Meet the Mentor: Penny Boycott – From Registrar to Celebrant Champion

When Penny Boycott handed in her notice as a principal registrar after more than a decade in the role, her family and friends thought she’d lost her mind. “You’ve got a nice pension, sick pay, and you’re working nine to five – it’s a cushy number,” they told her. But Penny had seen something that changed everything: couples and families trying to squeeze themselves into “really awkward-shaped boxes that they really didn’t fit in.”

Today, as Head of Learning at the Academy of Modern Celebrancy and a successful celebrant herself, Penny’s leap of faith has led to a career she describes as “the best job in the world.”

The Journey from Registrar to Celebrant

Penny’s path to celebrancy began in an unexpected way. After years working in events coordination and travelling the world, she returned to the UK looking for what she thought would be “a nice, little easy job, just working at weddings on the weekends.” During her interview at the local registration office, they told her the role wasn’t right for her – but they had something else coming up. That’s how her decade-long career as a registrar began.

“I hadn’t done public speaking before. I didn’t know anything about writing a ceremony,” Penny recalls. “All my ceremony training came from a registrar’s perspective, which is completely different. But it really gave me a good understanding of the wedding industry and the funeral industry.”

Day after day, week after week, year after year, Penny watched people compromise on what mattered to them to fit into the restrictions of legal ceremonies. “I just thought, there’s got to be a better way that we can do this,” she explains. “Like most things that belong to the government, they’re not really up for change. Any ideas are kind of poo-pooed quite quickly – we can’t do this, and we can’t do that. I just thought, okay, then I’ll do it by myself.”

The turning point came when Penny found herself sitting in what she calls “a cupboard” – a tiny office with a frosted Georgian window where “you couldn’t even see the world outside.” She remembers thinking: “Am I going to sit here for the next two or three decades, waiting for promotion, doing a job that I absolutely loved, but felt that it was holding the people I worked with back?”

The following Monday, she handed in her notice with no real plan about what she was going to do next.

What Makes Celebrant-Led Ceremonies Special

The contrast between her registrar days and her current role as a celebrant couldn’t be starker. As a registrar, Penny might conduct eight weddings in a single Saturday, meeting couples for the first time as they walked into the ceremony room. Now, as a celebrant, she works with couples for up to two years before their big day.

“When I get to the venue, it’s like I’m already one of the guests,” Penny explains. “I’ve already met mum, I might have met the groom’s brother, I might have met one of the bride’s bridesmaids. You’re already immersed in this community of people.”

This connection transforms the entire experience. “You’re so invested in your couples you just want everything to be perfect for them. When people say watching a couple walk down the aisle is a magical moment for a celebrant every time – that’s the pinnacle, the cherry on the cake of all that work underneath where you’ve been planning and building and constructing this ceremony.”

The flexibility that celebrants offer is revolutionary compared to the restrictions of legal ceremonies. “We can throw in some sing-alongs. You can have ring-bearing alpacas. You can tattoo each other. You can sing hymns if you want to. We can say a prayer. You can light candles – whatever they want to do is absolutely fine.”

The Evolution of Modern Celebrancy

Having been in the industry since its early days, Penny has witnessed remarkable changes. “When I started as a celebrant, nobody knew what one was. You had to tell everybody what that was, and you felt like it was an uphill struggle. There wasn’t a community of celebrants out there.”

Now, the landscape is completely different. “I stand at wedding fairs now and people come to me and go, ‘we’ve been dying to talk to a celebrant like you.’ They’re educated. They already know what a celebrant can bring and what that value is.”

This growth has strengthened the entire industry. “The more celebrants there are, the more the industry is strengthened, the more the bar is raised. I have celebrants who are my go-tos now. I share a lot of work. I pass work along.”

Mastering the Art of Balance: Managing Multiple Roles

Known around AMC as a “master plate spinner,” Penny juggles an impressive array of responsibilities. She’s a wedding, naming, and funeral celebrant, AMC’s course manager, mentor to celebrant trainees, manager of the mentor team, and runs her own celebrant business. For anyone wondering how they’d fit celebrancy into an already busy life, Penny’s approach offers valuable insights.

“What happens is you start to spin these plates, and then before you know it, you’ve got a whole tea service on the go,” she laughs. “These things sort of grow and they mature in ways that are slightly out of your control.”

Her secret? Being incredibly organised and setting firm boundaries. “Managing your time is really important and setting those boundaries in place. Because clients don’t want to meet in nine to five, Monday to Friday – they want to meet in the evenings and at weekends, and you have bereaved families that can only make Sunday mornings.”

