So you want to start an event planning business? Good call. You’re diving into one of the most flexible, lucrative, and downright fun businesses out there. But here’s the thing: It’s not just about throwing parties. Done right, it’s a fast track to freedom—financial freedom, time freedom, and creative freedom.

In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the step-by-step process of turning your event planning side hustle into a real business. We’re talking real-world tactics, not just the fluffy stuff. If you’re ready to make your own schedule, be your own boss, and actually enjoy what you do for a living, keep reading.

Why start an event planning business?

Starting an event planning business can be highly lucrative. I know because I built a large corporate event business called WeHero. I ran the business for 5 years before it was acquired by Private Equity for millions.

If you live in a major city in the US, starting an event planning company is worth considering. These businesses are hard to disrupt with technology and one of my favorite parts is that the leads have strong urgency because buyers are usually working against a deadline for their event. This means deals close quickly.

I recommend focusing your event business on supporting businesses (B2B) for larger deal sizes and much larger demand.

Why I think event planning businesses fit my criteria for Freedom Companies.

Some of you reading this know I enjoy writing about and helping people build what I call "Freedom Companies".

These are businesses that I believe anyone can build and create three kinds of freedom:

1. Financial Freedom
2. Time Freedom
3. Creative Freedom

If you want to read more about Freedom Companies and why I like them so much, you can read my post here.

Starting an event planning business (especially one focused on supporting companies) has the following benefits that align nicely for freedom companies.

1. They can be bootstrapped - You can start this business with very little money making the risk low for starting an event planning company. I'll break down the needed expenses later on in this article.
2. The deal sizes are large - At WeHero, our average deal size was $8,000.
3. Hiring talent is easy - There are a lot of people that can assist the business allowing you to have a flexible schedule.
4. The market is very very large - my last event planning company was actually supporting clients internationally and was working on expanding into Australia and Canada.

This makes starting an event planning business very appealing in my opinion. I know from experience that it can generate a lot of freedom when built the right way. So let's talk about building an event planning business that supports companies.

Steps for building an event planning business

Step 1 - What kind of events are you planning?

Being a general event planning business that does anything and everything will be challenging to position and get leads. Narrow your focus and provide hyper targeted value.

For example - We're an event planning business that does corporate team building events in the San Francisco Bay Area.

For WeHero, we focused on doing corporate volunteer events. We were hyper focused on being the best at those kinds of events for companies.

Step 2 - Build a simple landing page

Start by creating a simple website for your event planning business. Buy a domain using GoDaddy.

You can use simple website builders like Wix or Wordpress to get started. I personally use Webflow for all of my website builds. Your website doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to instill confidence in potential buyers of your service that you know what you are doing.

If you want a professional website build, I recommend using Makai Web. Full disclosure - I'm an owner in this business but they do incredible work with very fast turn arounds.

For inspiration, take a look at the homepage for WeHero.

Step 3 - Push traffic to your landing page

Now that we have a website with a good offer, it's time to start pushing traffic to your event planning business. There are a number of different marketing channels we can use, but after testing almost every marketing channel out there, I can confirm that the most effective channel is Google Ads.

Why does Google Ads work so well?

The easiest way to get people to pay for your services is to target people that are actively searching for services like yours.

Google ads can be highly effective, especially for companies that are struggling with SEO or are just starting their web presence.

There are a number of ad formats that Google offers, but in the spirit of focusing on the 20/80, we’re only going to talk about Search Ads (AKA Pay per click ads or PPC ads).

Search Ads - This allows us to have an ad at the top of the search results for keywords such as “corporate team building events” or “Boston corporate event planner”.

Driving traffic with Search Ads can be really easy. The challenge is getting that traffic to convert with great ad copy and a high converting website. 

At WeHero, we averaged 25 leads a week with Google Ads. 25 companies a week looking for services like ours. I'll teach you how you can do the same below 👇

Your headlines for the ads are everything!

People rarely make it to the body text of your ad. Your headlines need to accomplish the following:

1. It needs to be unique. Don’t use the same headlines everyone else is using. 
2. It should give a sense of the kind of clients you want to work with. Good traffic in. Good deals out. 
3. The ad should tell the same story that the landing page on your website is telling. 
4. It should convey trust in some way shape or form. 

In launching your first Search Ad campaign, I recommend testing 3 different ads to see what performs best with a budget of $8-20 / day in ad spend. 

The goal is to quickly get data in to see which ad performs the best and then continue optimizing from there. 

Another component of having highly successful search campaigns is making sure you’re bidding on the right keywords. This is where Google’s keyword planner comes in really handy. 

You can enter in keywords you’d like to see traffic for or enter in your website and Google will recommend keywords to bid on.

The metrics you’ll want to be looking for in the planner is:

• How competitive is the keyword?
• What is the bid range (AKA how much do you need to pay to have your ad show at the top of the search results)?
• How many monthly searches is the keyword receiving?
• What is the 3-month change in the search volume for the keyword?

