At some point a supplier will be late, wrong, or absent. The date does not move and the guests are arriving, so the only useful question is what you already decided to do.

Before the event

  • Confirm every supplier in writing in the final fortnight, however certain you are. The confirmation is where a diary error surfaces.
  • Have the contact number on the run sheet, not in your inbox.
  • Know which suppliers are genuinely load-bearing. A missing florist is a disappointment. A missing caterer is an emergency.
  • Keep two names you could call for each critical category.

In the moment

Call, do not email. Establish the actual situation rather than the reassurance, which means asking where they are right now rather than whether they are on their way.

Then decide quickly whether you are waiting or replacing, and tell the client which. The worst version of this is the planner who spends forty minutes hoping, and delivers the bad news at the point where nothing can be done about it.

Telling the client

Tell them, briefly, with the solution attached. Clients handle problems far better than they handle discovering afterwards that something was hidden from them.

Never tell them mid-ceremony or mid-speech. Part of the job is choosing the moment.

Afterwards

Put it in writing to the supplier the next working day, while everybody remembers it accurately. Then look at your own contract: whether you contracted them or the client did decides who carries the loss, and if you do not know the answer, that is the thing to fix before your next booking.