Business, Your Event Career

How to Use Event Decor to Boost Your Salary

While your salary will not stagnate early in your career (with more planning experience comes a heftier income), there are ways to give your salary a significant boost without having to exhaust yourself planning a hundred events a year! We all know that having a few extra skills on your resume can do wonders for your career. If you excel in more than one service and can deliver both in a timely manner, there’s no reason for your clients to find a second person when you’re more than capable.

If you’re already a certified event planner but want to continue your education, learning the fundamentals of event décor is a small investment in boosting your salary. You’ll become the local favorite for people looking to plan events big or small!

Keep reading to find out how you can use event décor to boost your salary!

1. Event décor diversifies your planning skills

You’ll gain a competitive advantage if you include event décor in your planning services! Event planners have to consult with their client to find out the goals for the event. After the basic elements are established, the planner has to contact the vendors. But what if the décor company you usually approach is unavailable? If you’re a well-established planner, you’ve probably developed quite the contact list over the years, but it can be quite a hassle if vendor after vendor has to pass on your client. If you’re able to offer décor as well, you can be one-stop shop for all your client’s event planning needs.

Not only will you be able to add a variety of hard skills to your tool belt (creating a color story, determining the best lighting to suit the theme of an event, etc.), you’ll hone a lot of soft skills along the way, too. Just make sure you’re great at dealing with additional responsibilities and have strong time management skills when offering both planning and decorating services.

2. Knowledge of event décor helps you plan a cohesive event

When you’re consulting with your clients, you’ll be able to tell right away what can and cannot be done. Having both planning and décor skills will allow you to think ahead and weave how you’ll manage the décor all throughout the planning process. When you walk into a potential venue, you’ll know exactly how to bring the space to life. Even though it’s your client’s vision, you are also expected to contribute your ideas and share advice because you have something they don’t: experience! Once you’ve planned a couple of events at full-service, you’ll be able to efficiently provide the best possible recommendation to your clients about what space suits their needs.

While your prices will increase to reflect your extra services, your clients won’t be complaining since you’re saving them a lot of grief and stress with your expert planning. If your clients are looking for value for their money, they’ve come to the right place!

3. Event décor experience increases your chances of being hired

This one is pretty obvious—you offer more services than some of the other planners in your area, so your chances of being hired are increased! Of course, you’ll still have to ace those client consultations and convince them to sign on the dotted line, but with more consultations comes more chances of booking a client (and growing your salary!).

You’ll attract wealthier clients since they can afford to pay someone else to do extensive planning for them. If you can take care of another dimension of planning, that is, the décor, you’ll rake in the big bucks!

Packaging your services can make them more appealing for the budget-conscious. With your new services comes the ability to offer individual or combined services depending on the event and your potential client’s needs. Nobody can say no to a good deal! If a fellow planner booked a job and has been unable to find a decorator, they might approach you since you offer event décor services as well. If you take on all opportunities as they come, you’ll boost your salary exponentially!

4. Décor skills help you market yourself to past clients

A lot of people see working with a professional event planner as a one-and-done transaction—especially those who only hire a planner for a day-of coordination for a wedding. But it’s important to maintain contact with any previous clients of yours just in case they require your services again or can refer you to their peers. If they had hinted that they were only going to hire you for your services on a one-off location, there’s still hope to change their mind. We’re not saying that you should be harassing them until they purchase your services again (they won’t with that approach), but you can create deals to incentivize old clients to check out your new decorating services. Rewarding previous clients with a discount code for your new event décor services, having referral promotions, and offering discounts for bundling full-service planning can make a huge difference!

5. Adding event décor to your business gives you more exposure

If you were running a website and blog to promote your event planning services (good job, by the way), it was probably largely limited to just posts about the planning side of events. With a knowledge of event décor, you can now expand to topics about décor ideas, DIYs, and event trends! You’ll also have more visually dazzling images for your portfolio to boot. With all these new posts for social media, you’ll generate more portals to your website and thus increase exposure to your business. If your Pinterest board goes viral, you’ll definitely see more inquiries into your services. Make sure you keep up with current planning trends for your posts. You’ll be able to capitalize on your trendsetting sensibilities and command a higher salary the more successful you become!

6. Having a décor inventory can earn you more money

It may require you to shell out more money in the short term, especially since you would have to both purchase the items as well as find storage for them, but it will be well worth it in the long term. Don’t just jump into buying 300 chairs and the latest and greatest sound systems after earning your event décor certification, though. You want to look back at your previous events and see where some extra décor pieces were needed, or if anything was particularly difficult to acquire that you can easily supply as a backup.

Once you’ve acquired these items, you can start renting them out at competitive prices. If you have a good variety of pieces in universally-liked neutral tones or in colors that can mix-and-match, it won’t be hard to sell your clients using your décor. Keeping inventory is particularly useful if your clients want to hold an event at an unconventional venue. Some facilities may not have the proper equipment in their facilities that you need. Having a video projector, some screens, microphones, extension cords, etc., can be indispensable in a pinch.

Looking for more ways to boost your salary if you’re a wedding planner? Check out this article!

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