What an Event Planner Actually Does

People sometimes ask me, gently, what I actually do that they couldn't do themselves. It's a fair question, and I'd rather answer it honestly than get defensive about it.

Anyone can search a venue. Anyone can request a quote from a caterer, or scroll through a florist's Instagram. None of that is the hard part, and I've never claimed it is. You're not hiring me because you don't know how to use Google. You're hiring me because you don't want to spend forty hours of your life doing this, or because you genuinely can't — you're planning from another country, or running a company, or you just want to be present at your own wedding instead of managing it.

I think this job exists because managing people, and managing the dozens of moving, interlocking parts of an event — vendors, venues, context, constraints, timing, personalities — is a real skill. Doing it well takes practice most people never get the chance to build.

Fixer and matchmaker

If I had to describe what I actually do, I'd say fixer and matchmaker. A client tells me what they want — not always in a fully formed way, sometimes it's closer to a feeling than a brief — and my job is to listen closely enough to understand the real thing underneath, then make it happen with whatever means I have available. A lot of the time that means connecting them to exactly the right person, someone I know can deliver precisely what they're describing, even if that person isn't who they expected.

I work holistically. I've never wanted to sell a fixed package. I want to solve the problem actually sitting in front of me, using whatever combination of people, ideas, and resources gets me there.

Why I hire individuals over event companies

My approach to event planning is deliberately non-traditional. If the right person for a job is a working artist, a theatre director who's never touched a corporate event before, or just someone talented I know rather than a registered company, that's who I hire. Established agencies are efficient, but efficiency and imagination don't always travel together, and I'd rather work with someone with a genuinely good idea than someone with a well-oiled process.

This comes straight from my background in theatre, where you work with genuinely creative people and your job is to elevate them — to get their best work seen and paid for. I've carried that with me. I don't hoard a private list of vendors as some kind of competitive edge. I believe in transparency, in honest work, and in making sure the people I hire get real credit for what they make.

The theoretical backbone

I didn't arrive at any of this by accident. My studies in sociocultural anthropology shaped how I think about events — the study of how people create meaning, mark occasions, and build community through shared experience. Every event, underneath the logistics, is a human happening to me. Understanding what actually makes those moments resonate is something I've been thinking about, one way or another, my whole life.

I also really love Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering. Her argument is that most gatherings fail not because of bad execution but because no one asked what the gathering was actually for. A wedding, a conference, a birthday party — each one is a chance to be specific about purpose, and I think that specificity is exactly where the good ones and the forgettable ones split.

What this looks like in practice

• I listen first. Before I contact a single vendor, I want to actually understand what the event is for — not assume I already know.
• I hire the right person, not the obvious one. Sometimes that's an established supplier. Sometimes it's an artist who's never done a wedding before and is exactly right for this one.
• I give credit. The people I work with are named, paid fairly, and never treated as an anonymous line item in someone else's pitch deck.
• Your time is what I'm actually selling. I'm not the only person who knows where the good caterers are. I'm giving you your time and attention back.

I've been doing some version of this since I was a kid, long before it was a job — designing pretend invitations, filling imaginary goodie bags from catalogue pages, planning parties for occasions that didn't exist yet. I've always done this, and I plan to keep doing it, for real events now instead of imaginary ones.