Wedding Wednesday: Hiring a Planner

March 13th will mark our two years engagement anniversary. Do you celebrate engagement anniversaries after you are married? I'm not sure, since this will be our first. I have casually mentioned it a couple times and in typical us fashion we have assigned already planned activities as our celebration for whatever date happens to fall around it. Our Napa trip will be an engagement anniversary celebration, a Sean is finally done with the business school application process celebration (and hopefully we will know where he is going!!!) and perhaps even a half birthday celebration thrown in there. The second we find out where Sean has been accepted to B school, we will likely forget about the engagement anniversary and I will kiss the ground and let out the exhale heard 'round the world. I do not function well with unknowns. As soon as we "know" and we can start the planning, I will be fine, regardless of the outcome. It's the not knowing, not being able to plan that drives me nuts. And this has been 6+ months of waiting for the end of March. And it is almost here at last, hallelujah.
All of this to say, it's been a while since we got engaged. And the more time passes the less I remember of the exact details and order events. This is clear in my recap posts, as we are already out of chronological order, but I guess that's ok.
Rewinding a bit, I believe the order went like this:
-engagement
-hire wedding coordinator
-Italy trip/ engagement photos
-ask bridal party
-select a venue
-Engagement Parties

Our wedding coordinator was Ryan Larson from Savoir Flair Weddings. If you are in the Southern California area and looking for a coordinator I cannot recommend her highly enough. A few weeks ago a woman emailed asking for a reference for Ryan. I stopped what I was doing and wrote an extremely long winded, verbose letter professing my undying love for all things Savoir Flair. I also demanded encouraged my best friend to hire Ryan. Thankfully she complied and her wedding could not have been more beautiful.
 Ryan was the first person we met with after getting engaged. I'll never forget the day. My Mom, Sean and I  went out to meet her and I was wearing terrible fitting white jeans and could not stop starring at my ring. I found Ryan on The Knot, where she was ranked one of the best planners for LA, and immediately emailed her. I just checked my gmail records, this was March 16 (exactly three days after getting engaged).
The three of us immediately liked her. She was confident, experienced, organized, creative and savvy. I wanted to be her best friend (actually that hasn't change, I still want to be Ryan's best friend). Sean decided she was perfect and that we should "just hire her" and not interview anyone else. My Mom and I proceeded to waste our time meeting with another four or five planners. We compared everyone to Ryan and no one measured up. After checking her references (all of whom wrote similar letters to the one I had the joy of writing a couple weeks ago), we were officially under contract with our first wedding vendor.
People will tell you the first decision on your list is selecting a venue (without a venue contract you don't have an official wedding date which is needed for every other contract). Hiring our coordinator first allowed her to help us in the venue search, selection and contract negotiation.  We knew when we hired Ryan (March 2011) we knew we were going to do a Saturday, summer 2012 wedding and at that point she let us know which days she was still available and we took that in to consideration in picking a date.
A few important elements to me:
-Ryan is the principal of Savoir Flair. It was written in to our contract that she (along with her assistants) would be there on our wedding day.I didn't want any of this "I'm sending my associate" business. It was extremely important throughout the vendor selection process that whoever I hired was the person I saw on my wedding day.
-Personality. Ryan and I meshed well. She let me run with my ideas, (micro)manage the entire process and stepped in when I needed a hand or when there were tasks I was happy to hand off. I did not want to show up the day of my wedding and be surprised  I wanted to meet with every vendor, hand select the linens, be at every floral mock up. I had dreamed of planning my wedding my entire life, you better believe I was going to be hands on. She was extremely good at calming me down. When I was freaking out or thought something was ruined, she put everything in to perspective and created a plan of action. If for no other reason, Ryan was worth her weight in gold right there. Having an objective entity who is able to talk sense in to you (not your mom or fiance) is crucial. Plus I trusted her opinion and experience (no offense to my well meaning mother).
-Every wedding is unique; none of Ryan's weddings loo alike. There are quite a few wedding planners out there who are very trend conscious and fixate on a certain look that they do over and over again. The wedding tells you more about the planner's aesthetic than the couple. While that could be good for their business, if you want a rustic hipster wedding in Malibu you know who to choose. I wanted my wedding to look like us, not necessarily Style Me Pretty.
-Cost. It all comes down to the bottom line, right? I've heard a lot of people ask if wedding coordinators are worth the money. I can not scream yes fast enough. Regardless of your budget, the size and intricacy of your wedding- you are going to need some outside help at some point- at least on your wedding day. Even if everything is perfectly planned, you need someone to orchestrate the day. Just because your well intentioned aunt offered to set up the escort table, does not mean she can or should manage everything (there are so many details that will not even occur to you). Plus your aunt will be stressed out her mind, let the poor woman enjoy the party. I can not stress enough how important it is to have (at the very least) a day of coordinator. I would recommend springing for a month of  + day of coordinator if you are able. There is so much going on before your wedding, the last thing you want to do the week before is making and sending out timelines, confirming 25 vendor and trying to figure out who you owe money to and how they are going to get in on the day of your wedding/ day before, etc.
There are wedding planners at all price points. Find someone who works in your budget. Before planning my wedding I was under the impression that wedding planners were cost prohibitive. Wrong. If you are going to spend all this money on everything else, you might as well enjoy your wedding day. The return on investment for a day of coordinator is extremely high. Knowing what I know now, I would have paid twice as much for Ryan. You can't put a price on sanity!

Ryan & her brides