Episode 248: Making Micro Weddings Work For You with Morgan Childs

Micro weddings aren’t new but ever since COVID forced some big changes onto the wedding industry, they’re popular and more in demand than ever. Micro weddings aren’t just a trend, they’re a permanent fixture in the wedding industry and they present some really exciting opportunities for wedding professionals of all different kinds.

Not only are small and micro weddings in demand by couples, but they also allow wedding professionals to serve more couples, work less, diversify their income, and provide amazing experiences for their couples. COVID showed many couples that they don’t have to invite Great Aunt Sarah who they haven’t seen since they were 3 years old to their wedding and it can be an intimate and personalized event.

Today’s guest transitioned from high-budget weddings to micro weddings and hasn’t looked back. They have provided her with more freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment in her business and now she’s teaching other wedding professionals how they can serve couples who want micro weddings and find more freedom and profit in the process.

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How Morgan discovered the niche of small and micro weddings
• The misconception of small weddings being low budget
• How Morgan rethought her pricing & processes
• Providing an abbreviated service and simplifying
• What is a small wedding/micro wedding/intimate wedding/elopement?
• What pop up weddings and minimonies are
• How to create packages for small weddings and elopements
• Why small weddings aren’t necessarily cheap
• The world of luxury elopements
• How small weddings can create more freedom
• What you should consider when you create small wedding packages

Making Micro-Weddings Work For You with Morgan Childs

How did Morgan get involved in this whole niche of small weddings?

Morgan came upon it because she had a wedding company successfully for over 15 years and did big elaborate weddings of all kinds. She started to get requests to do smaller weddings of 15-30 guests.

The way her business was set up just didn’t make sense to do these small weddings the same way. It was such a huge cost for her couples because like a lot of companies in the wedding industry, hers was actually set up for larger events, and it doesn’t always translate for couples wanting to do something intimate.

She had seen hundreds of weddings, amazing weddings, beautiful intimate weddings. She saw the appeal of going off to Europe with 25 friends and having this amazing week, and she realized that she could give that experience to her couples if she just rethought it.

So she rethought how to do weddings and designed the modern elopement and essentially started a brand. Kind of a sister company to her firm back in 2014, and she just fell in love. Now that’s really all she does and because she has been doing it for so long she’s learned her expert title.

What was going through her head when she was getting these small wedding inquiries?

A lot of wedding pros might associate a smaller wedding with a low budget. Morgan hears this a lot too.

She had to realize that this client wasn’t going to fit into her existing business workflow so the existing way that we charged and what we did and the amount of time and effort we were putting into everything, wasn’t gonna work with these smaller couples.

She set up to find a way that it wasn’t going to be unaffordable for them to have the wedding that they were envisioning. She would just really encourage vendors to reframe that and think the idea of smaller weddings results in not enough profit.

Is there a way that you can serve smaller weddings by changing how you approach them and changing what you provide so it makes sense to you financially but is also attractive to the couple? That’s exactly what Morgan did in her business.

What specifically changed about the way Morgan approached weddings

This is going to be different for every vendor but in general, you need an abbreviated service and a way to provide it. Morgan did things like simplify her workflow or not provide absolutely everything that she does for these larger weddings, or create a package that’s just geared towards these more intimate weddings that really actually works for them.

This is something Morgan was excited about. It’s just a really different way of approaching it and the most successful way that she has seen. Businesses do that, and certainly in her own experience, have been creating something entirely different. So she really started from the ground up and really just rethought how she could pair down the service that she provides, but still give them what they need.

Morgan has some really strong feelings about what constitutes a small wedding – 30 guests and below.

She started providing small wedding services during the week so they don’t take up your big wedding days. You don’t have to, you can rethink that and maybe fill your calendar in with some of these smaller weddings.

She effectively created a different business model for this entirely that can work alongside offering bigger weddings. You can offer them side-by-side, or you can totally lean into one like Morgan has.

How Morgan’s students balance big and small weddings

Morgan has some students that still do large weddings and book elopements or smaller weddings and she also has students who decide to just do small weddings.

You absolutely can do both and the key is to think about it differently because our traditional wedding industry was not made for elopements.

