HOW TO PREPARE PROPOSAL FOR YOUR CLIENT

The followings are some guide lines for you as an event planner or an event designer to make your event planning/designing proposal for your client:

PRELIMINARY STEPS FOR PREPARING YOUR PROPOSAL

• You need to meet with your clients and start asking all the necessary questions. You can make questioner sheet ready and print several copies of them in advance, so that way you can just fill up the answers.

• Have a proper note book/note pad for taking note of additional information or making sketches. 

•  Listen to your clients and let them tell you their ideas and their dreams for their events. 

• You need to ask your clients about their budgets. Please note that sometimes the customers do not want to be up front and honest about how much they want to spend and that is because they want to see whether they can squeeze the planner or designer to get the cheaper prices. They might ask you how much is going to cost to design and plan their events? You should tell your clients that without developing the concepts and the designs, you can't quote them any pricing. 

• One of the important question that you need to ask your clients is that do they have any venue booked or do they have any venue in mind for their events? The structure, size and the type of the venue plays an important part in designing and costing processes.   

• Now that you have all the information, it is time to go to your office and make your proposal ready for your clients.

STEPS FOR PREPARING YOUR PROPOSAL

Please note that there are two things involve in preparing your proposal : (a) developing your design concept, and (b) preparing your costs based on your design concept.

DEVELOPING YOUR DESIGN CONCEPT

• You need to go to the venue, look around, get a feel and sense of the place and surrounding and take several pictures to help you in your visualization and designing processes. If the venue has already been booked by your client, then you can ask the F&B Director of the venue to provide you with the floor plan; not necessarily a scaled floor plan but the outlines of the structures.  

• You need to develop a concept, a theme and color schemes based on your clients ideas. Each of us are different from one another, as a result every designer has a different mental process for developing a design concept. You can visualize and then sketch your visions and develop your concept in this way. You can flip through magazines, books and etc. or go through on line resources to get your inspiration and develop your design concept in this way or any other way that can help you to develop your concept.     

• After developing your design concept, you need to determine the actual design elements, decorative items, furnishes, fabrics, materials, floral and so on that will be used to create your design concept; this has a direct correlation with your clients budgets. 

• Now that you have developed your design concept and selected all the materials that will be used to create your concept, it is time to start the presentation process. This means the way you are going to present your concept to your clients. The followings are two options that you can choose to present your concept to your client:

          Presentation Board

• To create a presentation board, you need to buy foam boards and organize all your final and completed sketches, pictures, and fabric swatches on the board. Don't forget to label them all. You can also utilize the pictures of the venue to show your client how are you going to transform the place based on your design concept and design elements that you have in mind.Please note that in presentation board you are actually incorporating and showcasing actual pictures, sketches, fabrics/material samples that will be used to produce your design concept. The best is to come up with three design concepts with different design elements, in order to let your clients to choose the one they like the most. Thereafter you can refine your design concept and your design elements based on the chosen design concept.     

          Inspirational Board or Story Board

• This is similar to the presentation board, except that in Inspiration/story board, you are presenting similar concept, theme and color schemes not  your final and completed design concept. You can showcase pictures, photos and samples of similar items, elements and materials that you are going to use in your design elements. So this way you get the feel from your clients to see whether they like those ideas or not and then you can present them with finished, and completed design concept and design elements, material, fabrics, and so on. If the client likes your inspirational board, then this means that you need to develop a presentation board to show your clients the actual and completed design concept and design elements that will be used to produce the event.  

PREPARING YOUR COSTS

• After developing your design concept and the materials, elements, fabrics and so on that you are going to use to produce the event, now it is time to determine how much each element is going to cost to be rented or to be purchased. Also you need to determine how much the other vendors' charges are - if you are going to use outside vendors, for example, florist, lighting company and etc..

• After determining your costs, it is time for you to mark up those costs, in order for you to make a decent profit. I have learned this in a hard way, because I used to just charge my clients only for my designing and planning services and not marking up rental and purchasing items. I have actually learned this recently through the event that I have designed and planned for one of my client. I have put so many hours of planning, organizing, and designing, which was not tally with the amount that I have charged for my services. I will talk about this in more details in my next posts. Let's focus on the subject in hand.

• Another important thing that you need to be careful of is the shipping prices. If you are ordering any items which require shipping charges, then you need to establish a system for estimating the shipping charges in your proposal. For example, you can estimate 30 to 40 percent of the cost of the items as your shipping estimate.

• Another thing to consider when you are preparing your costs is to calculate the taxes. 

• Now that you have all your costs, it is time to determine how much your are going to charge your client for the services that your going to provide. This is a subject by itself, which I will talk about it in my next posts.

• O.k., now that you have all the numbers, it is time to print them on the nice paper and present it in the nice folders.

Now it is time to call your client and present your proposal.

Good Luck!

If you have any question regarding the above mentioned statements, please call me or e-mail me, I will be more than happy to guide you guys through your planning and designing processes.

Moji Manoochehri