Perfect Event Proposals

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Interview with Greg Palomino – How he built a multi-million dollar Event Planning company in 7 years!

Transcript

Intro:  Hi there, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacksand Perfect Event Proposals. Here today with me, I’ve got Greg Palomino from CRE8AD8 Events.

If you’re in the South Texas area, then you will have heard of Greg and you will have heard ofCRE8AD8. They have over two hundred and sixty team members in the company, over nineteen physical locations around the world and they are planning twelve hundred programs every year, so it’s great to have Greg here and looking forward to hearing all of Greg’s time and money saving tips.

Dave:  Welcome Greg, how are you doing today?

Greg:  I’m doing excellent. It has been a wonderful day, it’s a Friday afternoon so who’s not happy about the weekend starting.

Dave:  Definitely, I know how you feel about that! For those of our new audience who don’t know of you and CRE8AD8, could you

just tell us a little bit about how you got started in event planning and how you got to where you are now?

Gregorio:  Sure. Back in the nineties, I was still a teenager and I was on a dare.  I was walking through a mall with my friend back in 1998 and he dared me to go in and fill out an application forVictoria’s Secret!! I figured this is going to be great!! I was a teenager so I applied for the job with confidence, then went to the food court to grab something to eat and then I got a call. Literally twenty minutes later and they wanted to interview me!!

I already had a full time job as I was on a work release program at school, but I had some extra time to afford and Victoria’s Secret was offering a part-time opportunity that was essentially just about helping out in the stockroom.  So I thought this makes sense, p part time job, a few extra hours on a week and making some extra money so how couldn’t you be happy with that!!

Dave:  Yes, I’m sure that a teenager working for Victoria’s Secret won’t really care about what he did.

Greg:  Exactly. There were definitely a lot of perks to working in a store like that.  I was happy and It really taught me a lot.

So the first month and a half that I was there, I told them, let’s do a fashion show.  The manager was not really crazy about the idea and she said it wasn’t really her decision to make and  they don’t have any money.  After about a month or two of bugging her she said “Greg that’s fine, if you can do it with no money and you can pull it off then fantastic”. So, I got Chick-Fillet and some stir-fry place to help us out with food and I had Kirkwoods help us out with the staging. I just made it look more presentable by providing staging and event chairs. I just tried to make it look nice and I did. It was all about the consistency, not a lot of consistency, but consistency in the look, so it came out nice. We promoted it for about a week again. I don’t think the manager would allow us, but something like that happened and we promoted it for about a week or a week and a half and we did it.

I think it was on a Friday or Saturday afternoon and the sales that day went through the roof. They had made 300% more than they have normally done on a day like that. The manager said, wow!! You made a lot of money since we tripled everything that we normally do, so actually, that must be a good thing.

District caught wind of it and they weren’t too happy at first but they said, “well if you’re going to do it again, let’s do it the right way”.  So they gave me a few dollars to work with and we did the same thing. We duplicated the efforts at two more locations, and the same result came out. They had done anywhere between 200% to 400% more than what they normally did on a similar day and then, they were thrilled. They thought it’s a good idea. Unfortunately it never went past the district level.

Then, I got a call from National Headquarters as they had heard about what was going on and what I’d done.  They said, well, “we’d like you to come and learn and assist us and be part of TheVictoria’s Secret Fashion Show and I said, “why not!! I’m still young, I’m still a male and I’m still straight. Let’s go for this, let’s have some fun”.

This was back in the day when Campbell and Gisele and all these other ladies that we now consider in old, in their forties, this was the day when they were at their high. So i got a chance to work with them even on a consulting basis or whether they were walking the runway.

I was back in the house. I was learning how to actually run a show. And coming from a guy that just planned backyard keggers with a DJ and some simple food back in the day and then did some stuff with a Victoria’s Secretstore and now working on a show that pretty much everyone around the world knows about!! It was phenomenal. I got a chance to learn production and run of show, I will never forget an experience like that.

First of all the ladies, that was a great experience, but second and really now the most important is that I took so much in during that time while working on a couple

shows. That was just unbelievable!! I got to see what happens and this was really big show.  This wasn’t just a meeting where they just had a stage and some AV, this was a full production and obviously working with people that everybody around the world knows and a great company on top of that, so it was great!! Hands-on experience, a lot of things to learn from, a lot of mistakes that I obviously made on site but I got a chance to learn from and the good thing was that it’s all about taping. It’s not always live, so we had a chance to redo things if something happened, but that wasn’t just an easy show. It’s not just a handful of people, it takes several of people to run a show like that. For me, just to be once a part of it, was just amazing, then I graduated high school as most people always do.

Dave:  This was all while you’re in high school? Greg:  Yes, this is all when I was in high school. From nearly 1998 to 2001.

I’m only 32 years old. It’s nothing that I hide about my age. I’m still a young guy and I’m still learning. I still get to do a lot of things, but this is all happened when I was in high school. It was a lot of fun.

