Vendor Markup and Margins: How Event Planners Protect Profit

A planner can run a flawless event, delight the client, collect a glowing review, and still make less money than expected, because the margin leaked out through vendor handling that was never priced correctly. Vendor economics are where event planning businesses quietly win or lose their profit, and the mechanics are rarely taught. Markup versus commission, disclosure, the plus-plus catering trap, and scope creep on fixed packages are the four places the money moves. Control them and the margin holds.

Markup vs Commission: Two Ways to Earn on Vendors

There are two structural ways a planner earns on the vendors involved in an event. With markup, you pay the vendor directly and rebill the client at a higher figure, carrying the cost, the cash-flow burden, and the risk in exchange for control and a clean single point of contact. With commission, the vendor pays you a referral fee out of their own price, which is simpler and risk-free but makes your income depend on vendor goodwill and creates a disclosure obligation.

Most experienced planners run both, depending on the category. Rentals, decor, and floral that you source and physically manage lend themselves to markup, because you are absorbing real logistics. Venues and large vendors with their own sales teams often pay commission, because they want the referral and you are not handling their delivery. The decision is not ideological; it is about who is doing the work and carrying the risk for that line.

The Disclosure Line You Do Not Cross

Disclosure norms in the event industry have tightened, and the undisclosed kickback is the single fastest way to torch a client relationship and a reputation. The safe, increasingly expected practice is a clause in your contract stating that you may receive referral fees from recommended vendors and that your recommendations are based on fit, not commission size. Disclosure costs nothing and removes the most corrosive suspicion a client can carry: that your vendor list is for sale.

This is the same trust dynamic that governs the choice between percentage and flat-fee pricing, covered in how event planners choose a pricing model. The throughline is that clients forgive a fee they understand and resent one they discover. Markup with a guarantee attached, a chair that is promised to arrive and be replaced if it fails, reads as a service. Markup with nothing attached reads as a tax. Tie every dollar of margin to a piece of work the client can see.

The Plus-Plus Trap on Catering and Bar

Catering is where planners lose money on successful events more than anywhere else, and the cause is almost always the plus-plus. The printed per-head menu price is the beginning of the calculation. Banquet contracts add a service charge, commonly in the low to mid 20 percent range, then sales tax calculated on the post-service-charge total in many jurisdictions, then overtime, corkage, and bartender fees. A 100 dollar menu can land near 135 dollars fully loaded.

A planner who quotes the client off the menu price and pays the vendor off the plus-plus total simply absorbs the difference out of their own fee. The discipline is to model the fully loaded cost before quoting anything, never the headline number. Showing prospects a realistic figure up front, by letting them run their own catering quote estimate on your site, also pre-qualifies them on budget and prevents the awkward gap between the menu number they imagined and the plus-plus number they will pay.

Protecting Margin on Fixed-Price Packages

Once you move to flat-fee packages, the threat to margin shifts from mispricing to scope creep. The extra delivery, the second venue walkthrough, the guest-count change that ripples through catering and rentals, each one erodes a fixed fee that was calculated against a narrower scope. Protect it by defining package scope precisely, attaching a written change-order process to every addition, and building a contingency line into your own costing the same way you build one into the client's budget.

Deposit structure does similar protective work on the cash-flow side, ensuring client money arrives before vendor money leaves, which is the focus of deposit and cancellation policy economics. And because demand is uneven across the year, the margin you can hold also depends on how you price scarce peak-season dates versus quiet ones, which is where seasonality and capacity planning comes in. The full lead-capture system that feeds these qualified, budget-aware inquiries is laid out in lead generation for event planners.

Measuring Margin Per Event, Not Just Revenue

The planners who hold their profit are the ones who track margin at the event level, because a single blended revenue number hides which bookings actually made money. The figure that matters is the contribution each event leaves after the costs that event caused: the vendor pass-through, any markup you genuinely fronted, the coordinator labor for that date, and your own time. A wedding that billed 18,000 dollars all-in but pushed 11,000 of it straight through to vendors at little or no markup is a very different booking from one that billed 12,000 dollars of planning fee with no pass-through, even though the first looks larger on a revenue report. Revenue flatters; per-event contribution tells the truth.

