Prior to planning our own wedding, I had plenty of clients express how frustrated they were with different situations revolving around their guest list. Frustrations such as, “there are so many people on our guest list and it grows everytime we turn around!”, “My mom just sent me her list and she wants to invite 30 people whom I’ve never even met!”, “My fiance wants to invite all his fraternity brothers but I don’t want to have 350 people at our wedding!”, or, “my future mother-in-law sent over her list and she’s expecting all 100 of their extended family members to be invited but they aren’t contributing to the wedding at all!”…

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.