197: Should You Call Your Late Vendor? 4 Wedding Planners Answer

How many times do you expect to email one of your wedding vendors before you get a reply?

If you've got a coordinator, someone else is keeping count for you. But if you don't, you're the one deciding whether the non-response is normal or a red flag. 

I asked four full-service wedding planners, who also oversee each wedding day onsite themselves, 3 questions: 

1. When is too long to wait on an email response? 
2. What actually happens if a vendor cancels the week of your wedding? 
3. When is a late vendor on the day something to worry about? 

Their answers might surprise you. And if you haven’t booked a full-service planner or a day-of/month-of coordinator, I'm also giving you the 5 steps you need to take to cover that gap yourself. 

RESOURCES

Emily Clarke from The Modern Approach

The Modern Approach on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themodernapproach_/

Kelly Stephenson from Found Collective Events

Found Collective Events on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foundcollectiveevents/

Nicole Bailey from Your Event Plannery

Your Event Plannery on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/youreventplannery/

Laura Shepherd from Couture Events Worldwide

Couture Events Wordwide on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coutureeventsworldwide/

Send Unbridely a 90-second audio message on Speakpipe: https://www.speakpipe.com/unbridelypodcast

*The Unbridely Podcast is sponsored by its listeners. When you purchase products or services through links on our website or via the podcast, we may earn an affiliate commission.*

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This episode of the Unbridely Modern Wedding Planning Podcast is brought to you by WedSites.com, Unbridely's recommended all-in-one wedding website builder, guest management platform & wedding planning tool.

Visit WedSites.com to get started on your FREE wedding website and use code UNBRIDELYPOD to get 10% off any of their paid plans.

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Unbridely acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Land we record this podcast on, the Kaurna People. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

How many times would you expect to email one of your wedding vendors before you get a reply? If you've got a coordinator, someone else is keeping count for you. But if you don't, you're the one deciding whether silence is normal or a red flag. And if you're planning a wedding for the very first time, you probably have no idea what a normal wait time looks like. I asked four full service wedding planners who oversee each wedding day on site themselves three very important questions. How long is too long to wait on an email reply? What actually happens when a wedding vendor cancels on the week of your wedding? And when is a late vendor on the day something to worry about? Their answers might surprise you, and if you don't have a full service planner or a day-of-or month-off coordinator hired to watch all of this for you, I'm also going to give you at the end the five steps you need to know to cover that gap yourself. Let's get stuck into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Unbridly is a community of pro-wedding vendors who believe in freedom and integrity in weddings, giving you options, solutions, tips and tricks to create the experience and memories that you and your fiancee really want and deserve. Because we believe that weddings are a team sport with how-to's, stories and interviews with recently married couples. We find out what went right and what they'd changed if they could go back and do it all over again. I'm Camille and welcome to the Unbridly Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:35

