Rebecca Martens of Belle Events | Scaling a Team, Feedback as a Gift & Everything in Between
Rebecca Martens of Belle Events, a Houston wedding and event planning company, joins Kevin Cochran on the Texas Wedding Podcast as the second guest in a series leading up to WIPACon, where she'll speak on a panel about knowing when to scale your business.
Rebecca brings more than 20 years of experience, starting at Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings before returning to Houston to eventually buy and grow Belle Events into a team of 13 planners and 20 event day assistants. She and Kevin talk through the Disney-rooted philosophy that still shapes how she runs her business, feedback is a gift, and the story at the center of the episode: a large Houston tented wedding where torrential rain nearly took down the entire tent hours before guests arrived, and the team-wide scramble that saved it without the bride ever knowing.
Follow Belle Events on Instagram, and hear more from the people shaping the Texas wedding market on the Texas Wedding Podcast.
This episode kicks off a series leading up to WIPACon. Pair it with Jordan Fatheree's episode, the first in the series.
The Texas Wedding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Cochran of 718 Creative, a Texas wedding videographer.
FAQ Section
How do you know when it's time to scale a wedding planning business? According to Rebecca Martens, owner of Belle Events in Houston, the moment to scale is less about hitting a specific revenue number and more about your team's actual bandwidth. She grew Belle Events from three planners when she bought the company to thirteen planners and twenty event day assistants today, scaling gradually as demand outpaced what her existing team could handle well. Her broader philosophy: success isn't measured by revenue or luxury-tier status, it's measured by whether your team is happy and whether the business can run without you in the room.
What happens if it rains at a tented wedding? Rain pooling on a tent's clear top panels is a real risk, and it happened at one wedding Rebecca Martens' team planned in Houston: torrential rain created thirteen separate pools of standing water on the tent's crossbars. Her team cut and replaced the affected panels, drilled drainage holes through the floor, and pulled in extra hands from every vendor on site, all within a few hours before guests arrived. Choosing a tented wedding means having a rain plan you love as much as your original plan, not just a backup you hope you never need.
What does "feedback is a gift" mean in the wedding industry? It's a philosophy Rebecca Martens of Belle Events traces back to her time working for Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings, where a mentor taught her that feedback delivered with kindness, love, and respect helps people and vendors actually improve, rather than just calling out mistakes. In practice, she has her planners report back after every wedding so she's never caught off guard, and she personally delivers any constructive feedback to vendors herself rather than letting her team do it, to protect long-term working relationships.
How many planners does a wedding planning company need? There's no universal number, it depends on how many weddings you're taking on and how hands-on you want each planner to be. Rebecca Martens' company, Belle Events in Houston, started with three planners and has grown to thirteen planners plus twenty event day assistants as the business scaled. She matches clients to the planner on her team whose strengths best fit them, since planners tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum between creative, design-focused strengths and organizational, logistics-focused strengths.
Do wedding guests ever find out when something goes wrong on the wedding day? Usually not, and that's often the point. At one Houston wedding planned by Rebecca Martens of Belle Events, a flooded tent required a full emergency repair just hours before guests arrived, and the bride herself had no idea any of it happened until she was accidentally shown a behind-the-scenes photo afterward. A good wedding planning team is built to absorb chaos before it ever reaches the couple or their guests.
What is WIPACon? WIPACon is WIPA's first-ever national conference, held in Dallas, Texas from August 9th through 11th, 2026. It brings together wedding industry professionals from WIPA chapters across the country for education, networking, and events. Rebecca Martens of Belle Events is one of the panelists, speaking on knowing when to scale a wedding business.
Full Transcript
Meet Rebecca Martens
Rebecca is the owner of Belle Events, a Houston-based wedding and event planning company, bringing more than 20 years of industry experience. A Texas State University graduate, she launched her career with Disney Fairy Tale Weddings in Orlando, executing weddings and events across all four Disney theme parks. She returned to Houston as event manager at River Oaks Country Club, planning galas, charitable luncheons, and luxurious weddings for some of the city's most prominent families. Rebecca joined Belle Events as a planner in 2015, and in just four years purchased the company and took the reins. Today she leads a team of 13 planners and 20 event day assistants, guided by the belief that sincere relationships with every couple, family, and vendor bring a client's vision to life beautifully.
From Disney Cast Member to Business Owner
Rebecca Martens: The day I graduated college, I left three weeks later for Disney World to work at Disney Weddings. When you go to work for Disney, you don't just join a company, you join a family. They call employees cast members because you're part of the show, on stage and backstage. There's a class called Traditions where they teach you why Walt started it all and why it exists. That foundation has shaped basically everything about how I run Belle Events.
I was always headed here in some way. My mom was a collector of people, everyone came to our house after Friday football games, and she made grilled cheese and mozzarella sticks for whoever showed up. We celebrated every holiday with streamers and balloons. I was also a genuinely bossy kid, they called me Bossy Becky growing up, distributing the Barbies and the Barbie cars when friends came over. I actually thought about being a professional forger at one point, I used to practice my parents' signatures and my friends' parents' signatures so I could sign permission slips. I'm really grateful I found a job where I could channel all of that energy into something that works for me instead of against me.
Why Feedback Is a Gift
Rebecca Martens: I had a Disney leader who always said feedback is a gift, if it's delivered with kindness, love, and respect, it's a gift that helps you evolve. My team is not allowed to give constructive feedback to a vendor, that has to come from me. Partly because I don't want them to damage a relationship they'll need again, and partly because I've been doing this long enough to know how I want feedback delivered.
