We have all learned a lot in the last 12-15 months – about our industry and about ourselves. In challenging times, it is natural to take stock, and we are no exception. Although we’ve fared relatively well these last months, we decide to take a long look at the way we do business. We found that much of what we needed to do to weather external pressures, we already knew as part of our core approach to business. Here are just a few of the things we discovered. Ready? Here we go…
Another new normal?
We’ve been in business long enough to have experienced several “new normals” - millennium hysteria, 9/11, Sarbanes-Oxley, the increased role of procurement, economic downturns - just in the last 10 years. What if instead of another “new normal”, there is no more normal? That would be just fine with us. We’ve never been accused of being normal, anyway.
The power of partnership
From the beginning, we structured our business to be a lean, mean meeting/event/entertainment machine. Instead of maintaining a large staff (and having to lay them off when things get dicey), we have always leveraged the experience and knowledge of a sizeable network of skilled independent project partners. This philosophy has always served us well, clearly never more so than now. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, calls it “having the right people on the bus”. We call it the power of partnership.
It takes time and effort, but it’s more fun to have “skin in the game”.
Not long ago, we were the last man standing on a sizable piece of business over worthy competition. When we asked the client why we had gotten the nod, she responded, “It was obvious from your proposal that you had skin in the game. Competing proposals were cut-and-pasted, boiler-plated, and focused much more on the presenting company than our needs.” Apparently, these companies relied heavily on off-the- shelf, cookie cutter responses to this client’s RFP. To us, that is the ultimate square peg/round hole scenario – and this is not the first time we’ve seen it.
Of course we use what we’ve learned from a lifetime in event management, meeting support and entertainment, but we recognize first and foremost that each event has a unique footprint, from client culture and brand identity to specific event outcomes and budgets. We apply our expertise to addressing the challenge as opposed to trying to change the challenge to fit what we might have in stock today. That way, instead of being a commodity, we become a strategic asset. So - when it comes to proposals, we’ll keep doing them the hard way. It works better for our customers, and although it’s a lot more work, it’s a lot more fun for us.
These are some of the many things we have learned. One constant is this: we still know where our bread is buttered. We are profoundly grateful for the loyalty of our existing clients and for continued interest from prospective customers. Together, if we can make it through the last months dealing with short lead times, dramatically reduced budgets, cancelled or downsized events, and barking mad executive suites, and still have a smile on our faces and pep in our step, we should be just fine as the economy continues to slowly recover.
