, they start off by evaluating the different services and resources they’ll need to execute the event. Next, they draw up an estimated budget for their client to give them a breakdown of how much it’ll cost from start to finish.
Simply put, event planners plan, organize and execute events for clients while making sure everything fits the client’s budget.
As you can probably imagine, this requires the party planner, wedding planner, or event organizer to:
- Have a keen attention to detail.
- Be well-informed about the latest trends in the event planning industry.
- Be able to put together detailed event planning checklists and budget breakdowns.
Now that we have a good idea of what event planning is and what event planners actually do, let’s take a look at how you can start your own event planning company with a very limited startup budget.
5 Steps for Starting an Event Planning Business With No Money
Starting your own event planning business doesn’t have to be difficult. With the right set of tools, you can even get started and close your first client without spending a dime.
In this section, we’ll show you how to start an event planning business with a fairly limited startup budget. We’ll cover:
- Identifying your target market.
- Pricing your event planning services.
- Marketing and resources.
- Developing a business plan.
- Operations and logistics.
We recommend using an event management tool for building your site, managing your resources and contacts, and marketing your services. Event Smart is a hosted event registration, ticketing, and management solution that offers a free Basic Plan to help you get started.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Market
The first thing you need to do is decide whether you’d like to jump into general event planning or target a specific niche market for events.
If you don’t have a lot of event planning experience or are just starting out, it’s a good idea to pick a unique niche market for events and branch out to other types once you’ve built a portfolio for yourself. If possible, start with the type or at least events industry that you’re familiar with. If you’re not familiar with events, then attend some events and notice how things are done. The key benefit of offering your services to a niche event market is that you’ll be able to cover more ground and use your resources (time, effort, skills) more effectively for specific types of events and clients.
Once you’ve decided on the type of niche events, the next step is to do some research and identify your target market. If, for example, you’d like to plan fundraising events, you might consider getting in touch with local non-profit organizations and charities.
Next, do your research and learn as much as you can about the needs of your selected market. For example, you might consider finding out:
- How often does the organization host events.
- How many attendees they expect at each event.
- What their estimated budget is for each event.
- What sorts of activities take place at the event.
You can get this information by checking out the organization’s event website, their social media pages, doing competitor research, or simply reaching out to the organization and asking for an interview.
Step 2: Pricing Your Event Planning Services
After you settle on a niche and do some research, you’ll need to decide how to price your event planning service/s. Although your rates may vary from one event to the next depending on the client’s requirements, you should still have some general pricing information in mind. For example, you’ll want to decide:
- Your hourly rate for client meetings, consultations, reaching out to vendors, etc.
- How much you’ll charge for proposals and other resources you provide the potential client.
It’s also important to decide on an overall pricing strategy. Will you charge solely on a per-hour rate or a percentage of the total event budget? Will you charge a commission for booking venues or hiring caterers?
Event planners generally opt for a cost-plus pricing strategy (on average, it’s 15% of the total cost of the event) that allows them to keep their business operational while making a profit.
Once you’ve determined individual prices and pricing strategies, consider creating service bundles and offering event planning packages at different price points.
Step 3: Marketing and Resources
Since our goal is to start an event planning business with very little money, your marketing efforts will be limited in the beginning. However, once your event planning business starts to take off, you can put aside some funds every month for marketing purposes.
When you’re just starting out, you can market your event planning services using the following marketing strategies:
Word-of-mouth marketing
Let your friends, family, and colleagues know you’re in business! Hand out your business card containing your business name. Find opportunities to plan events for friends and family. This is a great way to build a portfolio, gain experience, and get the word out about your event planning business. Visit or contact businesses that need services like yours and discuss their needs.
Social media marketing
Create a business page on social media websites and begin marketing your events to your target audience. Use the right hashtags and post regularly for maximum outreach.
Marketing through your event website
Create a free event website with Event Smart and use it to promote your event planning services. Spend some time creating landing pages, blog posts, a FAQs section, a services page, and a pricing table. Leverage Event Smart’s Blogging & Custom Pages along with your event registration pages.
Email marketing
Look for potential clients in local business directories who’d be interested in availing your event planning services and start building an email list. Send them information regarding your event planning services and pricing.
Visit Venues
You should become familiar with the venues in your area that can be leased for events. Venues should be very willing to speak to event planners who can bring them customers for their space. As you talk with the venue owners, you will be building relationships with new businesses that can help you and your clients. It can also be an effective means of gaining new clients like small business owners as you connect to their network.
Step 4: Develop a Business Plan
Developing a business plan is a key step to starting any business. It includes information about your company, what your goals are, what services you’re offering, and who you’re offering services to. Having a solid business plan helps you stay on track and serves as a guide when you need to make key business decisions.
At the minimum, your event planning business plan should include:
- An executive summary
- Industry analysis
- Customer analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Operations and logistics plan
- Marketing plan
- Financial plan
Check out this Event Planning Sample Business Plan for instructions on how to get started.
Step 5: Operations and Logistics
Coordinating and supervising events are event planning activities that happen at or during the event. Depending on the niche you selected, this might be over the weekends, during evenings, after business hours, or maybe even during business hours (for any business meeting or other corporate event).
In addition to this, it’s important to keep in mind that some events are seasonal. For example, non-profits are more likely to host fundraising events around the holidays.
However, as an event planner, you’ll be in charge of many different event planning activities and operations depending on the type of event. Here are some operations that are common to most events:
Event Research
It’s a good idea to do some research related to the types of events you’ll be planning in advance. Different event types have different needs. For example, if you’re hosting a virtual event, you’ll be needing special equipment, event space and facility.
You might want to compile a list of possible venues and catering services. Your list might include information regarding availability, costs, and contact numbers.
Proposals
After gathering your client’s requirements and conducting research, the next step is to produce an event proposal for your client. This, again, depends on the type of event you’re planning.
That said, most event proposals contain a brief portfolio (with photos), testimonials, pricing information, contract, and schedule. Since you’re just starting out, you might consider charging a fee for the consultation in which you’ll share the proposal with your client.
Here’s a downloadable Event Proposal Template to help you get started.
Organization
After the client accepts your proposal, you’ll need to take steps to organize and execute the event. This step usually involves making phone calls and visiting various vendors. You’ll be renting out a venue, hiring vendors (catering, seats, lights, entertainment, etc.), and doing anything else that the client would like to feature at the event.
It’s a good idea to involve the client during the decision-making process and make it as easy and smooth for them as possible.
Coordination
Coordinating with the people, vendors, and suppliers who are coming together to make the event a reality can be pretty daunting. You have to make sure everyone is on the same page and has a clear understanding of the event’s schedule.
Event Smart’s Add Collaborators feature makes it easy to manage the entire team and opens up a platform for collaboration.
Conclusion
Starting an event planning business with very little funding is entirely possible. Initially, you’ll have to spend a lot of time on market research, building a portfolio, and marketing. Once your business starts to take off, you’ll be able to put some money back into your business and think about hiring staff or expanding into different niche event markets.
Hopefully, you have a better idea of how you can start your event planning business – from ideation to execution – with very little funding to start.
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