Most planners will tell you what you want to hear.

I never saw the point in that.

For years I worked inside luxury hospitality — managing events, food and beverage, and occasions where the margin for error was zero and the expectation was absolute. The kind of environments where discretion isn't optional, standards aren't negotiable, and everything has to work regardless of what's happening behind the scenes.

That experience taught me how venues think. How contracts are written. What the small print actually means. Which supplier promises hold and which ones don't. How a decision made in January creates a problem in September that nobody saw coming.

I handled destination weddings arriving from across the world — couples travelling from America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe — each navigating a planning process they'd never been through before, in a country they didn't always know well, with guests spread across time zones and expectations.

The same gaps appeared every single time. Not because couples weren't intelligent or organised. But because nobody had given them the right information, in the right order, before the key decisions were already made.

Crown & Compass exists to close that gap.

My role isn't to take over your wedding. It's to make sure that when you sign something, you understand exactly what you're signing. That when you choose a venue, you've already accounted for everything that comes with it. That your day is planned the way you actually want it — not the way it was easiest to sell to you.

I'm not the planner who will smile and agree with everything. I've never seen that serve a couple well.

I'll tell you what you need to know, be straight with you about what's realistic, what's possible, and the costs — including the decisions you haven't thought of yet.

And I'll be there from your first enquiry to your final boarding pass.