Show notes:

From the very start, I wanted Wed Pros Live to bring together brilliant speakers who really know their stuff and know how to connect with a room. Just as importantly, an audience of wedding professionals who were ready to learn, share, and get stuck in. The energy in the room was incredible, especially from the attendees right from my Spice Girls entrance through to every single session, it set the tone for such a special day. The quality of the talks reflected exactly what I hoped for: practical, insightful sessions that sparked real conversations and gave people ideas they could take straight back into their businesses. Because the best speakers don’t just share information, they inspire action. They get you thinking differently, challenge what you’re doing, and leave you feeling motivated to make real changes.

As I start planning for 2027, that bar isn’t moving—it’s getting even higher. I’m focused on creating an event that feels welcoming, inspiring, and genuinely valuable for every wedding pro in the room. Everything we learned from our first event is shaping what comes next, and I can’t wait to build on it.

Wed Pros Live 2027

Wed Pros Live 2026 video recap

Time stamps:

00:11 – Reflecting on Wed Pros Live

05:41 – Creating a Successful Wedding Conference

14:15 – The Importance of Quality Speakers

17:07 – The Importance of Audio Visual Quality in Event Planning

24:46 – The Importance of Details in Event Planning

31:22 – Finances and Event Management

35:20 – Feedback Reflections

42:32 – Planning for Wed Pros Live 2027

Transcript:

Becca
00:00:00.240 – 00:46:32.710
Can you believe it’s already been three weeks since Wed Pros Live and I am now definitely on the post conference comedown. As you can imagine, putting on an event of that scale is definitely not for the faint hearted.

So right now in today’s episode I’m going to be reflecting on what happened at Wed Pros Live and see what lessons I’ve learned along the way. I’m Becca Poutney, wedding business marketing expert, speaker and blogger and you’re listening to the Wedding Pros who Are Ready to Grow podcast.

I’m here to share with you actionable tips, strategies and real life examples to help you take your wedding business to the next level.

If you are an ambitious wedding business owner that wants to take your passion and use it to build a profitable, sustainable business doing what you love, then you’re in the right place. Let’s get going with today’s episode.

Wed Pros Live happened at the end of March in both London and in Ireland and as I look back my first thought is definitely wow.

I I did it for years and some people know this goes back years I’ve been saying that I want to see a more high energy conference here in the uk, that I think there’s room in the market for more wedding industry events and conferences that are more like some of the events I go to internationally and I’ve been hoping someone else was going to do it. And then this time last year I announced that you know what, I’m just going to do it myself.

And although I could picture very clearly what I wanted that event to look like, it was really difficult to market it to all of you because for me to say yeah, it’s going to be a new style Becca Vibe event, it’s quite difficult to put your finger on what that actually means now having experienced the event in both Ireland and in London for those that came, I hope you now kind of get a vibe for what I meant when I said I’m going to bring some Becca energy to the event. I think traditionally we feel like conferences can be a bit stuffy, a bit boring and actually they don’t have to be.

Some of the events I go and speak at, you know, I love Wedding NBA out in Las Vegas. I come away from there feeling so re energized.

That energy lasts me through almost the whole year until the next event and that was what I wanted to produce.

And I hope if you’re listening to this as I go through some of my learnings that one of the things you take away is that you still are living off some of that energy from that day and implementing the stuff you learn that will carry through to the next event you go to. And then back to Wedpros Live in March 2027.

So as I look with immense pride at this event, it was no small feat and there’s lots of lessons learned, but my overriding feeling is I did it.

And so the first encouragement for you today is when you have these ideas, yes, it may take months, it may take years to bring them to life, but don’t lose thought, don’t lose hope on those ideas. Sometimes you just gotta do it.

Now, one of the ways I do my business is probably with a bit of naivety because if I look too much into something, sometimes I talk myself out of doing it. And so when I am going to do something, I do it full force. I either don’t do it all or I do it at 100 miles an hour.

A bit like writing my book, launching this podcast, winning the podcast award, and now launching where Pros Live. And sometimes that’s the best way to do it.

You gotta launch it with confidence and then take people on that journey with you, otherwise you’ll talk yourself out of it.

Now, if I really thought about the amount of effort, the amount of stress, the amount of logistics, the amount of money involved in putting on a conference in central London, I probably wouldn’t have actually done it. However I’ve done it and as we say, done is better than perfect. And I threw everything behind it.

And sometimes that’s the best way because now we’ve got an amazing basis to build on and we can make those improvements along the way.

So my first learning from WED Pros Live is if you’ve got an idea, if you’ve got something you want to do, if you want to change the way something works, if you want to bring your own personality to something, then just do it. There is space for everyone.

I don’t think we can ever have too many wedding industry events or too many different kinds of photographers or videographers, because what differentiates that is the people who are running it. One of my heart reasons for doing WED Pros Live as well is because I wanted to create an inclusive space.

A space that was for people starting out in the industry as well as those who are very established, for people working in DI weddings as well as those people working in high end luxury weddings, because there’s events that exist for those different parts of the market. But actually, how much more rich and fulfilling is it when we bring those People together and there’s more work for me to do.

I’d love to see even more diversity in future years, but is a starting point to create a space which is full of different people, people who are full time managers in employment in a venue, through to people who are parents full time and have a small wedding business on the side. Everyone has equal value and everyone deserves to be in that room. And I love that that’s what we created.