To have a product that serves 200 guests wanting a full day and night party and then two people are just really, really different demographics. So as an industry, we really should rethink what those offerings are.

Instead of saying, “I couldn’t possibly serve those couples, they’re not gonna pay me enough” think about “What could I provide for them that would be exciting to them, would really serve the type of intimate experience they want, and also just be really great for my business?”

Small wedding clients are buying a completely different experience. They’re not expecting you to deliver like all the things. That’s the opposite of what they want. It’s important not to project our own feelings onto them too.

To say if it’s a couple doing an elopement, they need 12 hours of photography, they might not need 12 hours of photography. That’s an awful lot of time to be taking photos for two people. So you want to rethink that as something that is abbreviated and yet still incredibly valuable to that couple.

Offering micro weddings or elopements is a really good way to diversify and provide a completely different type of experience.

How Morgan defines all of the small wedding terms floating around in our industry

A lot of terms like micro wedding, elopement, small wedding, intimate wedding, etc are used interchangeably and to some extent, everyone has their own definition. We just have to make sure our couples understand these terms so their expectations are in line.

Elopement wedding is what Morgan uses as the most broad and it’s the oldest term. And it is something that definitely has changed since its conception. Elopement definitely used to mean running away but in the modern wedding world, elopement really came into its own and is still used to be an intimate wedding and can just be the couple. It more refers to an intentional marriage, not running away in the middle of the night.

An elopement nowadays is a non-traditional wedding that is focused on the ceremony, and that is up to 25 guests. It’s completely non-traditional, meaning you don’t have to have any sort of formal reception or anything afterward, and it’s really just focused on the couple, and it can be easily personalized.

That’s what Morgan really loves about elopement and she thinks that most couples love about intimate weddings is that they can personalize them, they can create their own experience, and that’s really important.

Now the micro wedding is the big one. This is the brand new 2020 term that has really gained some staying power. Interestingly enough, Heidi, it is the couples that are really latching onto this term.

A micro wedding generally refers to a much more traditional format wedding with a smaller guest count. It’s very commonly going to have all your professional vendors, a ceremony, a cocktail hour reception, and maybe dancing. It has more of that structure of a traditional Western wedding but it’s smaller. Some couples also use the term intimate wedding to describe this.

The expectations around a micro wedding for a couple could be a lot different than in an elopement so you want to make sure you’re being clear. It can get really confusing in terms of what that couple can expect from you and what they’re going to want out of your service.

It might not be that abbreviated that’s where a lot of vendors are seeing a little bit of pushback. This could be 50 guests, which by the way Morgan thinks is just a wedding.

That’s a micro wedding in many parts of the world, it’s just a wedding. The expectation of 50 people is going to be what a wedding entails so that term is really different from elopement and it’s good to keep those separate.

As a vendor, you can and should describe what you offer as a micro wedding experience, but that’s kind of what couples are grasping onto and they are searching for that online. That term is going crazy, so a lot of couples are searching for that.

Then we have the pop-up wedding. A pop-up wedding is a definite type of wedding that’s been around since at least 2014 and it came out of Australia.

It refers to a wedding ceremony experience that multiple couples use throughout a day so there’ll be like five couples and they all have different times. They get this beautiful setup, all these professional vendors, and they do just the ceremony and move through the experience. This one really does have its own definition and popup wedding or tiny wedding are often used interchangeably.

A tiny wedding could mean just about the same thing as a popup wedding all of the rest of the terms like a mini wedding or an intimate wedding are so broad that they don’t actually mean anything. They’re just terms that specific vendors and companies are using to define their own services.

The other one that we hear is the minimony and Morgan is not a fan. It was born out of COVID for people having tiny ceremonies knowing that they’re doing big weddings later. Morgan doesn’t always believe that that works or that it’s good for the wedding industry.

We just need to be really clear about these terms because different people define them differently. Morgan thinks that non-traditional is the best way to describe an elopement because it could be an intimate backyard ceremony & dinner for 10 or hiking up a mountain with the couple. “Non-traditional” tells you that the couple is looking for something different.

How to determine what you should offer

Couples are all looking for something different so first and foremost, you should look to your couples and your market. What are couples looking for and asking for? Morgan already had couples requesting smaller weddings so she knew that she needed to really think about what she could create.

