Julian Leaver Events | A Decade of Luxury Weddings, Finding the Yes Through the No’s & Reinventing Event Power
Julian Leaver is the founder of Julian Leaver Events, a luxury wedding planning and design firm based in Dallas, Texas, working with couples across the globe. He is also the co-founder of LOO Power, a solar-powered, silent alternative to traditional event generators. Julian has spent nearly 30 years in luxury hospitality and event planning, and this year marks the 10th anniversary of Julian Leaver Events.
In this episode of the Texas Wedding Podcast, Julian talks about how a career in hotel catering and private events shaped the way he communicates with vendors and clients today, why he believes in finding the yes through the no, and how his team rebuilt itself almost entirely in the last twelve months without missing a step. He also breaks down how LOO Power is replacing loud, diesel-powered event generators with a silent solar alternative that can now fit in a checked bag, and previews his Monday morning WIPACon breakout session on the baggage we all carry into this industry and how to use it.
The Texas Wedding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Cochran of 718 Creative, a Texas wedding videographer.
Related episode: If you enjoyed this episode, check out Kate Turner of Kate and Co for another conversation from our WIPACon series, this one about building multiple businesses, right-sizing a team, and staying steady when everything is changing at once.
Full Episode Transcript: Julian Leaver of Julian Leaver Events & LOO Power
Julian Leaver is the founder of Julian Leaver Events, a luxury wedding planning and design firm based in Dallas, Texas, and co-founder of LOO Power, a solar-powered, silent alternative to traditional event generators. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Julian Leaver Events.
Ten Years of Julian Leaver Events and a Packed Summer
Kevin: What's the season like for you? We're recording this Monday, August third. Are things slow and relaxing, or fast paced right now?
Julian Leaver: It's a little bit of both, honestly. We did our last paying event the last weekend of June, and our fall event season starts in September. But this summer has had a lot of marketing shoots and donated events, so it hasn't been as slow as any of us had hoped. I celebrated 10 years of Julian Leaver Events in May, but we actually had the anniversary party more recently, which was great. That was kind of our July event. Now we're doing two big events in August: one for WIPA, the national conference, and one for Rosewood Hotels and Resorts called Rosewood World of Weddings, which is in California.
From Hotel Hospitality to Event Planning
Kevin: A lot of your early career was on the hospitality and hotels side of the industry. How did those years shape Julian Leaver Events and what you're doing now?
Julian Leaver: They really helped with navigating a lot of different sets of expectations. When you're sitting in the catering and private events seat at a hotel, it's all about communication. You're communicating with the ballroom, the front desk, the banquet staff, the rooms division, housekeeping, all these different departments. And the interesting thing is that if anything goes wrong in any of those departments, whether you work there or not, you're the person the client comes to, because you're their point person for everything happening on the event side. So you learn very quickly to become a good communicator with each division and understand exactly the language they use, so you're only answering for one or two issues instead of thirty.
In my career, that same seat with all that communication was also the seat where you sold. I learned very quickly how to multitask, how to shift and pivot, and how to have important sales conversations while also executing an event at the same time. You take that knowledge and apply it to anything else in this space. If you've worked in hotels, you can do almost anything.
Learning to Delegate and Building a Team
Julian Leaver: Making it all look easy is definitely not easy. It's a hard balance of keeping my professional life and my personal life both moving in the right direction. It's been stages of a releasing process. In the beginning, it was business functions. I shouldn't do my own accounting, so I brought in an accountant. Then I needed someone to help me get more organized, because I had a system that made sense to me but not to anyone else. Then I realized marketing was a lot of work, and that's something somebody else could do better and more professionally.
It's evolved into what it is now, which is a team of four plus me, so five of us who are more permanent, plus a team of consultants who help with everything else. None of this would be possible if I couldn't get out of my own way and stop wanting to micromanage every process. I tried that at the beginning. It was not a good plan. You have to ask for help and then actually take the help that's offered.
Finding the Yes Through the No's
Kevin: Something on your website jumped out at me: "That looks like a Julian Leaver wedding is not something you'll hear someone say. In fact, most couples engage our services for this very reason." Is there a secret sauce to pulling what a couple really wants and translating that into the design?
Julian Leaver: There is, and I'd say it's really listening to them, and sitting with them in the uncomfortability of it. Not everybody nails it on the first try, because the client sometimes doesn't know what they want. You have to extract as much information as you can, go through their Pinterest and their inspiration, condense all of that, and present it back to them. Then you have to have no ego in the process. We always say we find the yeses through the no's. You can say no as much as you want, and I think that's the actual secret sauce. It's being okay with removing your ego enough to say, cool, you don't like that idea, we'll put it back in our pocket for the next person it makes sense for. Let's find the thing that's actually most important to you. And almost 10 out of 10 times, the second try, we hit it.