And the other ethos behind it that I wanted to get through, and I hope this shone through, is that owning a wedding business has many different factors to it and everyone’s there for different reasons. For some people, it’s their full time job. For some people, they want to like grow my business, make six figures.

And there can be a lot of emphasis on that, but actually there’s a huge gap for people that are closer to me really and that, yeah, I want a business, yes, I want it to be successful, yes, I want to do well.

But actually there’s a lot more important things in my life, like making sure it fits around my family, making sure I lead with the values rather than just constantly saying, here’s how you make more money. And so for me, I wanted it to be the whole package.

I wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, but also to look at our industry and our job roles in a more holistic way rather than feeling like it’s just about about making more money all of the time. So I did it. I bought my ethos. I was 100%, unapologetically myself, which I encourage you to be. And it’s like, get on board with it.

Or if you don’t like that, it’s not your event. But the people that got it loved it. And that shines through in the feedback. Okay, second lesson.

If you want to do something big, you can’t do it alone. Team is huge. And one of the key ways that we made WordPros Live a success was with the team I had been built around me.

And I am going to name them all individually and thank them because you don’t necessarily know who’s behind it. Yes, I might be the face of it, but on the day there was a whole lot of other people working around me to make things work.

And there was also people working ahead of the day to help it. So number one is Rachel. Rachel works as my VA as part of my team and she has a background in organizing exhibitions and conferences.

On a planner level, she’s a details person, she’s a spreadsheets person. She’s the Ying to my Yang because I have the creative ideas and she actually goes through the logistics.

She knew the questions to ask the venue when I had my big ideas. Things like how will we get access? Can we do that? What’s included? What’s the minimum spend?

She was brilliant and she worked with me from day one of me announcing the conference all the way through to the conference itself and then was the stage manager on the day. If you want to do something big, you have to have people that complement your skills. There’s no point having lots of Beccas there.

Actually having Rachel there. She grounded me. She did all of the logistics, the detail and she was incredible at it.

Second, a big factor of wedpros Live is of course Simona, my content creator.

We’ve been working together a year now, so she’s been there for the whole journey and she did an amazing job all year round creating content to promote the event, which is difficult when we’re promoting an event that we’ve never run before. So how do we show you what it’s going to be like?

And then also on the day itself, running around with her big Mike, creating content and bringing the energy and the conference content has been huge. More on that later. Okay. Then there was the on the day team who around me as well. So Ella, who also works as part of my team was there on the day.

She was incredible again, just a self starter.

Two members of my team went and got me a caramel latte that morning because number one they knew I loved it and number two they just went and did it and they knew it would make a difference to my day and I’m so thankful to Ella and Simona for doing that. Ella was brilliant on the day. She was a calming presence, she was organized, she kept things going.

And I was saying to my team afterwards, I didn’t really noticed them on the day other than that they were just getting on and doing what they needed to do. No one asked me questions, no one bothered me, which was what we said. We wanted to have everything planned ahead of the day.

So on the day I could focus on the job in hand which was hosting and speaking on the stage, making sure that it’s running to time and they would get on and do everything else, which they did. And then my amazing check in team as well, which was made up of my mum and dad and Trudy who’s also part of the business and her partner as well.

And we, they were just great.

They were so good for me to have some solid Foundational people who genuinely just want to be there because they love and care for me, to encourage me along the way, to help me into my change of dress, to just see my business meant so much to me. And I know lots of you that met them were encouraged that I had my family and friends there supporting me as well. So team is a big thing.

You cannot do something of this scale alone.

You can’t do everything, even if you’re capable of doing everything and actually finding people to surround yourself, yourself with, that have your same ethos, that get it, that know you, that care for you, and equally want this to be a success is huge. And they’re a huge part of what made that day run so smoothly.

The third learning, which I knew all along, but I think has been backed up, and hopefully you’re seeing it now too, is the importance of a conference, having great speakers. From day one, I talked about having top quality professional speakers.

You know, there’s that saying that everyone can speak, but not everyone can speak, which basically means, yeah, anyone can go on the stage and give a talk, but it doesn’t mean they’re a speaker, it doesn’t mean they’re a professional speaker, it doesn’t mean they’re engaging, it doesn’t mean they’ve got good content. And I’ve definitely been to conferences before with not very good speakers. And for me, from day one, I wanted the best speakers in the industry.

When I go to Wedding MBA out in Las Vegas, the quality of education there is second to none. And that’s what I wanted to emulate. It’s not that I wanted just people from America.

What I wanted was the best quality speakers in, in the world that I knew and had relationships with and trusted and knew would deliver for me at my first ever event. And actually, we don’t have that many speakers here in the uk and if we have, lots of, you will have heard them before.

And so I wanted to bring in fresh people, different people, people that I knew and trusted and knew would bring and understand the vibe I wanted to create. And that’s exactly what they did. Now, a good speaker works on a number of levels, some that you’ll have noticed and some that you don’t.

So whether or not you’re interested in that topic or not, actually a speaker is way more than that.

A good speaker will keep you engaged and tell stories and hook you back in, even if it’s not a topic that you’re 100% interested in, because they’re not just regurgitating slides, they’re telling stories, they may be making you laugh, they may be giving you real examples, and they keep the pace of the energy flowing. That’s really important.

A good speaker isn’t trying to sell you from the stage or try and give you a little bit of information in order to get you to buy something from them. They’re actually giving more and more and more information. They’re giving an abundance.