As professional wedding vendors, there is half what your couple asks you for and half what you know that they need so Morgan married those things together and created something that she knew would be a great experience for them. Her mindset was focused more on streamlining and cost savings.

If you have 20 people, you’re probably not gonna wanna spend a year planning an elaborate wedding, and you’re probably not gonna wanna spend six figures. That’s what Morgan was doing in her planning business. She identified that her small wedding couples wanted something more cost-effective but they still wanted her signature style and our service, so she had to evaluate how they could make that happen.

Morgan came up with an abbreviated focus on the ceremony and then being really a lot more casual and creative with what that dinner could look like and that it wasn’t a formal reception. So she sort of stripped all of the have-t- haves out of that, and that’s really where we got more flexibility.

For most vendors, you should look at your market and what your couples are asking for, whether you are a makeup artist or have a rental company or you’re a photographer, there are certain things that you could think about offering in an abbreviated way.

That doesn’t need to mean cheaper though. For makeup artists, it could be something that’s even more inclusive and more expensive because they don’t have a wedding party. Morgan has talked to a lot of makeup artists about serving as the assistant to the bride helping her in her dress and things that normally other people would do, but perhaps if you’re having an elopement, you wouldn’t have those people.

Just really start thinking about what your couples are asking you for.

Starting from the price point or arriving at it naturally

You could start with a price point you want to reach but Morgan started from what she could include and came to the price point after that. Price doesn’t need to be the main factor. Couples planning a smaller wedding generally want to spend less than if they were planning a large wedding so Morgan focused on an abbreviated service.

Approach it from the perspective of what they need because as Morgan said, in the case of makeup artists, it may be creating a more robust package that costs more, but really suits that couple. It can absolutely be a VIP experience.

All vendors are really different in how that’s really gonna work best for the clients they serve, and then also what part of the market they serve. The small wedding market is where you can get really creative. There’s so much opportunity and creativity that Morgan has seen in redefining what weddings are right now, and it’s what couples want.

2020 shook up the wedding market in a way that we’re not going to go back to being just what we were. If you know what was happening before then, we were already on our way for couples wanting more personalization, wanting different formats, needing different things with their family situations or budget situations.

This is a great opportunity to look at your business and ask yourself “Is there something super creative that I can do? Are there opportunities to be had?” And specifically with small weddings, it’s so much easier to do those things because you’re not dealing with the logistics of 200 guests.

“Micro wedding” does not equal cheap

There’s something to be said for the fact that just because someone is spending less on their wedding or because they have fewer guests, doesn’t mean they’re looking for a bargain basement kind of situation. Morgan has developed an entire business around luxury elopements, so it’s not as if the experience just gets thrown out the door.

Morgan points out that we can’t all be wanting our couples to spend more with us. That’s not why we’re in business. We are in this business because we love weddings and we love what we do.

And if there’s a better way to serve a couple, then it should be worth considering. Morgan found that in her business, she used to do super high-end with people spending six figures on their wedding day and now they’re doing these luxury elopements that have a lot of bells and whistles with them, and that really fit into Morgan’s brand.

There are couples spending, you know, $15,000 and $20,000. But in relation to what they would be spending, like $70,000-$150,000, that feels like nothing. But in reality, $15,000 to $20,000, is not chump change. And that’s definitely what a lot of couples have as their budget.

If they’re doing it with a small group of people, that’s a super beautiful pretty fancy affair as opposed to, you know, just spending $20,000 on a hundred people. It’s just understanding that there are different ways that we can serve these couples, and it doesn’t always have to fit into what we traditionally thought when we started our businesses and that we’re gonna have a hundred people and they’re gonna spend X amount, and that’s all we can do.

Morgan wants the wedding industry to become more diverse and create options for couples who either can’t afford that or don’t want to necessarily make that big of investment because there are a lot of people that need that, and we would be doing them all a service to provide it.

I love that we’re getting these different types of experiences. Spending $20,000 on 20 people versus spending $70,000 on 200 people, is actually spending more if my math is right off the top of my head per person. You can still create a high-end experience and because it’s abbreviated, it should be less work.

