The Decision to Start My Own Business

This post is the first of many that are intended to be a resource to you while planning your wedding. This blog will include tips, shout-outs to my favorite vendors, and recaps of past weddings.

In this post, however, I am going to give you a bit of background about me and my decision to build my own business.

November 11th, 2017 was the day the trajectory of my life took a dramatic turn. On this day my boyfriend of three years asked me to spend the rest of my life with him. I then began planning the wedding day of my dreams.

Before I could even blink, it had been two months, and I had completed all of the initial planning. I started getting comments from friends about "how organized" or "how on top of things" I was, and before I knew it I had four people asking me to help them plan their weddings.

At the time I was employed full-time at Georgetown University's Center for Functional and Molecular Imaging, running the MRI and doing research involving adolescent development. My degree is in Psychology, and my long-term goal was to earn my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology. I was struggling with the decision of leaving my home to pursue this degree because was not sure that I wanted to uproot my fiancé from a fantastic professional opportunity, to commit to something that I wasn't even confident that I loved. I thoughts went back and forth from very driven go to graduate school or to maybe pursuing something utterly different. No matter what I chose, I was not excited or happy about it. Eventually, someone asked me what I would charge to help them plan their wedding, taken aback I replied "why would you pay me?", It was at that moment I had an epiphany. Wedding planning was a career that I could excel in and genuinely enjoy.

At first, I was not confident that wedding planning was something I wanted to dive head-first into, I didn't want to be that person that gave up on their degree or to be looked down on by my coworkers as if I had chosen something lesser to do with my life. But after some careful reflection and a multitude of empowering talks with some critical people in my life, I realized it honestly did not matter what my coworkers (or anyone else for that matter) thought--as totally cliche as that may sound. If I am perusing something that I genuinely love and am talented at, I would rather be happy than be seen as more successful to someone that will not matter to me in the future. It even took me some time to mention to my closest of work friends that I had taken a wedding planning elective at George Washington University.

After successfully completing the short class at George Washington, I decided to invest in a more comprehensive and immersive course at the Wedding Planning Institute through George Mason University. Those classes equipped me with the knowledge and skill to not only plan weddings and events but how to successfully start and run my own business as well. I began building my brand in my spare time, as well as planning and coordinating weddings to include my own.

I believe wedding planning is what I am meant to do and I urge anyone that's soul searching to look in directions you would never think you'd go because you just might be surprised.

With Love,

Macy