In my business I plan tea parties for little girls and women. Normally my business focused on planning these tea parties privately. Recently, my business partner and I have decided to plan a public event to kick off our event planning business and our etiquette lessons and workshops. Planning this event is unlike our other events since we are selling tickets, will serve a more diverse audience and possibly (and hopefully) have more attendees than we have served in the past. We are very excited about this event but at the same time feeling a bit overwhelmed. How do we keep it simple and yet plan something to help build our business? Here are a few guidelines we are following.
Use a theme associated with our business: Since my business is about planning tea and etiquette training, my business partner and I are planning a Mother’s Day Tea and Fashion Event. We felt this event incorporated our tea party theme and would allow us a forum to introduce our business to women and young ladies who we were targeting as clientele. We chose to add in a fashion portion since within our etiquette workshops we offer personal presentation and modesty seminars and workshops.
Plan during late afternoon for a simple menu: Since we are a new company we are low on funds and high on creativity. To turn this to our advantage we used our creative juices to come up with an elegant menu at a reasonable price. One resource to find great menu ideas for parties is Smarty Had a Party. Believe me, once you visit their site you will be the Smarty who has a party! You are certain to find creative food ideas that will keep your guests raving for a long time.
Divide up duties: My business partner and I work beautifully together because we work beautifully apart. We each have different skill sets which enhance our business. To make things simple we divided up the work based on skill and let the chips fall where they may. We are working together and making decisions together but some areas we are fully in charge of and that has taken stress off both of our plates.
Lists, lists and more lists: We are making lists for every aspect of our event. We then wrote an outline of how the event would run from start to finish. This caused us to write more lists since details easily forgotten were revealed through that process.