So to kick off, let's talk about this non-reply threshold. You know, you send an email, a few days passed, and you start wondering, should you follow up, or does that make you the difficult client? This is the quietest kind of stress in wedding planning because there's no one single rule that you can refer to. So here's what four full service planners who also oversee each wedding day on site themselves have actually told me about this very specific problem. Kelly Stevenson of the Found Collective ties her expectation on email responses to how close the wedding date is. And she said once you're inside three months of your wedding date, she considers three to five business days best practice for a vendor to respond. Decisions inside that window, you know, within three months of your wedding date, she was saying they need to be confirmed, they need to be acted on, they can't be just left hanging. And she told me how she's had vendors in the past take one to two weeks to reply during peak season. And while she completely understands that the next couple's wedding, you know, the one that's on that very week, always needs attention as well, her view is very clear. If a business has offer staff whose job it is to manage timely responses, then that's just not good enough. Nicole Bailey of Your Event Plannery draws the line a little differently, depending on the time of the season. So outside of peak times, especially with a vendor that she uses very often, she expects a quick reply, like within 48 hours, is her general rule, stretching to a week at most. But during peak season, she says it can take up to a month. And in her words, you take your chances then. Laura Shepard of Couture Events Worldwide, who works in the luxury market in Dubai, holds a tighter standard again. Two to three days. And her reasoning is about the competition in her market rather than politeness. So in her market, speed is often what separates one planner or one wedding vendor from another. And a vendor's slow response doesn't just mean that they look bad or they're not responsive, but she thinks it makes her as a planner look bad to her client as well. Emily Clark of the Modern Approach, and she's an Umbrali Suppliers Pro member, draws the line at a week, but her real issue isn't the number of days at all, it's the silence. Let me explain. So Emily has said that she understands peak season and she gets that plenty of suppliers are running their whole business solo, you know, they're sole traders and they don't have support behind them, like we're talking about, that office or admin staff to be able to respond to emails, you know, is literally the photographer themselves who's answering. But where Emily sees a problem is that there is no warning given when there's a lack of response. So what she means is put an out-of-office response, an auto-responder, on your email. If you're going to be out of office, give her a heads up that your response will be slower. Because that's all it takes to stop Emily from second guessing and worrying that there's something more behind the scenes going on that she needs to deal with. Emily also made a point worth remembering. A slow, unexplained response doesn't just hold up one decision. Like Kelly said, it holds up everything that depends on it further down the line, as far as like a knock-on effect of the planning process. And she remembers. She remembers how a vendor communicated under pressure, and it shapes whether she recommends them to her next couple. So that's four planners and a few different numbers, but there is one clear pattern here. What actually matters isn't a single day count that you need to memorize. It's how close is it to your wedding date? Whether the silence, you know, a vendor not getting back to you, breaks a pattern that they've already shown you. You know, have they been really good at getting back to you in the past? Is this out of character, is what you should be thinking. And whether they've already told you why that might be the case. You know, I might be a bit delayed because I'm going to hospital, I'm going overseas. This is happening, that's happening. And, you know, then they let you know when they will get back to you. A vendor who warns you that they're slammed and a vendor who simply vanishes are not the same kind of problem, even if they take exactly the same number of days to reply. So now let's talk about when a vendor cancels on the week of your wedding. And you might be thinking this is the one that's going to keep you up at night. But I want you to hear me very clearly, right at the start, I want you to understand it's really rare. It's very rare. But when it happens, what separates a manageable situation from disaster often comes down to something that you don't see from the outside. And that is whether the person managing your wedding has a network to call on in that situation. So Kelly said that she's never had a vendor cancel on her, and she puts that down to the relationship she's built over the years of working with the same people. But she has stepped in when other vendors have canceled on the couples that she was working with, you know, as a stylist in that capacity. So she was hired as a stylist, and the couple hired other vendors, and then the other vendors didn't show up. So one couple in a regional area, they had both their ceremony musician and their DJ cancel. Now they were part of an entertainment agency. And so when the entertainment agency said, We won't be uh fulfilling your wedding, it meant the ceremony musician and the DJ for the reception. They turned to Kelly, they said, What do we do? And Kelly went, Okay, I'm not your planner, but I might be able to help. So Kelly assumed straight up that finding two replacement vendors at such short notice in a regional location would be difficult. But instead, through her contacts, she found one musician who could cover both roles, both the ceremony and the DJ for the reception. And she considers that this might well have saved the couple money and in fact given them a better result than the people that they'd originally booked. And at a separate wedding, a hairstylist just didn't show up on the morning of the wedding. So there wasn't this, I won't be able to show up. There wasn't even that notice given. And so Kelly and the makeup artist on site worked through their contacts and they found two replacement hairstylists within about 30 minutes. They needed two because of the compacted timeline and the number of people who had to have their hair done. But they got it sorted and they pretty much stayed on track on their timeline. Nicole's approach leans the same way. So when something falls through, she goes straight to her vendor networks, whether that's on socials or on her phone, and to the other planners and coordinators that she knows because those relationships move fast when it matters. They know what's at stake. And so those contacts are everything. Now, Laura, who works in Dubai, remember, sees the responsibility a bit differently. And in her view, if a vendor cancels, which she pointed out that it actually hasn't happened to her, but if they