The Birth of Polka Dot Events

When I tell people I own an Event Planning & Design company the course of events that follows is typically the following

"what?"
"I own my own company, I do weddings and sweet 16s and corporate events"
"wait so what do you do?"
"I design, I plan it, I pick the venue, I make sure everything is perfect and my clients have the perfect event"
"How do you own your own business? You look like what, 17?"

I'm sure you can figure out how the rest goes. I usually explain that I applied for a sole propertiership license by the state, hired a friend to do my website, designed my business cards, and contacted everyone I knew and all of a sudden business just started to happen.
But how did it start before that?

To save some time and boring information it basically goes like this:

Since I was old enough to think I was always putting on shows, making up dances, doing arts and crafts, trying to invent things, creating unique birthday parties for myself (one year I had a zoo birthday party in my backyard, another year was a "make your own music video" party). My mom is a landscape deisgner her family always built things I spent every minute at my grandmas house trying to invent things in my grandpa's workshop. I loved the concept of making something beautiful out of something ugly.
I grew up as a dancer dedicating all non-school moments to dance and I eventually became very good at choreography. I wasn't the best dancer but I was a natural...I loved the feeling of creating something from nothing.
So that's my paragraph about my creative gene.

When I went to Fordham and transferred to the business school I originally did it to go into management for event planning. Everyone told me to go into it after my success in planning proms and parties in high school and my love for everything weddings and decor. But when I got to Fordham... they starting roping me into THE TRACK. It made me feel like if I was not in accounting or finance I was going to be poor and a loser the rest of my life. So I decided I'd forget the "starving creative life" and go into finance.
After hating every waking moment of the first two weeks working as a financial advisor trainee at a well respected Investment Bank, I knew that if I did finance the rest of my life I would clearly be miserable... and probably not that succesful as I had no interest in reading Barron's and the only sections I read in the Wall Street Journal were the one with fun topics like interior design or new innovations in the art world.

I reevaluated my life and had a tiny breakdown. The final conclusion was that I am a great worker and a natural business person. No matter what I did in life, I would succeed, and I would succeed even more if I loved what I did. So from that day on I knew I had to go back to my original event planning plan!

Most people would then look for a job in even planning... but I already had that experience. I worked under the owner of a small event planning company for a year and I saw everything she went through in the beginning. I also worked in a design firm that also started out small and I saw what she did to be prosperous and be so succesful. That design firm is now in every wedding magazine every single month. Shes incredible.

So I started my own company. My business launched pretty much when my website went up whcih was september 2007. A month and a half later I had my first client booked for a 300 person wedding. She found me through a recommendation from her photographer I met that summer. The wedding went so well I was so unbeliveably proud of myself that work. Now it's January and I get new inquries every single day, a new client booked and signed, and 2 or 3 still in negotiations. I truly feel that I will be highly succesful in this business and I have the abilities to make an impact on the event planning industry. I hope my future clients feel the same way.