They’re not gatekeeping their information, they’re being generous with their information because they actually want your businesses to grow. Yes, there’s ways to work with them going forward. Of course there are, but you don’t need to feel like you’re being sold to in that moment.

Now, from my perspective, what makes a great speaker is invisible. And a lot of you wouldn’t even notice this. But I know that they’re professional speakers. Why? They all came and got mic’d up on time.

They knew what to do to get mic’d up. They all kept to time impeccably, so every single one of them finished on their mark.

We did have a countdown clock on stage to help them, which is great when you’re a speaker. But I didn’t have to have anyone go over time. People said to me, oh, the day flowed really well. We always had the breaks. Everything went to time.

That’s the difference when you have a really good quality speaker, because they know their job and they’re good at it. They know the time they’ve got to fill. They know if they need to speed up or slow down.

They know how to hit a mark and keep everything running to time. They’re professional, they’re low maintenance, they come in, they do their job and they get out of there. But stay around and chat to the attendees.

And the speakers at wedpros Live were phenomenal on that level. They were amazing as speakers. Whether or not they were your favorite speaker of the day. Well, everyone’s going to have different opinions on that.

But from my perspective, they were an amazing set of speakers in terms of the content, in terms of the engagement, in terms of the interest level of their talk, the way they made sure they targeted it to the audience in the room as a whole, and the way that they kept a time and were so super professional and lovely people. That’s what makes a great speaker.

And I think when you attend a conference and it goes off time or it feels boring or dull, often is because the people that they’re booking to speak are not speakers. Right?

We’ve all been to conferences where you have people who get up and tell you their life story about how they’ve made loads of money from their business, which may be really interesting in an interview or a podcast interview or even on a panel, but it doesn’t necessarily make a great 40 minute talk. So having great speakers is essential. And that’s a key part of how my events will run in the future. As I start to plan my speakers for 2027.

You shouldn’t have a problem finding speakers. I shouldn’t have to put out a speaker request.

For me, finding speakers is the easiest part of my job because I’m surrounded by the most incredible speakers.

I’ve spent 10 years building a network of people that I’ve spoken on stage with, that I trust, that I know can speak or that I know I can give an opportunity or a testing ground to on a pan. And so yes, I might put out a call for speakers just to find out who’s interested.

But ultimately I’m hand selecting every single speaker because I know you need to hear what they have to say. Sometimes you may not know that you need to hear what they had to say.

Someone said to me the legal talk wasn’t relevant to me this year, but on the train home I went and changed my terms and conditions. Well, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t relevant to you. Actually, it was relevant to you because you went and made a change in your business.

Now, it may not be the most exciting thing that you want to think about or you may not think you need it, but Becca here knows that a lot of you need it. A lot of you don’t spend time on your terms and conditions. A lot of you don’t think about that more deeply.

And actually if you then went and took action on a train, to me that’s a win.

So I will always curate a set of speakers that I think on the whole as a group are going to benefit you and benefit your business, even when you don’t think they’re who you’re needing to hear from. Now, my fourth learning, and this was a big one for me, was all around AV or audio visual.

Now, as a speaker again, I’ve been to lots of conferences and what you have for your audio visual can make or break a conference and often we don’t put enough emphasis on it.

And as I said, it’s not the most sexiest thing pit like some of those talks, they don’t necessarily what you want to go to, but they may be what you need. It’s the same with audio visual. I knew that really Good sound and lighting and screen makes all the difference to a conference.

And so I knew I wanted to spend money on that. It’s also quite stressful. It’s hard, hard.

You know, I’ve been to loads of conferences where the microphones don’t work or you can’t work out how to turn the projector on. And I didn’t want me or my team to be dealing with any of that during the day. It’s time consuming, it’s stressful, it makes the speakers stressed.

So I knew I needed to offload it.

Now, I’m going to be very honest with you because I put a number in my budget for Wed Pros Live for av, which I thought was generous and I thought that was definitely what it was going to be. It was probably more than most people spend on their AV for their conference. And then I had all my ideas.

I took it to the company who were incredible and it turns out my ideas were quite wrong. So my AV actually ended up costing me four times the amount that I budgeted. It was the biggest oh my goodness moment of the entire planning.

But I knew it needed to be right and I’d rather take the risk on making less profit and having really great quality audio visual for my attendees and for me and for my speakers than to scrimp and save and do it myself, have the added stress and not give a very good result. If you were in the room at wedpros Live, I’m sure you will agree that the audio visual was incredible.

I had three technicians there, they were amazing. They did all the work, it was no stress for me.

They got in at 6am, they set everything up, they did the lighting, they did the sound, they did the entrance music, they did everything and they packed it all away again at the end. There was not a sound problem all day. There was no microphones, running out of batteries.

Yes, there are a few feedback comments about if you were at the back of the room and the screen. I’ll come on to that later.

But ultimately I have no regrets about spending that money and the learning for me is for next year, I need to budget correctly.

I know now how much this stuff costs, especially in central London, especially if I’m getting people to set it up first thing in the morning, how many people it takes. And I want to just grow on that and get my audio visual even better. But it’s not cheap now.

I could have just gone, yeah, I’ll just do free audio visual or really cheap audio visual. But I guarantee that your experience on the day would have been a lot worse because it can take away for both the speakers and the attendees.

