Rebels' Guide

2020. What a traumatic year. It’s a miracle that Britt and I are here standing together, holding each other, smiling, at the end of this year. Someone acutely described our situation like this: this year all of us need more than any one of us can give. That’s literally how I feel. That our clients needed more from us than we could give, our business partners and industry friends needed more than we could give, and within the four walls of our home the three – almost four – of us needed more than we could give. I’ve just run our numbers for the year and that’s the story I can read in the spreadsheet. Only 59% of my weddings went ahead as planned, but only 28% of our elopements went ahead as planned. More than 20% of our couples are still without a new wedding or elopement date. Our inboxes were about 20% busier this year than 2019 and normally our client relationships have become about 60% longer. The simplified story is that we’re doing a lot more for less with less to give....

As the guy standing up the front of your marriage ceremony, I often see your wedding from a completely different point of view than your guests do – and often differently from how you do. I’ve been at weddings where the cake was destroyed by a toddler and replaced without anyone noticing. I’ve been to destination weddings where flights were cancelled so replacement photographers were literally called on at 10pm to start at 5pm and they had a four hour drive ahead of them from a different country in Europe! I can now comfortably say I’ve also experienced a pandemic which completely tore apart the fabric of our society and made getting married hard. I’ve heard the battle stories and the seen the scars. In the last 11 years as a marriage celebrant and almost 20 years in events, I have some stories to tell. If you want to hear them, bring a bottle of Japanese whisky round to my place one time and we’ll get messy. But the real advantage for you here is tha...