After every wedding, my team calls or texts me that night to tell me how it went, so I never wake up to a surprise. I've genuinely woken up to a photo of an ambulance outside a country club with zero context, that one turned out to be nothing serious, but I still needed the heads up. If something needs addressing with a vendor, I'll follow up myself on Monday to understand the full context first. Most of the time it's a miscommunication, not negligence, and I believe in second chances. My team actually loves feedback. When we sit down, it's never "what did I do wrong," it's "what can I be doing better." Nobody wants to stay stagnant.
The Ringmaster Philosophy
Rebecca Martens: Managing a team of wedding planners is different from managing a team of photographers or videographers or bands. We're the ringmaster of the circus. Every vendor we work with has their own act, their own creative outlet, whether it's floral or music or photography, and our talent is making sure all of it comes together for the client in a way that's fun and kind, without passing our own stress on to anyone else.
Wedding planners fall on a spectrum. Some get into it for the design and aesthetic side, some for the organizing and serving people side, and some have real strength in both. I have a team of 13, so I can match clients with the planner whose strengths fit them best. But even the most creative planner still has to handle the logistics they don't love, and the most structured planner still has to flex their creative side. You land somewhere on that spectrum, but you need both muscles.
Redefining Success
Rebecca Martens: My proudest moments are hard to name, because I'm much better at remembering where I failed than where I succeeded. If I had to say, it's probably tied to the numbers, seeing on paper how many weddings we've done, how much of our clients' money we've managed, especially after being told early on that this was just a hobby job.
We've managed over thirty million dollars of client investment at this point. But I remember fixating on hitting six figures early in my career, like once I got there I'd finally have made it. I hit it, and nothing changed. My therapist asked me what I actually thought was going to happen, and I didn't have a good answer. It just became the next number, then the next one after that. That was an epiphany for me: it was never really about the numbers. It's about having a happy team, a happy husband, being able to go on vacation, having people who can run things without me and make their own decisions. In the beginning you get defined by whether your average client budget puts you in the luxury or ultra-luxury category. None of that is actually fulfilling. What matters is a team that's proud of their work, can pay their bills, and doesn't have to miss their kid's Christmas pageant for a job.
The Flooded Tent Wedding
Rebecca Martens: I thrive in chaos, genuinely. When something goes wrong, my brain turns on, I want to give everyone marching orders and find the solution on the spot. This was a large Houston wedding, a big investment, and the bride wanted a tented wedding from her very first call with us. I'm always honest with clients about that choice: you have to love your rain plan as much as plan A, because in Houston, especially in spring and summer, you cannot predict the weather the way you can with a winter storm rolling in off the coast.
My planner on this one, Victoria, is an Enneagram one, a total perfectionist, ten years with me, incredibly thorough. She'd done everything right. But Houston got hit with heavy rain, and our tent had a clear top with a sun cover that had just enough give to it that the crossbars formed divots that held water, thirteen of them, full of rain. The only fix was cutting the panels off and replacing them, and all the furniture, linens, and lounge seating were already loaded in.
Victoria called me at 7:30 that morning. It's bad, she said, I'm sending you a video. She wanted to offer the family a backup venue, but when we asked the bride's father, the decision maker, he said no, she's always dreamed of a tented wedding, make it happen, whatever it takes. So we did. Squeegees and mops got purchased. I packed everything in my garage, drills, duct tape, harps, whatever I had. I sent the video to a few vendor friends who weren't even booked for the day, and they just showed up to help. Gulf Coast Entertainment's owner showed up in gym shorts and a t-shirt ready to work. My husband Joe came and ran food for the team. We had seven Belle planners there, servers mopping and squeegeeing water, people drilling holes straight through the floorboards to drain standing water, all with guests arriving at 6:30 and, at 4:30, still no clear sign we'd have a wedding there at all.
At one point I had to pull Victoria off the site entirely. She was too close to it, a year of planning coming apart in front of her, and I needed her level-headed for the bride later. Meanwhile the bride herself had left hair and makeup to see her brand-new niece or nephew at the hospital and got stranded by flash flooding on the way back. She had no idea any of this happened. When she arrived, I was showing her finished photos of the tent, beautiful, candlelit, and accidentally scrolled one photo too far into the chaos shots. She asked what that was. I told her that's what your tent looked like two hours ago. She was floored, and told us we had to put it online.
None of it happens without the whole village showing up, servers willing to grab a mop when that's not their job, a band manager moving tarps, my husband running Chick-fil-A to a starving team. In over twenty years doing this, I've never had something that extreme. But I love being thrown into a challenge I wasn't prepared for. The bigger it is, the more my adrenaline kicks in. That's exactly why we built a team this size, so whoever's in the deep end always has someone to call.
WIPACon 2026
Rebecca Martens: I'm on a panel about how you know when to scale your business, and when I bought Belle Events there were three of us. Now there are 13 planners, 20 event day assistants, plus an assistant and an intern, more than I ever dreamed of, so I think I can speak to it. This is the second episode in Kevin's series leading up to the conference, following Jordan Fatheree of Rosewood Mansion last week.
Connect with Rebecca Belle Events: https://www.belleevents.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/belleevents
Connect with Kevin // 718 Creative https://718creative.com | https://www.instagram.com/718.creative
Connect with the Podcast https://www.texasweddingpodcast.com | https://www.instagram.com/texasweddingpodcast