So it was a lesson. And if you’re listening to this and you’re planning an event, audio, visual is a lot more expensive than you maybe think it is.

But it’s the invisible thing that makes quality. And I have no regrets for it. And I’m hoping to book the same team to do it again next year.

My fifth lesson when putting this event together was around how important it was for me that this event worked well for both speakers and guests. And that’s a really difficult line to follow. However, let me explain what I mean by that, right?

You, as a guest, you go to the conference and everything, you want it to be best for you. Of course you do. That’s why you’re paying for the ticket.

But as a speaker myself as well, I know that when I go to conferences and speak, I don’t always have the same experience everywhere. And so for me, it’s thinking, okay, how can I make this a really good event for a speaker?

As well as how can I make this a really good event for an attendee? And where does that balance lie? So, for example, some of the feedback I’ve had is that, could I make the speaker talk shorter?

But for me as a speaker, I know that 30 minutes is a rush. If I get asked to speak at something for 30 minutes, it’s difficult. For me, 40 minutes is the sweet spot. As a speaker, it gives me time.

I don’t have to rush. I can pace myself. And if I’m traveling across the world or across the country to give up my time for an event, I want a bit more than 30 minutes.

And so for me, I would rather protect that time for the speaker, having the music to come on and off the stage, to having someone introduce you so that you don’t have that awkward moment of shuffling up to the stage. A small detail, but as a speaker makes a big difference.

We also, as I said, had that countdown clock, and also what I call a confidence monitor is the professional name for it, where you can see your slides in front of you so you don’t have to keep turning around and looking at a screen. Now, all of those things cost more money. That’s why my AV budget was so high. However, they make all the difference as a speaker.

And when I speak at an event and I get those things, I feel really looked after. But on the other hand, I want to make sure it’s a great experience for the guests, I don’t Want them to get bored.

I want to make sure we’ve got enough time for the coffee breaks, which is always hard to get right.

I want to make sure there’s space for them to move around, time to go and use the bathroom, opportunity to go and get food, a whole range of topics to try and help people. Because what one person needs and what another person needs is never going to be identical.

So trying to find things that work throughout the day on different levels for different people in different businesses, in different stages of business, and getting that balance now, it will never be perfect. There will be no one that went to Wed Pros Live and went, well, maybe there is, but most people won’t go.

Every single element was exactly perfect for me. There will be people who say, well, 90 of it was good. This bit was less relevant to me.

And that’s fine because I can’t please 184 people to exactly the same preferences as each other. But for me, the guest experience and the speaker experience went hand in hand.

I guess this is the same when it comes to you thinking about your wedding businesses.

It’s thinking about the experience you’re giving your clients, but also the experience that it’s like for your vendors around you working with you, because both of those people are equally important in creating a great outcome. Okay, let’s move on to number six. My sixth learning, and I’m sure you’ve learned from this too, is the incredible power of content.

I’ve been banging on about content on this podcast on the stage for the last year about how video content is Now King on TikTok, on Instagram. It works. And over the month of Wed Pros, over the month of Wed Pros Live, the content of the event reached something like 150,000 views.

And just content about Wed Pros Live, which is huge, that way out outfits anyone in the room. I mean, we had 184 people in the room. Think how many more people saw and heard and found out about the event because of the content.

Because the content was great quality, because the content was being done by someone who was pumping it out all day. Live in the moment.

So even if you were not there at wedpros Live in the room because you couldn’t get a ticket or you couldn’t afford it, you were getting it live. You felt like you were almost in the room as well because you were seeing clips from it everywhere. That’s no accident.

That’s planned and it works, right?

The content buzz around the event helped us sell the tickets and also it helped us get the interest up and it’s helped us start to sell tickets for next year. And as I said earlier, it’s a difficult job for Simona to sell a conference that had never happened.

Well, it should be so much easier for us now for 2027 because we’ve got so much content. I had to go out and buy her a hard drive. But if you want an example of how content works, look at what she did for my event.

Because content is key, and if you want to reach a high level of people, if you want to reach more and more people, Instagram account video content is the way to do it.

Whether that’s upskilling yourself and doing it frequently, whether that’s paying someone to do it for you, it’s got to be part of the conversation if you want to show up on social media. And it definitely worked for Wed Pros Live.

Okay, the seventh lesson that I learned along the way is I knew that it would work really well if I could announce the 2027 WED pros live at the 2026 event. But practically as a business owner, that is an added layer of stress that I probably didn’t need.

Although I’m glad I did it, because while I was trying to organize this first ever conference, well, towards the latter stages the last couple of months, I was also trying to arrange the next year’s conference, trying to visit venues, and it was really difficult to know what to do. I had this whole conundrum about I had two venues. One was the same size as 2026 and one was a lot bigger.

Now, the same size one would have been similar cost and the one that’s a lot bigger was a lot more cost. But if I stayed the same size and everyone wanted to come back, we’d sell out really quick.

But if I went bigger and people didn’t like the event, which hadn’t yet taken place, I’m taking a massive gamble on a bigger amount of money. And I went back and forward on that a lot.

And it was a bit of stress that no one really knew other than my team because I hadn’t told anyone that that was happening. I wanted it to be a surprise that I already had the date and the venue announced.

Now, we actually only managed to secure it something like five or six days before WedPro’s live. So we were on a deadline, it was tight, and it nearly didn’t happen.