should, you know, in advance, you know, they give her notice, then it should be on them, the wedding vendor, the supplier, the photographer, musician, you know, whoever it is, to provide a replacement or help find a solution. And she said that's just the same way that she'd need to find a solution if she had to cancel on a client herself. She'd have to find another planner. Emily of the modern approach has never had a vendor cancel on her either, outside of a positive COVID test, that is. So, you know, someone didn't have a choice, but they had to cancel. But her answer is worth hearing in full because it labels something that the other planners sort of hinted at, but didn't quite say outright. So if it did happen to Emily, if a vendor cancelled and gave her notice, her couple wouldn't be the ones trying to solve it. They wouldn't be carrying it. It wouldn't be their burden. So Emily said after 11 years of developing and cultivating these industry relationships, the whole reason she does it is for exactly this kind of moment, that she'd be on the phone, a replacement would be locked in, and it would be handled before it ever reached her couple. In her words, they do not need to know every problem. They need to know that she's got them covered. So here's the part worth thinking about carefully. If you don't have a coordinator, none of this fixing of uh, you know, calling other vendors of sourcing happens without a vendor's own sense of responsibility or a planner's personal network that they've built over the years. So if you're planning without a coordinator, you don't get either of those safety nets. Now that's not a reason to panic, but it is a very good reason to build some of that protection into your planning yourself. And that might be through vendor contracts that address what happens if a vendor can't actually arrive and deliver what they say they're going to, and a bit of your own research as well into who else locally does what your key vendors do. You want to know how you would fix it if it goes wrong. If you had a sweary, chocolate addicted wine-sipping fairy godmother who could help you with your wedding planning, what would you wish for? Perhaps no more waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering what you've forgotten, or fretting about your RSVPs? Maybe no more spreadsheets or post-it notes or endless to-do lists. Well, I can help you with all of that. WedSites is an Australian wedding website builder, guest management software, and wedding project planner all in one. Why is this such a game changer for you? Well, imagine everything to do with your wedding being in one place, updated in real time in the cloud, shareable to anyone else that's helping you, password protected for your guests, with notifications to tell you what needs to be done next and by when. It's amazing, right? I love how easy websites is to set up and use, and how there are no ads on the platform yelling at you to spend more money on your wedding. To get started on your very own free wedding website, just head to websites.com, that's W E D S I T E S dot com and enter the code unbridlypod, that's unbridly pod, to get 10% off their paid planning tools. The link is in the show notes. Now this one's really tricky. Late vendors on the actual day itself. So a wedding supplier running late on your wedding day, the effects of that can range from a complete non-issue to a real, real problem. And the difference isn't always obvious if you've never been in that coordinator's role before. Kelly's framework is perhaps the clearest starting point. We'll start with Kelly's. So for a vendor with a tightly timed role, and her example is a ceremony musician, you know, would be expected to arrive about 30 minutes before the ceremony starts. Like that would be the minimum, I would say. Five minutes late, in her mind, is well within the grace period. You know, they're parking, they're getting stuff out of the car, you know, they're doing what they need to to get to that ceremony spot where they've got to perform. 10 minutes late is the point where you call and check where they are. 20 minutes late is when you start looking at alternatives. The exact numbers shift depending on how critical that vendor slot is to the timeline. But the general principle is the same. The more your day depends on that person, that vendor being in a certain place at a precise moment, the shorter your grace period needs to be. Nicole likes to build in her own buffer by confirming arrival times with every vendor in the week before, and all of these planners do that. I should make a point of saying that. Of course, they're all confirming arrival times before this happens. And then Nicole arrives nice and early on site to watch for arrival times. So she's doing other things, of course, but she's got that run sheet in her hands and she knows at a certain time a certain vendor is required. If the vendor isn't there within around 30 minutes of when they said they'd be, you know, in a non-crucial role, then she's calling or she's texting to check in. And Laura works in a similar window and she checks in 20 to 30 minutes before a vendor's expected arrival. And she'll go, are you still on track? Do you know where you're coming? You know, do you know the entrance? And again, 20 to 30 minutes after, if they haven't shown yet. Partly because a late arrival isn't always a no-show. Sometimes, as she said, it's a vendor stuck at security or struggling with venue access, parking, etc. And that's a fairly easy fix, but not a crisis. And she also draws an important distinction that some things can be patched on the day. You know, you can bring in more people, you've got more hands to work things out, you can tweak the timeline a bit, adjust the run sheet, but some other things just can't be replaced at short notice. So she was thinking anything custom made or fabricated specifically for your wedding, you know, in particular staging and signage and draping and things like that for rentals running hours late, that's when she'll start calling in other suppliers. But this is well before any guests are on site, of course. Her view is pretty straightforward, pretty blunt, but I really like it. Replacing a vendor causes more disruption than a vendor simply arriving a bit late. So Laura will always make sure that she knows which one is happening. Emily of the modern approach, she holds the shortest grace period of anyone. And for her, it's almost always hire companies that she's watching out for and she plans for it in advance. So she has an out-of-hours mobile number for every hire vendor that goes straight onto the run sheet before the day even starts. The moment they're not there, at the time they said they would be, she's calling. Not 10 minutes later, right then. And Emily says that call tells her everything she needs to know. Either she moves into fixing the problem with what she's already got on site, or she learns very fast that she needs a bigger solution. And the earlier she knows, the quicker she knows, the more time she has to be able to make that decision and to act. And that's really the point underneath all