I graduated high school and went to college in San Antonio. My parents had divorced that time, so I told my mom, hey, I will come back when I graduate high school and I came back home.

I went to school here in San Antonio, where I still live. It’s a great market with lots of culture and a great cost of living.

When I came back, there wasn’t availability for me to work at Victoria’s Secretat that time, so I was essentially forced to leave Victoria’s Secret and do something different on my own and that was the end of my Victoria’s Secretlife. It was great. It was a good experience. It was a lot of fun times and I made a lot of good friends and connections and saw some different parts of the world and also some different types of people.

Then, fast forward, I was lead concierge at one of the major western hotels and that was fun and then found that sales job and then another sales job, but they’re just wasn’t for me and then I found that position with FedEx and they were looking for a sales manager, and I said ok. I applied for it, got the job, great company, then and not too long after that I was asked if I could help out with some of the sports events that they had sponsored although I was in sales and that really was a lot of experience. That chance to see a lot of people, meet a lot of athletes and travel around.

And then in 2005  UPS came and said, “hey would you like to redo that”, and I said, of course, so I went to UPS for a couple of years and did that as well.

2007 rolled around, UPS was a great company, but there came a time where I had an opportunity to stay at home for a little bit as one of my family members was sick at that time and I said, let me check a few weeks to make sure that if everything is ok. Everything turned out to be ok, but I enjoyed staying home!!

There was something about it and I really liked being at home and I started thinking, whatever it is, I have to do something from home, then I was sitting at home one day and I said, you know what, I think I will start my own business!! And I sat there and started contemplating, what’s am I good at?, what do  I know a lot about? what I’m comfortable with? etc etc and I started going through a list of pro’s and con’s.  And I thought “you know, I think I’m going to bail guys out of the dog house”, they forget birthdays, they forget anniversaries, I thought I could help them. I didn’t want to get into event management as I didn’t know what was out there.  I hadn’t researched the competition or anything like that and I wasn’t just gonna stick it out there just to stick it out there.  So we launched – four thousand dollar investment – we launched a website, we had identity, and that was when we chose the name “CRE8AD8”.

Now, I always say “We”, even though it was me at the beginning, but we’re always a team and I always think everybody, so it’s always a We no matter what. It could have been the influence of my father, my mother, my friends or my family at that time, but at some point it’s never just me. It was always a We. So, the CRE8AD8 name came out of it.  We had to separate ourselves so we turned it into an alpha-numeric name and I said to myself, this is a name that we can have forever, no matter what we do, as long as we stay with events and travel, no matter where we go with this. This is a name that we can grow and essentially create an empire out of it.

And CRE8AD8 with our tag line is “Let Us Create Your Perfect Date”. I wanted it to be about the client. I never wanted to name the company after me or name it after part of me, or my initial because it really doesn’t feel right. It feels like it was about me, but CRE8AD8 was about creating your perfect date. It was about them. It was about the customer, the client, the bride the groom, whoever it was that came around. It was always going to be about them.

So fast-forward, that was 2007 and it was really physically just me. Now, we’ve got over  two hundred and sixty people around the world and nineteen locations. We’ve managed over 86 million dollars of budget to date and we have clients on the fortune 5, 50 and 500 lists.  And the majority of our business these days comes from the corporate world. We have our fair share of brides and grooms and couples which we love and then we have our fair share of corporations.

Because of our company name and the way it spelt and the way it works, we do attract a certain type of client.  We attract the type of client that’s not looking for a typical meeting or a typical conference setup. The clients that look for us and come to us are looking for a creative way to do things.  So that’s where we at these days.

It’s phenomenal. We’ve a good run and we plan on being around as long as we can. We have aquired other companies as well and that’s just because they have a good talent and they feel like to be a part of something bigger, so some mergers and acquisitions have happened over time and we’ve retained some really great talent.

Until this day, it’s really not about us. Our clients give us the opportunity, our vendors make this looks phenomenal and we’re just happened to be the coaches, so we give the credit, but we love to share it with as many people as possible.

Dave:  Excellent!! That’s great! That’s absolutely amazing! Very impressive!  

In eight years you’ve taken it from a website that was just helping guys to stop

forgetting about birthdays and anniversaries and things like that to an international event company that controls or uses millions and millions and millions of dollars every year in budget, so how did you take it from that small idea you had and how did it grow so quickly in just the last eight years?

Greg:  No matter how many times I get asked this question, I will always keep saying that it was never just me.

I think that I found a good talent in the beginning and I did what I could to retain that good talent.

If a company A was paying somebody X amount of dollars or a Commission or whatever, then I try to find a way to say, well, I want your talent, I think that you deserve more than what you’re getting compensated, let’s figure out a compensation plan to get you to come work for us. And that was one way.

I think the talent is what help us. Obviously, you have a good talent, their clients wants to follow that talent and that helps. A lot of our clients came from existing accounts

that a person has been taking over either immediately or down the road, so the first and foremost as I think is the talent and it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with our talents because our talents is what makes people feel confident, secure and reliable.