But I’m so thankful we did, because as a marketer, I know the best time to sell something is in the moment. I talk about the excitement curve with your couples.

The moment you’re most likely to sell to them is when they’re excitedly looking through your Instagram and looking through your website. And if you wait five days to go back to them, them, they’ve gone on and done something else.

So when you’re at wedpros live 2026 and you know it’s a great time and you know you’ve learned something, it’s the perfect time for you to think, yeah, I’m going to put this in my diary for 2027. So the added stress was trying to do two conferences at the same time.

It’s not for the faint hearted and I guess, I don’t know, maybe I need to start looking at 28. If anyone’s got any recommendations for venues.

But it’s hard to project that growth and there is a little bit of self belief that has to come in there because I could have taken the safe option and gone for the same size venue and I would have sold it easily and made a profit. But the self belief in me said I want a bigger space at the table because there were people who wanted to come that couldn’t get in the room.

And I don’t want it to be exclusive. I want it to be inclusive. I want everyone to be able to be there from all areas of the industry. I said that earlier.

And so I had to have the instinct to know this is going to go well. I’ve put in all the time and effort. I know people are going to like it and therefore I’m going to back myself for 2027.

And I’m glad we did because I’ve already sold 70 tickets for next year, which is incredible because I haven’t even announced a single speaker yet. Which shows that the trust in the brand and in me alone was enough for you guys to know is going to be great in 2027 too.

And that’s my promise to you, always to bring you great quality stuff. When you give up your time for it, your time is precious. You deserve the best. Okay, number eight on my list of learnings is this.

The details matter now.

I talk about this all the time when I talk about customer service, about Disney, about going above and Bey, about the little things you do for your customers, how that will make them remember you, how it will make them feel. All of that stuff I teach you all of the time. I tried to execute as well as I possibly could at Wed Pros Live.

For me it was all about the tiny details.

I visualized what it would be like for you walking in the venue, the first thing you would see, how that would work, how it would make it easy for you, how you knew where to go, how you knew which session you’d booked. Because I know I always forget what I’ve booked.

How you know how to identify other people to make networking easier and how everyone would go from room to room. I visualized everything in as much detail as possible to make the event as seamless and as easy for you to attend as I possibly could.

Now I know there’s probably some learnings for next year to make that check in process smoother, but on the whole it worked really well.

You got given your name badge, you wrote your own name on it, you wore it around your neck, you got your lanyard, which I love from Wedding mba and I borrowed that idea to show you who’s who so you can see quickly who’s from a venue, who’s a celebrant, who does the same as me and spark up conversation.

We had those colored stickers to show you which breakout room you had already booked for so that you couldn’t forget and so that we could make sure you could get into your room quick. And we gave them colors because colors are easy to remember whereas names of rooms are often easy to forget.

So if you’ve got a green sticker you go to the green room. Well that’s quite easy for you to remember. So all of those little details coming together make the experience better for everyone.

Yes, it involved a lot of pre planning on my part but on the day it meant everyone knew where to go and it was very, very easy. Also other little details, things such as the program that was really important to me to have a really good quality program.

But if I’m going to spend money printing a program, I want it to be something you’re not just going to discard in the bin straight away. Which is why I had the idea of adding the notes section to it. I love pen and paper still.

I love to write physical notes but I could never find the right notebook I left the notes in. And so the idea was if you have that program, you know, all year round the notes are attached to that speaker.

So you can look up the details of the speaker if you’ve forgotten who they are. But you can also go oh, what did she say about that? And you know exactly.

Your notes are in the Wed Pros Live program that you’ve got on your shelf and you go straight to that page and your notes are there. It Makes it a benefit.

And loads of people said how much they enjoyed having that physical program, how easy it was for them, how they’ve kept loads of notes in it. And I loved seeing people scribble in them all day. And so I hope not too many of them have ended up in the bin.

And that’s definitely something I will repeat for next year. The other detail that I said I wanted from day one was the Becca cocktail. And we had loads of fun with the Becca cocktail.

I know sometimes people are like, why are you doing that? I told you. I wanted my business conference to be fun and engaging and a bit different. I love a cocktail at the end of a long day.

I wanted it to be pink and sparkly. The amazing team from Sip and Swig came on board as a sponsor to help me make that happen for you. They got behind the idea, we designed the cocktail.

It was a lot of fun, but it was also really nice to just give people that breathing space to chat, to connect, to, look at the exhibition stands at the end of the day, because a day of learning is intense. As fun as I tried to make it, it’s still heavy on the brain.

And so actually having that space in the cocktail hour for those that stayed, which was most people, and having that music and having that more of a party atmosphere so people didn’t feel like they had to rush back and they could kind of digest. Well, again, I absolutely loved it. And the cocktail is definitely something we’re going to keep for 2027. You know, the little details matter.

Many of the details you probably wouldn’t have even noticed on the day, things like the ribbons so that you knew where you could sit or which lunch you had, because we had so many different variants of people. And I didn’t want people feeling awkward.

I hate going to an event and then ending up in a space I’m not supposed to be in and someone having to awkwardly tell me, oh, are you sure you booked that? I hate that.

And so I wanted to avoid as much of that as possible by making it super easy for everyone to identify where they could go, what they could do, what they paid for. Because there were so many different options. The little details make the biggest difference.

And one of my biggest challenges is thinking about those little details for 2027. To make it. To make it energizing, to make it exciting, and to keep surprising and delighting you.