four answers. The grace period itself matters less than having the plan for what happens when that moment passes. So you've got Kelly's tiered response, Nicole and Laura's check-in windows, and Emily's immediate call. They're all different systems built around the same instinct. You've got to know when the red flag goes up in advance. So you're acting on information instead of guessing under pressure. And that distinction between what can be patched and what can't is exactly the kind of call a coordinator makes instinctively, you know, after years and years of doing it, they know. And it's the one you are least likely to know how to make in the moment if you don't have a plan in advance. And this is why the success of your wedding and how you deal with your vendors comes down to more than just price alone. Across all four planners, one thread kept showing up time and time again. The vendors, the suppliers, the people who produce goods and services for your wedding, those who go the extra distance, who help find a replacement, who fix a problem before you, the couple getting married, even know that it happened, tend to be the ones with more established reputations and deeper relationships in the wedding industry. Nicole told me about a situation where vendors didn't set the tables properly and there was a floral delivery that wasn't what was asked for, and someone forgot to make a special cake for one of the couple getting married for their dietary needs. So what Nicole did was she made it work herself. Time was really short, she didn't have an option. So she set the tables herself, she remade a smaller floral arrangement from a larger one because yeah, she didn't have the time for other people to fix it. And she ordered a replacement cake through a delivery app and got it delivered by Uber Eats. She only told the couple what had actually happened after the wedding was over. Then it's a funny story, right? It's it's in the past. That kind of problem solving isn't really about how much money you've spent, it's about how much a vendor has invested in their own reputation and their relationships over time. Because an experienced, well-connected wedding vendor, wedding supplier, worth their salt, typically has more at stake if things go wrong and more contacts to call on if they do. Now it's not their fault, but a newer or less established vendor may simply not have built that up yet. And that's not your fault either. As always, no blame. This isn't a reason to feel like you've made the wrong choice if budget has shaped your vendor decisions. But know the trade-off. You know that you have hired someone who is perhaps on the affordable side and is new and perhaps doesn't have a lot of contacts, and you will need to build a little of your own contingency planning in there if you're going it alone. If you don't have that full service planner, the day-off coordinator, month off coordinator, there's no such thing as a day-off coordinator, but sometimes they call it that. So, what can you actually do without a planner on site? So if you haven't got a full service planner, that day of, month of coordinator who's watching all of this for you, clocking it, you know, making sure everything's tracking along as it should be. What does that contingency planning actually look like for you? So I've got five concrete things worth doing well before your wedding day arrives. Number one, you need to confirm those arrival times with every key vendor, you know, a vendor who's going to be rocking up on the wedding day, doing something on your wedding day, delivering something. You want it in writing at least the week before your wedding. And this is the same step that Nicole builds into her process. It will give you a clear time to measure lateness against on the day. You know, you've got it in their words. When your cake maker says they're going to arrive at two o'clock to deliver your cake, then you know. You know, they've they've had a look at where they're going, at where they're delivering, what the travel is, what the parking is if they say they will be there at two, then you know. Okay, number two, save an out-of-hours mobile number for any vendor whose role is tightly timed, just the way Emily does for her higher companies. And if a mobile phone number is not offered up front, ask for one when you book them in. Number three, set your own grace periods in advanced based on how critical each supplier's timing is. So this is using Kelly's framework as a guide. A ceremony musician arriving five minutes late is different from a caterer running five minutes late. So decide what your trigger points are before the day, you know, when you'll actually press the alarm before the day and not in the moment. Number four, do a little research into who else locally, you know you need them close by, could step up and step in for your most critical suppliers. Even a rough list of names so you're not starting from scratch if something falls through. And you might ask your vendors for that. They might supply that. And to that point, number five, ask about cancellation and backup arrangements before you book and not after. So Laura's view was that this should be the vendor's responsibility. So it's a fair question to ask directly at the contract stage, you know, I'd like to book you can you tell me what would happen if for some reason you couldn't make it and beyond number five, if you truly can't stretch your budget to get a professional to be able to do this for you. And this is, you know, this is why these planners are worth their weight in gold, then you're needing to delegate that on the day point of contact to someone else. It might be a family member, a member of your wedding party, a close friend, anyone other than the people getting married of course, please, you know, and you need to be able to trust them. They need to be organized. Brief them properly beforehand with your vendor list, arrival times, those grace periods that you've decided on. So they're the one making the call if something runs late, not you on your own wedding day or stressing the night before. Of course none of this replaces what a full service wedding planner brings, but it does close some of that gap for you. And it means the decision about who calls a vendor and when has already been made before you need it. And I hope that you never do. And if you've got a story of your very own about a vendor who has let you down or a vendor who has gone over and above I love to hear about wedding professionals who just save the day every weekend. You know it's just beautiful. Please send me a DM on Instagram. I'd love to hear about it. And if I can share it on the podcast I absolutely will. And until next time, celebrate your people. That about wraps it up for this episode of the Umbradly Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

For the links and resources we mentioned please head to the show notes and if you love the show please review and subscribe on the podcast platform you're on now so you don't miss out on a single episode. Thanks so much for listening and remember weddings are a team sport. Catch you soon