Changing your volume

Unless your small wedding is a super luxury offering, you are probably gonna be at a little bit more volume versus really large ticket weddings. For Morgan’s company, this is still very profitable. They work with more couples and less work goes into each. It’s a great business model and one that Morgan and I both get excited about.

It offers a lot more freedom and it’s easier to book. But you know, it’s a different mentality than a lot of people have in the market, which is just, “I need to just keep getting weddings that are paying me more.”

And that is a business strategy that can dead end really. You price yourself out of the market at some point so it’s good to look at alternate things. I like to remind people that they do have way more control than they realize in their business. We have all of these different levers in front of us that we can pull, and most people don’t touch them.

Most wedding pros don’t change how they’re serving people or change how they’re charging. People change, you know, their pricing model changes. There are infinite ways that you can change your business and I don’t think we think about that enough.

Evolving Your Business Model

This is just a slightly different model of serving more people more often but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a bad thing. We have that like old guard kind of stigma in our industry of, you know, like if they aren’t spending, you know, X amount, they’re not worth working with. And that’s bullshit.

Morgan is with me on this and she has done celebrity weddings and huge weddings that she can never talk about. It still didn’t bring her the level of freedom that she has with this business model.

Morgan also agrees that wedding pros don’t experiment enough. When she first started offering elopements she had no idea if anyone was going to buy. She put it on her website and got one booking and didn’t get another for months. Then they got one more, and one more. She didn’t focus on it, she didn’t market it, but it allowed them to figure it out, streamline the process, and understand if the offering was the right offering at the right price.

And then they got to execute it and realized ”Hey, this is a good product.” The clients were happy. Morgan and her team were happy, okay, how do they do this better? And all of a sudden it just blew up and was something that they needed to focus on and get more staffing for.

But that’s just what they did. They tried it, and if it didn’t work, nobody would’ve known that Morgan had ever tried that. It wouldn’t have been a big deal.

So Morgan wants you to go out and try something new and just see if it’s a good fit for your business, because what if it is?

And if it’s not, no big deal. Just take that page down.

I always say nobody knows what our prices are. They might have some general idea, but if you think about the nature of weddings, people are not consistently on our websites. It’s like when they need us, they find us, and then that’s that. So you really have so much flexibility to go and change things and try new things and switch up your pricing and offer new services.

How smaller weddings create more freedom for Morgan

Small weddings can create more freedom because just on a base level, they should take less time. So whatever prep time you put into and whatever onsite time you put into, generally it’s going to be less time than a larger wedding.

It also takes less staffing. So again, depending on what part of the industry you’re in, that’s usually a benefit. And maybe you don’t have to carry such a large staff or hire all these people or manage all of these people all the time. For a lot of people, the appeal is not working on the weekends.

If you’ve been in the wedding industry for a while, you don’t have weekends, and you certainly don’t have weekends during wedding season. So it would be really exciting for a lot of people to have weekends when either their family or all of their friends have weekends. So that’s a big factor as well.

One of the biggest benefits of doing small weddings is they’re simpler to outsource. So those are things that you can have either your team or associates take on for you, especially if they are, at a lesser rate and maybe that’s how that makes sense in your business.

That’s certainly something that Morgan kept in mind when she designed my package. It kept costs down and she didn’t have to be involved. That was the key to unlocking freedom in her business because even with those high-ticket clients and only having a few of them a year, truthfully, as a planner, it was her whole year.

Dealing with these clients, and the more they’re paying you, the more they expect, period. So in reality, the elopements afforded so much more freedom because clients weren’t expecting that and Morgan wasn’t even the one working with them. Her team handles those and they do such an amazing job and they love the experience of that.

All of Morgan’s vendors love our elopements. They’re such a great supplement to their full week that they can have weddings on different days. It’s more popular now, but pre-2020, nobody wanted to have a wedding on a Monday. There are a lot of ways that they provide more freedom, but staffing is the biggest one.

Morgan loves the time flexibility in so many different ways. Whether it’s who’s working on this, how many hours you’re putting in, how many hours someone else is putting in, and the schedule. That is a very straightforward way to transition away from having every weekend of your life taken up by a wedding.

A lot of photographers are so excited because they’re like, “I just wanna spend time with my family and not spend every single Saturday on site. So if I’m doing these smaller weddings, that’s not the case anymore.”