A couple of other things that worked really well in terms of the details. Well, number one was a last minute decision, but lots of people mentioned it and that was.

I always knew I wanted to do some recorded announcements telling people to take their seats because when I go to the theater that’s exactly what happens. And it makes everyone move.

And often I go to an event and someone’s like tapping a glass or hurrying people along and I just wanted again to try and try and reduce some of that friction and to keep everything running on time. So I had this idea to record these pre recorded announcements and I had it diarized to record the week before the event.

However, I lost my voice in the week before the event and I decided I’m not going to be able to do the announcements. And I said to my kids, I was chatting to them over dinner and I was, I was going to do these announcements for my event but my voice has gone.

I think I’m going to have to scrap it. And my Lovely son who’s 12 years old said I could record them for you. Mommy, just tell me what to do. So there we go. I was like, you know what?

Good plan, I will do that. So I did. And he recorded the announcements and he said, welcome to wedpros Live. Thank you for supporting my mum’s first event.

It’s time to take your seats, we’ll start in 15 minutes. And he did a series of announcements, 10 minutes, five minutes and after lunch as well. And we played them out, we played them out a number of times.

People took their seats and people said who was that? And I said from the stage, that was my son. I wanted to get the family involved and people, people loved it. It’s that little touch. It’s a difference.

It’s something you’re not expecting. It’s something that on paper you’d be like why is she doing that? But actually it’s very much part of me and my brand is all about family.

And the other detail which was again a last minute addition was the amazing team at Coventon Video who came to me and said do you want a videographer for the event?

And they had this idea that they could do some filming through the day and then have it edited for us to show on the screen at the end of the event as a surprise for the attendees. And it actually brought me to tears. It was so good. Everyone was surprised by it.

And it’s amazing to there and see the day you’ve just experienced be replayed to you on the screen before you’ve even left. And it was a great marketing move from them because it meant everyone watch their video.

They could have sent me the video a few Days later and I’d put it on social media, but it wouldn’t have hit everyone. But they had the full attention of the room. They had that surprise and delight factor.

And I’m sure they’re going to get some bookings and work and recommendations off the back of it. It was smart on their part. It made my event even better and I know that the attendees enjoyed it it too.

Okay, the next thought number nine is finances. Now with any event like that, we got to talk a little bit of finance. It’s not the my favorite subject and it’s definitely not my speciality.

I went in with a name for this year’s event. I knew a first event often makes a loss or breaks even. I wanted to break even or make profit.

And I’m happy to say that we did manage to make some profit. Not lows, but we did make a decent amount of profit, which I’m pleased about for a first year because I also didn’t scrimp and and save on things.

I tried to make sure that I went for it and I made it a good experience rather than trying to do things on the cheap.

Yes, like I said earlier, I could have made quite a bit more money by not having good av, but quite frankly, I think the AV made the day much, much better. So finance wise, a couple of learnings. Number one, as I said earlier, I went in very naively. I did have a budget.

I had estimated costs, but some of my costs were a little bit off and ended up being a lot more expensive than I thought. I also found it hard because I’m not a details person, even though I encourage you all to be to track of that.

And when I got busy sometimes I felt overwhelmed.

And also a lesson in cash flow being different to profit because you can make profit from something, but when you’re getting income coming in all the way through the year, you have to learn to put stuff aside to pay the venue and put stuff aside for that. Because if you spend the money as it comes in, when the bill comes in, you’re not going to have the money there.

And I know that’s something a lot of you struggle with, particularly when it comes to planning your finances around a busy season and a quiet season. And so I love my Starling accounts because it allows me to have spaces within my bank account.

And so I have a wed pros live space that I could start filtering money through. So when the bills came in I knew that I had the money there so I wasn’t spending the money that needed to go on expenses.

It’s easy and tempting when all that money’s coming in for ticket sales, to think you’ve got loads of money to go out and spend it. But ultimately you’ve got to pay out your expenses first, otherwise you’re going to get a surprise down the road.

The other thing that I definitely didn’t take into an account and was a huge learning for me and it’s going to impact my business going, going forward in both positive and negative, is that when you have a business event of that size, obviously you bring in a huge amount of money. There’s a big turnover because you’ve got to pay the venue for all the food and the drinks and the venue. And so the turnover is quite high.

And what I hadn’t realized, obviously, was that if your turnover gets high, your turnover in your business goes up. And there’s something here in the UK called the VAT threshold. So if your turnover goes over 90,000, you have to register for VAT.

There’s an additional tax that you then have to pass on to your clients. And I’ve never particularly been near that threshold.

I’ve kept my business at a lovely place that I was happy with, but doing wed pros live well, I could see very quickly by March it was going to tip me over. And, yes, you can go, well, that’s great for your business, Becca, but remember, this isn’t profit, this is turnover.

So it’s not that my profit went up like it was, that my turnover went up lows. And that’s what caught me off guard.

And so, as of the 1st of April, I have now gone VAT registered and will remain so, and I have to charge VAT on all of my sales going forward. And that’s been interesting.

And again, that was a stress point because it happened in March when I was at this highest stress level of running a conference and I then had to go and go through all my subscriptions and tell everyone that all my prices were now going to have to be submitted subject to vat. So lots of financial lessons learned along the way.

Definitely learnings for next year, Definitely learnings in terms of profit and making sure that I spend my expenses well.

