WOW! What a Weekend! (Part 2)
SUBTITLE: It takes a team
I started Eclatante based on certain principles, and my faith in those principles have only grown stronger since then. Chief among those principles is the “Team Approach” to planning extraordinary events. The importance of that principle was never more evident than at the Sonya & Mike’s wedding this past weekend.
I want to give you a peek “under the tent” (as Ed Knight of EventQuip would say) to see exactly why it is so very important that the team in place is made up not only of talented professionals, but professionals who have no prima donna factor that would keep one professional from going beyond the call to help out another professional for the good of the event.
So here’s a quick peek under the tent:
Just at the moment when this weekend’s bride, her family and her attendants arrived at the bride’s home in the S T R E T C H Elegante Limo for the wedding, the skies literally opened up and let loose with a drenching and blinding rain. Because of the long, curving, very dark driveway, that enormous limo had to back in. Without missing a beat, while Tina and I stood in the driveway holding huge umbrellas, Donna O’Brien, the owner of Beautiful Blooms, jumped right out of her role as the florist and ran out in the pouring rain, without an umbrella, to guide the limo down the long driveway. While the bride and her entourage stepped into the foyer warm and dry, for the rest of the night, Donna was soaked to the bone and shivering.
Leslie Rosen (Leslie Rosen Catering) made a bunch of calls late on Friday night to her amazing staff and asked them to arrive very early because of the impending weather. Not a one refused. The whole catering team was there ready to go well before their appointed time and because of that the guests were served impeccably and precisely on time with absolutely incredible food.
And literally moments before the guests were to enter the tent, the wind gusts intensified and the walls of the tent were slamming into the tables. The catering team and the Beautiful Blooms team joined Tina to form a protective line along the wall of the tent, while the EventQuip guys crawled around on their knees (with Donna (again!) alongside) on the wet ground to secure the walls even more tightly than they were before. And everyone was laughing the entire time. It was truly a great group of team players who wanted more than anything to overcome all the adversity Mother Nature threw at us and provide the bride and groom and their wonderful families with the perfect wedding they deserved.
The moral of this story is: The team you choose to create an event is FAR AND AWAY more important than any of the individual vendors. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to create a cooperative group of team players who will be there to do whatever it takes should anything adverse happen on the day of your celebration. And this past Saturday was proof that the “team approach” to putting together a wedding is absolutely the best approach.