Christy & Ty’s Kentucky Wedding I’m so very excited to finally share OUR Waveland wedding! Having been in the wedding industry for the past decade, I have the pleasure of being surrounded by beautiful gowns, flowers, stationery, and venues almost every weekend. Therefore, when it came time to begin planning our wedding, I knew we […]

Don’t let selecting a venue overwhelm you – follow the steps I used when choosing my own wedding venue.
When it comes to selecting a wedding venue it can be hard to know where to begin.  You can spend hours and hours googling and after weeks of hunting still feel like you don’t have a clue.  There’s so much info out there in cyberspace that it’s easy to become overwhelmed.  So using my own upcoming wedding as an example, I’ll break it down into four easy steps.

“Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.” – Alice Walker

It feels like I blinked and suddenly I was at the end of my first year of business ownership. It’s incredible how quickly time passes.

One year ago, I launched Christina Burton Events. It was something I had been thinking about for awhile, but didn’t decide on until I learned we were relocating from Lexington, Kentucky to Indianapolis, Indiana because of my fiance’s job. Although not knowing a soul in the city you’re launching a company (especially one in such a relationship based industry) it can be a daunting challenge, it just finally felt like the right time to take the leap. I had spent the past nine years in the event industry, planning weddings and other events under different companies. Along the way business ownership never felt like the right fit, but when facing that move I felt as though the timing was finally right to tackle that new challenge.

As I sit snuggled on my couch reflecting on the past year, I’m truly in awe of how much change and development can happen in a years time.  Had someone told me all that would come in 2017 I probably would have called them crazy, but here I sit with the first wedding season of business ownership under my belt and it was quite the first year!  So in order to celebrate and remember – let’s review the top 10 things that have taken place for Christina Burton Events over the past year.

Where do I begin?
With money – the thing none of us loooovvvee to talk about (at least, I don’t.)  But the first step to planning a wedding should be determining how much money you have to spend.  This is a line I’ve told clients over and over through the years, but shortly after our proposal (as friends and family are asking if it’s planned yet) I found myself going the wrong direction.  If you begin planning before you have a budget in place it’s really easy for things to get out of hand and for you to get entirely off track.  I’m now speaking from experience.  Even though I knew to start with a budget, I’ve been planning weddings for other people for ten years, I was SO excited to start planning my own, so I jumped in before I was ready.  Luckily, I very quickly realized that things were headed down a financial path I didn’t want to go down, so I pressed pause on all communication with vendors and went back to gather a budget.