Definitely learnings in the VAT threshold for some of you, and also learnings in making sure that I’m keeping on track of the income and the spreadsheets and keeping those numbers to hand like I tell you to, so I’m not losing control of the spending now. I didn’t lose control of my spending for 2026 but. But it could have easily happened, especially when my AV bill was four times what I’d budgeted for.

Luckily, it had a lot of buffer room in my budget as well. Okay, that brings me on to number 10, my final learning from Wed Pros Live. And that is I have a love hate relationship with feedback.

So as part of the event, I realized I probably should do a feedback form for attendees. Now, I’m someone who very much lives in my own head in the moment.

And so I love being in the post event vibe of everyone being there and saying how much fun they had and seeing the smiles. And I’m not so good at hearing the things that they didn’t like so much, but I knew it was an important part.

And if you want to grow as a business owner, you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth, you got to hear the good with the bad. And there’s lessons to be learned. So we did send out a feedback form.

I started reading the feedback forms two days after the event and realized I wasn’t in the right place to read everyone’s feedback because I was exhausted, I was riding a high and I didn’t want that to end. However, we have now, as a team, we’re compiling that feedback and looking through for common patterns.

But here’s why I have a love hate relationship with feedback. I love it because it’s helpful.

And inside all of that feedback we get, there will be little nuggets that will really help me shape 2027 to be even better than 2026. Even though we set a high bar, there’s always room for 1% improvements. And so I knew that I needed to get that feedback in order to do that.

And there were some things in there that were either a couple of common themes or things I think. Yeah, actually I should have thought about that sooner. For example, there was a few things I hadn’t thought about, which I’ll go through in a moment.

But on the other hand, the difficulty with feedback is everyone’s looking at it from their own perspective. They’re not thinking about practicalities, they’re thinking about what would make it better for them as an individual.

And I said earlier, well, in the room there’s going to be such a cross section of people and the speakers that I’ve got to try and make it work across the board. And so what’s better for person A might be not for person B.

And that’s the difficulty with feedback because I would read some feedback form where someone would say, say speaker Zed I’m not going to give a specific name. Speaker Zed. I didn’t like their talk.

And then I’d read three other pieces of feedback that would say, speaker Zed was the best speaker I’ve ever seen. It was my highlight of the day. Okay, so what works for someone doesn’t work for someone else.

I had other people say, you had too many American speakers. And then I had other people say, I love the American speakers. I want to see more of them.

And so we have to take that feedback as a collector and with the practical had people say that they’d rather all the seating was round tables so they could take notes. And I hear you and I understand that, but practically, if we’d have had tables in the Royal Horse Guards Hotel, you saw the size of the space.

I’d have had to half the guest numbers. So half of the people wouldn’t have been able to come and I’d have had to double the ticket price to be able to pay for the same space.

And so although something might be better for you personally, actually, if you had to take it at the cost of the ticket price price, well, would you want to pay double to sit at a table?

Or as an industry, as a whole, are we better to let more people experience these great speakers in this great event and be part of it rather than feeling like they’re costed out of being able to attend? So in all of these things, there’s lots to pay attention to.

Now, there were a couple of really good pieces of feedback things that I hadn’t thought about, some that came out early on in the process and some that came out after the event. But here’s three quite funny things. Simple things to solve in some ways, but also challenges.

Now, the number one thing was, now lots of you made jokes to me about coats because I kept putting out in my messaging, don’t bring a coat, even though it was kind of cold and rainy.

And the reason for that was, is in our final meeting where we did a walkthrough of the venue, the venue team pointed out to me that we used all the spaces really effectively, but we hadn’t left a space for anyone to put coats. And I panicked because I suddenly realized if 184 people all bring big winter coats, like where are they going to go? It’s going to be stressful.

They’re going to be on the back of all their chairs.

And so I decided the best way to do it was encouraging people not to bring a coat, knowing that some people would, but we could deal with 20 to 50 coats, we couldn’t deal with 180 coats. And actually, in the end, the venue did manage to find some coat hanger spaces for people to hang coats. But it’s something you didn’t think about.

When I booked the venue last year, coats were not top of my mind, but I’m definitely going to be thinking about where people are putting their coats for 2027, or look out for me saying, again, again, don’t bring a coat, because if you’ve got to hire an extra room for coats, trust me, that’s going to cost you a lot of money in one of those central London hotels. Another piece of feedback was the distance from the screen.

So with there being so many people, it was a large room and if you were placed right at the back of that room, there were some slides that were harder to read and you were quite far away from the screen. And a couple of people suggested that we had repeater screens throughout the auditorium.

Now, this is definitely something I’m going to look at for 2027. It was a learning for me, me. But again, I had to make a decision. I already told you, my AV was four times over budget.

They did offer me repeating screens, but I just couldn’t afford it. And I decided that was the one thing I was going to have to compromise on.

I knew that the speakers would carry, I knew that people could move further forward if they needed to, or try and switch and get closer, but I just couldn’t do anything about it for this year. But it’s definitely a learning for me for next year, especially if we grow the amount of people.

And the other learning for me is that we’re all very British. And I think I needed to make it clearer that you didn’t have to be super British at my conference. So some of the pieces of feedback may have been.

Actually, that talk wasn’t relevant to me because I work in a venue and I don’t do Instagram, for example, or I don’t have anything to do with the legal stuff because I have a legal team that do it in my venue for me.

