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Event planner invoice example for non-profit organizations

hi I'm Chelsea from event planning comm and today I want to talk to you about how to start your event planning business if you have no money so it's definitely doable it's a common myth that you need a ton of money to start any new business but that's simply not true there's plenty of free things that you can do for especially for building your website and building your company in marketing that you can start out on the right path until you start building up those clients and start making revenue so first I want to talk about building your website and also some marketing it's actually usually pretty inexpensive to build a website on a website builder like Wix comm but if you don't want to spend any money you can you build a free one on a blog website so say wordpress.com so you can start there and then once you start to get some revenue you can switch over to a better platform as for marketing social media is so crucial to your business an especially word-of-mouth from your family and friends that's really where your marketing is coming from that's where you're gonna get your first events and how your business is going to grow and it doesn't cost any money to pick up the phone and call your close friends and family tell them about your business ask them to book your services and ask them to spread the word about your business so make sure that you stay really up-to-date on social media it keeps your family and friends up on the news about your website and about your event planning business and what you're up to so this is really important doesn't cost any money you just have to be super diligent and make sure that you're posting very regular on social media platforms the next thing is booking your first event so you don't need any money to book your first event hopefully it's a family or friend or somebody you feel really comfortable with and the great thing about booking your first client is they already have a budget for their event that they're planning on spending for the entire event nothing comes out of your pocket so if they need a bunch of anything anything to do with rentals or anything to do with catering anything at all it all comes out of your clients budget so never pay for anything yourself upfront whenever you're working with vendors are booking them so say you're working with a company that's doing table and chair rentals you might rent the linens from them you might even rent some of the table escapes from them you're going to get the whole bill and send it directly to your client and your client will pay that bill so you never have to pull any money out of your pocket you're just making money doing all the legwork by finding the vendors and making sure that you're keeping the cost down for your client and staying on top of all the scheduling and budgeting so also which goes along with your first event is this is also going to lead to free marketing because hopefully you're gonna do such a great job on this first event the yogurt referrals from it people are gonna notice your great work and book you from there so that's a free marketing is just to do the event as for inventory there might be some things at the event that this particular client doesn't want to take home maybe they needed 100 hurricane candles with the glass holders and the candles in them after the event they don't know what they're going to do with all those candles you could politely ask them that in exchange for your services you could keep those and start building your own inventory again this doesn't cost you any money another thing from your first event is the photos all the photos that you get from this first event can be your marketing material you'll put them on your website and on your social media and they can lead to more work another thing that's really important that doesn't cost any money is education so education is obviously really important once you start making money it's a great idea to invest some of that money into specific certifications or educational courses until then there's plenty of free resources online there's lots of YouTube videos great blog material and you can stay up to date on say you're a wedding planner you can stay up to date on wedding magazines or wedding trends also Pinscher is a great way to generate ideas and see what other event planners are using for their events so education is great in a lot of times it's free especially in the beginning stages so you don't have to spend any money on this until you start making money and then you can reinvest in your education and then two other things I want to talk briefly about is offering trade for inventory and do-it-yourself projects so if there's something that you think you need for your event planning services maybe you want that really nice website you could always offer trade for the services so maybe you have somebody in your life that you know that could build a great website they could build that for you and in exchange you could offer them a discounted package on an event that they have that they're planning that's coming up so this is always an option another option is to do some do-it-yourself projects the materials for these are always going to be paid for by the client but do-it-yourself projects are a great way to start out and show your creativity and also have some material again for your marketing material for your social media so do-it-yourself is a great way to get started out lastly I just want to say sometimes it can take a year or even two to start booking clients regularly so that doesn't mean that necessarily if you have a great day job that you should put it because a lot of events are on the weekends or at night if you can find some kind of supplemental income while you're starting out the best way to do that is work in something that's already in the event planning world so maybe you can work for a catering company and then eventually you can build that relationship and build off one of one another or you could work for a hotel that has a venue or something along those lines so there's always ways everybody there meeting can be a potential client so always keep that in mind and push forward with your event planning business [Music]