Penny emphasises the importance of having support systems in place: “I have a really understanding family and husband who appreciates that I might not be here on Saturday evening to watch whatever’s on the telly, because I’ve got to go see a family.”

She also advocates for knowing your strengths and limitations: “I’m useless at some stuff, like absolutely hopeless. In the early days, I would have just slogged at whatever it was – creating an Instagram post for three hours until I got it right. Whereas now I’m not afraid to say, ‘Do you know what? I can’t do this. It’s worth my time to invest in somebody else to do this for me, because then I can spend time with my couple, or I can spend time writing that funeral.'”

Her organisational approach includes using her tech-savvy children for help and maintaining old-school planning methods: “I’m quite old school – I write lists a lot. I literally think these are the things that are important and need doing first. These are the things that I’m not very good at, that I maybe need to outsource.”

What keeps it all manageable? “The love for the job. When you genuinely love what you do and you feel like it makes a difference, it makes keeping those plates in the air a little bit easier.”

Advice for Aspiring Celebrants

For those considering celebrant training, Penny’s advice is clear: “Always research who you’re training with and make sure it aligns with your style of learning. Find yourself a training organisation where you feel supported, where you’ve got human connection, and where you know that the people training you are actually out there, boots on the ground doing the job.”

She emphasises the importance of embracing feedback during training: “It’s never a criticism. It’s there to guide you. The amount of students I say to – they say, ‘Well, I’m really nervous about public speaking,’ and I say, ‘you’re a teacher, you public speak to 30-40 children a day. Use that mindset and that skilset and adapt it.'”

Most importantly, Penny believes authenticity is key: “Just be you, literally. Everybody else is taken. You only you can be you, and that is your superpower. What you are going to offer these families, clients, couples, individuals – it will never be what somebody else can offer them, because nobody else is you.“

What Penny Wishes She’d Known

When asked what she wishes someone had told her when she first started out as a celebrant, Penny is candid: “I wished when I started, somebody said to me, this is how you market yourself. This is how you build a business strategy. This is how you have a marketing strategy. This is how you plan for the first quarter. Nobody told me that. I was just going out there thinking I could start a business – this is going to be a breeze. That is something that we really have at the AMC. We really want our graduates to go out with the confidence that this is what our business strategy is, this is how I’m going to brand, market, establish myself as a celebrant.”

Addressing Industry Misconceptions

Penny also addresses a common misconception in the growing celebrant industry: “I think people see more celebrants in their area as a negative thing for their business. They don’t see it as an opportunity for more people to be educated about celebrant-led ceremonies, and they don’t see it as a potential network that can pass on enquiries.”

She’s living proof of this positive reality: “I never thought I would get to a point where I would have to turn enquiries away, but I’m booking 2-3 years out, so I find myself referring couples on all the time.”

Penny reminds aspiring celebrants that success looks different for everyone: “Being a fully booked celebrant doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. Fully booked to you might be five ceremonies a year, because that’s all you want to do… If, like the rest of us, you’re doing 50 because that’s where we feel comfortable and that’s what we need as full-time celebrants, that’s OK too.”

The Ceremony High

What keeps Penny passionate about celebrancy is what she calls the “ceremony high” – that moment at the end of working with any client, whether it’s “as the confetti is being thrown at the wedding, or as you see the family leave the crematorium, or as you see a family go off and celebrate a new arrival.”

“There is a reward that comes from the work we do,” she explains. “Some of that is because you’ve really given something back, and some of that’s a job well done. And that high is like nothing else on Earth… Once you’ve felt it, you want it again, and you want to be able to experience it again.”

You can catch Penny on episode 4 of Beyond the Ceremony – our brand new podcast sharing everything you need to be a successful celebrant.

Is Celebrancy Right for You?

Penny’s message to anyone considering this path is simple but powerful: “You’ve got to want to be here. When you talk about being a celebrant or becoming a celebrant, it’s got to light a fire in your belly.”

She believes there’s no single character type that makes a perfect celebrant: “You might be super shy and really quiet – that doesn’t make you a bad celebrant. You might be really out there and very loud and wear crazy stuff – that doesn’t make you a good celebrant either. There is no one size fits all option.”

Ready to discover if celebrancy could be your calling? Take our fun quiz to find out if this rewarding career path could be perfect for you. Whether you’re looking for a complete career change or a meaningful way to be part of life’s most special moments, celebrancy might just be the adventure you’ve been searching for.

Take Our Celebrant Quiz and start your journey today!