And actually when I envisage the event and I put together all these talks and what happens in the American events is people don’t sit through everything. So if there was a talk you didn’t want to go to, you didn’t have to go to it. There was no.

It’s not like school where you have to go and sit in the seat for every session. Of course you want to make the most of your ticket money.

But if you know that that hour of your time isn’t going to be best placed listening to that talk, not because you don’t think you need it, I talked about that earlier. But because genuinely you don’t need it, then you didn’t have to be in there. I wasn’t forcing you. You can feel free to use the exhibitor spaces.

Use that hour to sit and chat to someone else about something you learned earlier in the day. Use that hour to go and start making content.

Use that hour to talk to the exhibitors while it’s quiet and get your questions an and so I think I need to remind people of that next year that yes, of course I want you to go to as much as you possibly can, but you don’t have to go to everything if something’s not for you, if someone’s not your cup of tea, you don’t have to go to it. You can go and use that time for something else beneficial to your business.

Now, I don’t recommend working in that time because you want to be out your business, but use that time to build the connections to just have a reset, to go get some fresh air and then come back in fresh for the session you do want.

When I speak in the US and this is why I say we’re all very British, I was obviously the events on a bigger scale, but people come in and out, people come to the second half of my talk and the first half of someone else’s like it’s very transient and I see people getting up and down throughout my talk in that big room. So we don’t need to be so British. Make the event work for you.

I cannot curate a perfect set of speakers and sessions that’s going to work for everyone in that room. So if there is one that is not as relevant to you as the rest of them, use that one to do something else.

You don’t need to be treated like you’re at school. And so I think I’m going to make that clearer next year.

Obviously I don’t want a half empty room, but for most of you, you’re going to get the benefit from all the talks. But if there is something that’s really not relevant, then use that time for something else.

So as I conclude today’s episode where we’ve gone on a deep dive on the lessons learned at wedpros Live and there’s been a lot I’m now onto planning 2027 WEDPROS LIVE 2027 Monday 22 March at the Tower Hotel is gonna be even bigger and even better than 2026. I have a mixture of fear and excitement right now. I’m working on who I’m gonna invite, the speakers.

I’m gonna have the kind of topics, the kind of people you want to hear from. Please drop into my inbox. Don’t pitch yourself, but pitch other people.

Tell me who I should be talking to, who you’ve heard on my podcast that you’d love to see. Now’s the time to influence those things. And here’s some of the positive outcomes I’ve taken away from the event.

Well, number one, I wanted to show the level a conference should be. I wanted to show the level the wedding industry deserves and how we can create a great event event for both speakers and attendees.

I showed you what it is to have a good speaker, to have people who are engaging and and go to time. I also paid every single one of my speakers. Unless they were there as part of a sponsorship, I paid them for their time.

Not as much as I would have liked to, definitely not their going rate. But I wanted to set a precedent from day one that we shouldn’t expect be expecting to get these great people to speak free of charge.

That’s been the norm in our industry for a long time, and I’m trying my best to shift that. And I’ve now set a precedent. My first ever conference, I paid every single one of my speakers and my panelists something.

And I made it very clear to them that it was just something, but that it’s because I wanted to start from somewhere, year one, so that they’re not expected to come and do it for free. They are given an amount of money that helps towards their expenses, help towards their time, and they can use.

So often we think now we shouldn’t pay our speakers. That’s an expense we can save. Now we don’t need to spend lots of money on av. That’s an expense we can save. Save.

But trust me, my speakers felt valued because I valued them and their time. Yes, of course I’d like to pay them a lot more. And hopefully over time, as the event grows, I’ll be able to.

But from day one of Wed Pros Live, I’m setting a precedent that my speakers will get paid and they will bring great quality content to you. And if we don’t pay and value the good speakers, that’s when we end up with not so good speakers.

Because we’re just trying to get the people that are willing to do do it for Free. I also loved seeing people in the room who’ve now taken action. I have noticed it. I have noticed some of you going on your social media more.

I’ve noticed some of you being more visible, changing things about your business, carrying on, interacting with the speakers and I’m here for it. I love that some of you change your terms and conditions on the on the train.

I love that some of you have dived into the data reports or thought differently about the way you do your marketing. For me, that’s what it’s about. About.

I want to see you come to that conference, invest yourself and your time in that day and walk away inspired, energized and taking action. And my final thought, I’m thankful that I succeeded in creating an inclusive room. I hope if you came to Wed Pros Live you felt included.

I hope you felt like it was for you.

And if you didn’t, reach out to me and let me know why, because I want to make sure that’s a space whether you’re brand new to the industry or you’ve been in it 100 years. I want it to be a safe space for you, whether you’re just starting out and you’re charging low prices or you’re working at the top end of luxury.

I hope that we tried as best as I could to reflect that and make you feel welcome. And I hope you tell other people that they are welcome at Wed Pros Live.

There is not a single wedding professional that is not welcome in those doors if they want to be there. And I would love to see you there in 2027. 2027 Tickets are now on sale. I’ll put all the links in my show notes. I would love to see you there.

My aim is to have over 200 wedding pros and venues in the room. We’ve already sold 70 tickets, which is incred. VIP is already sold out, but there is currently space for you.

So if you want to get involved, if you want to come along, grab yourself a ticket because I promise you, as always, you’ll want to be in the room where it happens. I’ll see you next time.