Who are micro weddings best for?

Morgan mentioned planners, photographers, makeup artists but really this applies to everybody. Rental companies can do this by creating a package that just serves that and they have certain parameters around it. Videographers can be doing this and it’s a market videographers should be excited about because hello, there’s not a lot of people there, so that is a really good investment to have this on video that you can share with everybody else.

DJs and entertainment is a little bit trickier but there are some creative ways for them to get involved in this as well. And that’s to be a part of packages that maybe venues are doing or that planners are doing so that they have more all-inclusive packages, that they’re gonna need those services. They can also think about alternate events.

A lot of these elopement couples are also doing a big party afterward and now it has a name, a happily ever after party, which is a couple-driven term. Morgan is loving it because she likes the idea of having a big casual celebration after your elopement that doesn’t have this big expectation of cost and pomp and circumstance, if you will.

A lot of people are doing those so you could be participating in those types of events. You’re a DJ, you do dance parties, what do you do? Yes, you could still play music for dinner, so you should think about that, but you can also think about what are the events surrounding that as well?

Venues are definitely already getting in on this even before it became popular. Doing smaller ceremony-only bookings at their venue during the weekdays or during morning hours, something like that.

So a lot of venues were kind of aware that there is this need for those smaller weddings for a long time but many of the venues are the ones that are putting together the pop-up weddings or the tiny weddings and they kinda have these all-inclusive things that couples can get and maybe they have the rentals already on the property or they have these vendors that they’re partnering with.

Venues are absolutely a big part of that as well. Anywhere you are in the industry, even stationery or calligraphy. Usually, with elopements, you’re not sending out invitations necessarily, but you’re sending out announcements after you eloped and that’s something that you could have as part of the services that you provide.

There are just really opportunities for every vendor to rethink. Morgan has even had some super creative caterers think about, okay, let’s do to-go picnic boxes that our couples could take or like to go charcuterie or you know, just really creative ideas.

It’s just changing your mindset a little bit to understand that yes, it doesn’t fit into the business model you have currently, but it can fit. So how can I figure that out?

It is so exciting to see all the different ways we can diversify our revenue streams. I know an officiant who one day, every month, they just do the legal signings because people come to them and ask about it. One day a month they just stack up their day with all these, they make like over a thousand dollars in a day from these little 15-minute, 20-minute sessions, just getting all your legal stuff done, and they don’t have to deal with those people again.

Officiants are so easy. There are so many packages that what they need is an officiant, right? So basically, photographers who are doing those adventure elopements, any planners, any venues, they’re looking for officiants or celebrants to partner with.

It might not be any different doing these smaller weddings as an officiant and that’s okay. But the legal signings, yes, thinking about what your couples need surrounding their wedding is also always a great opportunity.

A lot of wedding pros that I’ve worked with shift their businesses in different ways to better suit them and their clients. That’s the thing I get super pumped about because there’s no one right way to do this.

There’s so much opportunity right now in the wedding industry for that and believe me, our couples want it. They want something different. They want us to be creative. They’re not the experts. They don’t wanna come up with it. They want us to be creative and figure out how we can serve them.

About Morgan

Morgan Childs has been called the Elopement Expert and named top wedding planner in Hawaii by both Destination I Do & Modern Luxury Magazine. With 18 years in the event industry, Morgan got her start working in one of the principal planning firms in New York City producing high-profile events for A-list clients. After falling in love with wedding planning Morgan moved back to her home state in 2006 to open Moana Events, bringing her distinct sense of style and knowledge of events to Hawaii.

Moana Events has been honored to have planned celebrity and high-profile weddings and has been featured on television and in more than 20 national and international publications as well as over 200 online features. In 2015, she launched Modern Elopement, a luxury elopement experience for couples after noticing a lack in the market for beautiful intimate wedding options.

Now as a Wedding Industry Educator & Elopement Expert Morgan is helping wedding pros grow their businesses through elopements in her Elopement Wedding Pro community. In her spare time, Morgan can be found spontaneously re-decorating her home, at the beach with her dog Gracie, reading a good book, or planning her next trip to Paris and Rome.

Website: www.elopementpro.com
Podcast: www.elopementpro.com/podcast
Instagram: @morganmchilds

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