You have to hear the no. Unless you're very well adjusted, hearing that no again and again is hard. That's the hardest part of this job: removing yourself from it completely and coming at the whole process with a servant's heart. We're facilitators. That's what we are. The event itself is nothing. It's the conclusion of great decisions made along the way. If you make great decisions in the process, the end is a foregone conclusion.
Etiquette vs. Protocol: Why Every Wedding Is Different
Julian Leaver: There's a difference between etiquette and protocol. The protocol of an event stays basically the same: the ceremony, then the cocktail hour, then the reception. But the etiquette within that event changes drastically depending on who's involved, the culture, the specific couple, every family dynamic. The process stays the same, but the decisions within it all change, and that's what makes this job interesting. Every event is so different because it's hyper-unique to the people involved in it.
Getting married myself helped with understanding that. We've been married since 2022, and I tried desperately to plan my way out of the emotion, because that's the antithesis of who I am. I wanted to follow my checklist and spreadsheet the whole thing. But that's not how weddings actually go. It was a good lesson that you cannot plan your way out of the emotion. You have to give it space, and sometimes make a bad decision, and ask whether you need to remove your own self from the process.
Rebuilding the Team in Under a Year
Kevin: Your team has had a big transition in the past 12 months, bringing on new people and moving people into new positions, and from the outside it's looked seamless. What's the secret sauce for building a team that could operate at a high level so quickly?
Julian Leaver: I'm just as shocked as you are, honestly. Part of it was that two team members had already been with me and knew my process, which kept the baseline running while two new members learned their jobs quickly. We also took a lot of time writing very clear job descriptions so everyone knew exactly what role they'd fit into, and hiring the right people for those seats with a specific set of qualifications and experience.
Elisa came from hotels, so she understood the seat I'd sat in before. Kate came from a rental background into a role that involved a lot of rentals, so she understood that world and what asks you can make of rental partners. Grace moved into a new role as lead designer after doing some design work before, and had already been helping develop some of our processes. Julie stayed in the same job, keeping the lights on, the trains running, and the contracts moving. Everyone needs a Julie. It's been fun. We looked up recently and realized this team has only been together since January.
WIPACon 2026 Preview: The Things That Are Unsaid
Kevin: Can you give a sneak peek about what you'll be speaking on at WIPACon?
Julian Leaver: I'm speaking on something I've never spoken on before, which is a little nerve-wracking. It's about the things that are unsaid, the baggage we bring with us. What do we bring from our past that got us to where we are now, and how do we harness the lessons from the past and move them into the future? I always say we're children of trauma in this industry. You don't have a servant's heart or a heart for hospitality if you don't come from a place where your heart was hurt, in my experience. I want to talk about how you bring whatever heartbreak you have and carry that through to giving to others.
We're doing the Tuesday night gala and I'm also speaking Monday morning.
LOO Power: Reinventing Event Power
Kevin: Tell me about LOO Power.
Julian Leaver: It really started pushing in January, but I've been working on it since 2020. It's not a restroom trailer, it's a next generation power solution that's silent and green. It started as the idea of a next generation generator, but it's evolved into something bigger: how do we distribute power in an even, consistent way? We started with the event industry because I knew generators are loud and have to be kept far from the tent, and I knew they're nasty to stand next to, with CO2 spewing out, and they always end up next to the restroom trailer. So the whole guest experience ends up loud and smelly on that side of the property. We also wanted to solve for the fluctuating price of diesel.
It's evolved constantly. It started as a trailer, and as of this past weekend we tested a product that can fly on an airplane: you can take the power source, fly it with you, arrive at a location, and plug it into a Cybertruck to power an entire event. There are three different iterations now. One can be flown, and one is a more compact unit that fits in a truck and can be driven. The actual component needed can fit in a checked bag, though you still need the truck and cables to distribute the power.
We also solved for air conditioning, launched in early June. We ran it on an event in Florida in extreme heat, under an open-air clear-top tent, and it was silent. The HVAC solution is individual units that can be carried to a location, useful when you can't get a crane over a backyard.
Most of the power loss in a traditional system happens because every generator is built to run three-phase power, while most event equipment is actually meant to run on two-phase power, so there's an inverter step that loses a lot of power in the process. Our solution can run three-phase if it absolutely has to, but it's built to run two-phase, which is much cleaner and more even. The three-phase requirement in traditional setups is also the real reason generators have to be placed so far from the tent, since it's loud and smells. Now you can put the power right next to the tent. There's no smell, no noise, virtually nothing.
If you're at WIPACon, you'll actually see it in action: it's going to power the air conditioning for the event Kate Turner is producing on the first or second night.
Connect with Julian: Julian Leaver Events, Luxury Wedding Planning & Design: julianleaver.com | @julianleaver LOO Power, Sustainable Event Power: loopower.co | @loopower.co WIPA National: wipa.org/2026conference | @wipa_org
