Please read this before giving her your deposit and going forward with hiring her.
Before I get into why we ultimately decided to relieve Ms. Nadine of her responsibilities I do wish to point out two things that we appreciated and were the reasons we decided to hire her in the first place:
1. Nadine is extremely responsive. Usually when we messaged her, unless she was working another event she usually replied almost immediately.
2. She is extremely creative. When we were talking about ideas for our wedding space she gave us ideas that we loved and seemed cost effective as well.
Now to the reasons why we ultimately decided to let her go. The short version is we felt she didn't listen, she was disorganized, and unprofessional. Here is the long version:
1. We didn't feel like she did an adequate job of listening to us:
There were a few instances of this. One had to do with showing us venues via internet. After our second official meeting we had told Nadine that we did not want to consider reception venues in Baltimore or ones that were outside. Our third meeting was when she was supposed to show us the last few venues that she was looking into and where we were supposed to pick the ones that we would ultimately go to visit. Of the three she showed us during that meeting, one was in Baltimore, one was outside and one was just completely horrendous. Needless to say we were not impressed
Another instance where we felt like she did not listen was with the actual ceremony. I am Catholic and my fiancé is Orthodox and we were talking about how we wished to let our priests be more in charge of the ceremony as both faith traditions are very specific about what needs to happen in order for the churches to deem the sacrament both valid and licit. Instead of inquiring as to what we meant she just informed us that both her dad and brother are pastors and we don't need to worry about that and that we could do whatever we wanted to for the ceremony.
Lastly for this section, my bride to be did not feel like she was heard during this process. Off the bat she told my bride that she didn't use Pinterest. This struck us as odd because we figured wedding planners would use any means to connect with their client base, but we moved forward anyways. Repeatedly my bride told Nadine things that she wanted in the wedding and those things were usually promptly forgotten or brushed under the rug.
2. Lack of organization:
Again many many things we could talk about in this section, but I will just stick to the top few. The first one was inability to keep to schedules. We had Ms. Nadine under contract for 4 months. 2 months into contract she finally gave us a timeline for our wedding planning. Fast forward 1.5 months later and we had done literally nothing from checklist. The biggest issue was that we were supposed to have had a venue booked by October 1st 2017 for our August 4th (2018) wedding. By mid November we still had not visited any places. Throughout October we had kept asking her what the delay was and she kept telling us that she was having trouble getting in touch with different places and by the end of October we had voiced our concerns. She had promised us that within two weeks time we would have 3 venue visits scheduled. Leading up to the day of our venue visits she told us that she had 2 appointments on the books and was still waiting to hear on one so we decided 2/3 was not bad. On the day of she called us at 3 pm to tell us that our 4:30 appointment was actually at 3:30 which of course created issues. My bride was able to make that appointment but unfortunately I was not. On the way to the second appointment my bride received a call from Nadine saying that we actually never had an appointment at the second place and that the venue was hosting an event. She did ask if we would be willing to drive 45 minutes to go look at the place from the outside though. The funny thing is the day we fired her I called the two venues that we were supposed to see that "she wasn't able to get in touch with" and had appointments at both places within 20 minutes. Ultimately we didn't go with either venue which leads to the second point in this section, she failed to gather important information.
With the second of the two venues that we were visiting, she had told us that the venue fell within our budget, but was at the upper end (we had budgeted around 5k for the rental space). Not only was this venue more than double our budget (just for the space), we had to use their service staff which would have brought our costs FOR THE VENUE ALONE up to around 18k. Not only that she had told us they could accommodate our number (350) and they said they couldn't. On that same vein it seems that she never looked up officiant laws in VA. If she had she would have seen that none of our priests would have been able to marry is in VA as VA requires officiants to be registered with the county that the couple is getting married in.
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