Once you launch your ads, it’s a game of constantly analyzing the data, testing, and optimizing!

I know this is a lot on Google Ads but it is absolutely critical for building your event planning business. If you can't drive traffic and get good leads, you can't build a good business that can give you freedom.

Needs some more help on how to properly setup Google Ads for your event planning business? Follow the steps below in the following video:

Step 4 - Sell

Now that you're getting leads in the door for your event planning company, it's time to sell. The best way to get good at event sales is just practice. Don't be discouraged if your first 5-10 calls don't produce sales. The goal in your first few calls is to learn as much as you can about what your prospects are looking for and how you can adjust your offering and pitch to start closing deals.

The following sales best practices just scratch the surface but will assist you in closing more deals:

1. Ask lot's of questions during your sales calls - In a 30 minute sales call, you want your prospect ideally talking for 20 minutes of the call while you use the final 10 minutes to share about how you can solve their problem or help them reach their goals.
2. Have a crystal clear offering - I recommend having a short power point deck to showcase what makes your event planning business special. The deck is also helpful as a leave behind so the prospect can share with other decision makers in the business.
3. The close is in the follow up - Don't give up after one phone call. Follow up multiple times after a sales call to see if they have additional questions or would like to move forward. You should also do this with leads that haven't gotten back to you. In our business, we had many deals that took 5-8 follow ups to close.
4. Organize your deals in a CRM - To have an effective sales process, I highly recommend setting up a CRM to track your tasks, deals, and make sure no dollars are falling through the cracks. The CRM I recommend is Hubspot. It has a great free option and I find it to be one of the easiest CRMs to use. Need help setting up Hubspot? Watch the video below:

Be agile, learn as much as you can from your sales calls, and you'll be closing business in no time.

Step 5 - Operationalizing and growing an event planning business

In this step for starting an event planning business, I recommend taking care of some formal items such as filing a business entity, setting up invoicing and payment processing, building a team, etc.

I have some recommended services to help with a few of these items below:

Setting up a business entity - I'm not a legal professional, but in the early days of your business, this does not need to be complicated. I recommend a simple LLC to get you started. Legal Zoom is a great place to start and is a low cost option. As your business grows and you start to hire employees, I recommend consulting with a legal professional.

Invoicing and banking - I love using Mercury for my business banking and they also offer invoicing now. Makes things really easy!

Bookkeeping and accounting - Just save yourself the headache and stick with Quickbooks. It just works!

HR and Payroll - I love Gusto. From paying employees to setting up 401Ks, Gusto makes it easy!

Project management - As you take on more and more events, project management and organizational skills are key. We rely heavily on Asana for all our project management activity.

Startup costs for an event planning business

Ready to start you event planning company? Thankfully these businesses can be very low cost to get off the ground. Here are some of the expenses to consider:

• Entity formation (I recommend waiting until you have proof of concept before doing this) - $800
• Website and hosting - $29 / month
• Advertising - $100 - $500 / month
• Google workspace (email and google tools) - $7 / month
• Domain - $10 / year

Pros and cons of starting an event planning company

Pros of the business:

Easy to start - This business can get off the ground in a weekend. It doesn't take technical skills or education/experience in planning events. I'm a testament to that. I just felt like I could host great experiences for companies and I got better at it over time.

Great margins and large deal sizes - If you stay focused on being a B2B company, the margins and deal sizes can be large.

B2B – I love B2B businesses. Easier clientele to work with, larger deal sizes, and at the end of the day, the individual paying for the service isn’t using their credit card. Huge win for deal flow.

Cons of business:

Slower to scale - Unlike a SASS product or e-commerce store, it takes humans to scale an event planning company. The more events you host, the more staff and event planners you will need.

Lacks recession proofing - Events aren't essential for most businesses. When budgets get cut, event businesses can be the first items on the chopping block. Understanding and conveying the benefits your business creates for your clients is key. For example, at WeHero we had great data on how our experiences decreased employee turnover, increased productivity, and as a result made businesses more profitable!

Inspiration

Every time I write about a freedom company, I like to share a case study for inspiration. In this case, I'm most familiar with WeHero so I'm going to use that.

When I started WeHero, I had never run a corporate event. That being said, I was passionate about creating powerful experiences and showing people how they could make an impact with a volunteer experience.

I started in my one bedroom apartment and slowly grew the business.

WeHero continued to grow and we expanded into remote and virtual events as well. This helped us scale the business quickly. In less than 2 years, WeHero was doing over $1,000,000 in revenue annually.

Because we were focused at being the best at what we do, we started getting more and more business via word of mouth and referrals. Pretty soon we had the biggest companies in the world working with us.

If I can build an event planning business, so can you. I can't wait to see the event businesses you all create!

Thank you for reading, and I wish you the best of luck on your journey towards building a freedom company.