A simple worked example shows why this changes decisions. Take a planning fee of 9,000 dollars, add 1,500 dollars of genuine markup margin on rentals and decor you managed, then subtract 1,200 dollars in coordinator day-of labor and an estimate of your own loaded hours; what remains is the event's real contribution, and comparing that across bookings reveals which client types, package tiers, and seasons are worth pursuing. Planners who run this number consistently often discover that the largest, most pass-through-heavy events are not their most profitable, which is the kind of insight that quietly redirects a whole business toward the work that pays. This per-event view also connects to the ROI lens an owner applies to their marketing in measuring event ROI.

Running a Preferred-Vendor Program

As a planner's volume grows, the ad-hoc vendor relationships harden into something more deliberate: a preferred-vendor list, the curated roster you recommend by default. Done well, a preferred list is a margin and quality engine at once. It concentrates your bookings with a handful of partners who therefore value the relationship enough to prioritize your events, hold their pricing, and absorb the occasional favor, and it reduces your own risk because you are sending clients only to vendors you have watched deliver. The leverage is real: a venue or caterer who receives a steady stream of your referrals has every incentive to make you look good.

The governance is where it gets delicate, because a preferred list that quietly sells placement to the highest commission becomes the exact conflict clients fear. The defensible version selects partners on demonstrated quality and fit and discloses any referral arrangement, the disclosure discipline already covered above and echoed in the reciprocity-versus-cash discussion in client acquisition and vendor referrals. A preferred-vendor program built on merit compounds in both directions; one built on undisclosed kickbacks is a reputation liability waiting to surface, and in an industry that runs on word of mouth, that is the most expensive kind of liability there is.

Markup Norms Vary by Vendor Category

Treating every vendor line with one blanket markup leaves money on some and prices you out on others, because the work you do per category differs sharply. Rentals, decor, and floral that you source, deliver, install, and guarantee carry the most defensible markup, commonly the 10 to 25 percent range noted above, because you are absorbing real logistics and standing behind the result. Audiovisual and production, where a specialist firm does the technical work and bears the technical risk, typically run on commission or a thin coordination markup, because the value you add is selection and oversight rather than execution. Photography and entertainment, booked directly by many clients, often pay a referral fee rather than supporting a markup at all.

The principle underneath the variation is the cost-to-serve rule applied category by category: your margin on any line should track the coordination, delivery oversight, and risk you genuinely carry for that line, not a flat percentage applied for tidiness. This is the same discipline that sets package tier prices in package and tier design, and it protects you from two opposite errors: under-charging on the labor-heavy categories where you do real work, and over-charging on the hands-off categories where a client could easily discover you added margin for nothing. Tie each category's markup to the work behind it and the whole pricing structure survives scrutiny.

Who Pays When a Vendor Fails

The margin question has a risk twin that planners learn about the hard way: when a vendor cancels, no-shows, or underperforms, who absorbs the cost? If you marked up and rebilled that vendor as your own line, you may have implicitly assumed responsibility for their failure, which is a very different exposure than simply recommending a vendor the client contracts directly. This is why the markup-versus-commission choice is also a liability choice, and why contracts matter. A planner agreement should make clear which vendors the client engages directly and which the planner manages, and should include language addressing vendor default, ideally pushing recovery back to the failing vendor rather than onto the planner.

Two protections reduce the exposure. The first is requiring your managed vendors to carry their own liability insurance and to name terms for non-performance, so a failure has a recovery path that does not run through your bank account. The second is the same event-cancellation and liability coverage that protects the larger booking, discussed in deposit and cancellation policy economics. The throughline with everything above is that margin and risk are two sides of the same vendor relationship: the markup you earn for managing a vendor is only worth it if your contract ensures the markup is not erased the one time that vendor lets you down.