Episode 15: When the Planner Becomes the Client

Episode Summary

The tables have turned, friends! For Francisco’s 40th birthday, we planned a five-day celebration in Puerto Vallarta and brought in a local planner to help make his vision real. I’m sharing what it felt like to hand over the reins, trust someone else with the details, and experience the celebration from the client side. We’re talking design boards, an Adele impersonator, fireworks, and the messy middle of letting go. If you’re planning a wedding and wondering how to trust your vendor team with a vision that means so much to you, I hope this story gives you a little perspective.

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Full Episode Transcript

Welcome back to Mind Over Matrimony and today we are going to talk a little bit about when the planner becomes the client. And as you all know, I have a fabulous husband named Francisco and he actually this year turned 40 years old. So sorry babe, for calling you out on your age, but but it needed to be said because 40 is a big year. And so how do you celebrate someone as big as Francisco? You have to throw a party as big as him, as big as his personality, as big as the way in which he celebrates other people and invites people in to be celebrated by him.

We needed to celebrate him in that way. And so what did we do? We decided we would go to Mexico and not just one day, not just two days, but really a five day celebration to celebrate Francisco. And of course, being the planner, I really thought, OK, we'll just plan this all in house, it'll be fine, we'll handle it all. It's no big deal. Well, of course it ends up being like right in the middle of wedding season. So there's no way that our team is going to be able to handle everything that's going on with us, with our regular clients and also help plan this.

So we decided that we would hire someone to help us on the ground in Puerto Vallarta. And we were recommended this person by kind of the villa company that we rented this villa through. And her name is Rocio. And just a shout out to her, she was amazing. And what was interesting about it for me was relinquishing control cause shocking, as we've talked about here many times, I am a control freak and I want to be in control and I want to know exactly what's happening and how it's all being communicated. And are the T's crossed and the i's dotted and all of the things.

And but there just wasn't enough time to do that. And so what we needed to do was be able to actually just create a design board. And I let Francisco create the design board of this is what his mood wanted to be. And it matched what we had done for the invitation. And we did a paperless post invitation because we wanted to be able to communicate to everyone all of our details very quickly. And, and then he did this design board and we sent it to her and she sent back the most incredible design board in just a few short weeks.

And we were able to pick everything. And she just nailed it. She just nailed it. And I think the thing that I've just been pondering in all of this is what it feels like for you as the client to have this vision in your head of what something should look like. And I'll tell you, Francisco, literally one day we were in our bathroom at home, and he had just gotten out of the shower and he was like blasting some Adele music. And he literally turned it to this song, Catch Fire to the Rain. And he, like, started singing the song.

And he was like, OK, picture this. It's going to be this Adele impersonator. And she's going to be singing this song. And then the cake is going to come out and the sparklers are going to go off. And then the fireworks are going to shoot in the sky. And that's what I see, Julian. OK, so that's my vision. And so now you need to go and make it happen, right? And so thank God for Rocio, because I knew where to find the drag queen in Mexico City to be Adele. Thank God. But she needed to figure out the rest of that because that was his vision and that was his dream.

And all of you are dreaming every single day about maybe what this looks like. But I think really more, you're dreaming about what it's going to feel like, right? You're dreaming about how is it going to feel with all of my friends are all together? How's it going to feel when my family is there and I'm doing my first dance, right? And how is it going to feel when I dance with my parents? And how is it going to feel when I cut my cake and the fireworks go off and Adele is singing, right? Like, how is all of that going to feel?

And then you have to trust that someone else is going to care about your vision as much as you care about it, and that they're going to be able to put all the pieces together and execute it in this really cool, amazing way, just the way that you saw it in your head. And in my experience, a lot of the time, what we've envisioned in our head is not even as great as it's actually going to be on the day of, because on the day of, the emotions are actually real. It's not an imagination. It's not your imagination projecting these things on you.

You're literally standing there and like this Adele person is singing and the fireworks are going off and all of your friends are there just like with their mouths open and just like having the freaking best time and all singing together. And there's really nothing that beats that, which is why I still do this business because getting to be on the other side of it every once in a while reminds me how special it is to be entrusted with someone's day like this. That you would choose us or you would choose any of your vendor partners and team that you're working with to make the vision that you had in your bathroom with your spouse come to life.

That's pretty wild. And it's really like the coolest honor, honestly. Because we care so much and because we care so much, then when we give it to someone else, they care just as much. It's like we're passing this ball that of caring really. And that's why we work with the people that we work with. That's why we trust the people that we trust and that's why you get the result again and again of this amazing experience. And there is a messy middle in all of that, friends, right? Just like me, you will want to control the process or you want to micromanage the little things, but at some point you have to let go because you can't do it all.

You have a full time job. I have another full time job. I'm a planner, right? Like, I'm doing this job over here, but then I'm doing this other thing over here and you have to let it go and you have to trust that you chose the right people. And how do you trust that? Right. Like for us, we trusted because this recommendation came through a company that we had already been working with, that had built trust with us, that had done exactly what they said they were going to do. And they're great. They've done what they've said they're going to do.

So now the people that they are saying are going to produce a good result, we're going to trust them because they work together all the time. She works there all the time. She knows the property perfectly. She can literally make magic happen for you. And it's the same with you when you're picking your specific vendor sets and letting go of some of that control. It's nice to be looped in, right? We're included in all the discussions, were included in the budget conversation. We're included in the design board conversation. Was it perfect every single time? No, 100% not, but that's because there's lots of things changing.

You're dealing with lots of different vendors. It moves, it shifts, it moves here and there. It's not going to be perfect every single time. But what's most important is that I always knew I could send an e-mail and I would get an answer. I could send a text message and I would get an answer. I could pick up the phone and I could call and maybe I'm not going to get her right in this moment, but she was going to call me back. That's all you can really ask for. Giving that trust up was honestly a gift this year to me.

And being able to be reminded that you all have to do this every single day, you have to give it up. You don't really know. And for me, I'm lucky because I know that the result is ultimately going to be good because I can see the vendors. I can understand how it's all going to work. I've done it a million times before. You've never done it before. How do you know? So how do you know? You talk to people who've worked with that person before, you get a recommendation, you talk with someone who's used them before, and then you trust you put your trust in that other person and know that in my case, I was there and I could have taken control at any time.

So for me, that was good. I knew that I would be OK. And you also know that because you specifically with Julian Leaver Events, you've hired a team of people who are all going to be there to cradle this like it was our own event and get you to the finish line. I think the thing about this too is that I didn't micromanage this situation, which is very different for me. Usually I'm involved in every single little piece and I want to know all the details and I want to tweak everything and I want to change it and I want to have a very clear opinion on it.

But what I will tell you is this is that we sent our invitation and what was given back to us was perfect, exactly what I would have chosen. So I didn't need to micromanage it, which is something that has definitely changed within me because that is not how I usually operate. But there was just some kind of trust like in getting it right the first time. There were no notes. That's amazing. And it doesn't happen that often, but I was truly impressed. This is just a lesson in the control that you have to let go of and the control you keep.

We'll see you next week.

A The Media Socialites Production