Our talents is one of the biggest reasons why we’ve grown, just on the people capital alone which is great!!

Dave:  Brilliant!! I just want to ask you a quick question concerning that you keep mentioning the word “talent”, so who were the first editions to your team? Who were they?  Were they assistant planners?  Were they AV talent? Who were the first people that you brought on?

Greg:  The first people I brought out were just a couple of assistants.

I needed some help so I brought assistants. those assistants are now event planners that made probably more than they have ever thought they would make in this career field.

Once we had some dollars to invest, then we started getting people and talents planners

that had has five, ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty five years in the industry. That have brought their expertise, but also had a client base. May be not everybody, but they had a client base, so we wanted to invest on that.

And on top of that, we wanted to invest in our client base. We wanted to make sure that our clients are treated fairly and properly.  We wanted to make sure that they could do more for their clients than they previously could, I think most people would agree that

they don’t really have an expense account, unless it comes out of their own pocket to do things for their client.  Well, we essentially said, let’s take some marketing dollars out of the Cre8aD8 pocket, and let’s take care of these clients.

These clients are bringing in a hundred thousand, a million dollars, 10 million dollars a year, well, I tell you what, let’s take them to Hawaii, let’s have a good time, let’s truly get to know them.  We need to pull these clients out, and maybe have a team building with this committee.   Whereas another other client, may be saying “hey, let’s go play a round of golf”.

Because every client likes to do something different but at the same time as we like to reward our clients, whenever we can, because we do want to keep that business and we do reinvest in our clients and yes, you’re right, we could send them thank you cards, but if we can give them a thank you card and taking them on the road on a vacation or taking them somewhere else or just send them a gift basket that is memorable not just a typical chocolate gift basket but if this client specifically mentioned the first time we met them, I like to drink this, I prefer to eat these things, when you can send them something that’s five years down the road and they still don’t remember that they told you that five years before, makes a big difference. It show’s we were listening from the get go!

Dave:  Right, and now for all the event planners that are wondering, ok but how do I get to that point.  At the moment that my margins aren’t good enough for me to be able to take clients on holidays, or vacations and things like that.  What steps did you take, how did you get to the point where you can do that?

Greg:  Well, I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy and it doesn’t happen overnight.  You get the client every once in a while and go – hey wow, I got an RFP the next day

or I got a proposal the next day going out, it happens every so often.

I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but for us it takes time, you have to go cultivate that client and cultivating a client means a lot of different things, it can mean just simply dropping in to their office and bringing them a thank you card, yes, it can be very very simple and very very inexpensive.  Some clients don’t budge until you spend a lot of money unfortunately, and sometimes takes time to get those clients, but I think

first and foremost it’s relationships, it’s building the one on one, it’s not sending an email and setting up a time to have a meeting, it’s, hey, let’s go and grab drink because

we’re friends, and I think that’s one of the main reasons why we’ve landed a lot of the prosperous accounts that we have, and what I mean by prosperous –  we don’t put a number on who’s prosperous – what we call prosperous is we can have good relationships with, they can spend a thousand dollars with us every year and we’re still going to treat them like they spend 10 million, that’s the goal.  It doesn’t matter how much they spend, we still treat them the same like we treat everybody

the same as much as we possibly can.  Yes, some clients do may be a bigger gift because we have it in the budget to do so, but at the same time, it doesn’t

mean that we’re going to let the person that’s spending a thousand dollars with us not get to enjoy the things that we do or when we have extra tickets or things we’re definitely going to send it to them.

But the biggest way that we have attracted clients, the biggest way that we’ve made money to referrals from different clients is, it’s relationships.  It’s not about

putting five hundred people in your funnel and see what it spits out, it’s about working and spending time with the ten, twenty or thirty people that you truly want to get to know because at some point – you can be talented, you can be an expert – but at some point managing five hundred people, it gets to be a bit challenging.  

But managing thirty is a little bit more manageable and I think you enjoy your time better, so people pleasing – it’s not always easy – but people pleasing is the best way that I find that we will retain good clients, that we will retain good quality business and just stay in touch with them, like I said, it doesn’t always have to be a card, it doesn’t have to be a vacation, it can be a simple as a phone call, dropping in.  Remembering things, like hey, how is your son doing, how is your daughter doing, hey, I remember a little while you’ve told me that your son isn’t doing good and that he was in the hospital, how is everything going, when you pick up the phone, you can’t always think about sales, you have to think about it as if it was family, see how they’re doing first and even if you ended that phone call and never talked about business, some times that goes a lot further than trying to make sure that you got that business, does that make sense?

Dave:  Yeah, definitely, it’s exactly like you said before, it’s all about relationships and

I’ve heard that time and time again.  It’s obviously working for you, also sounds like, there’s a little bit of persistence that comes in there as well, and just keeping it going like you said, not every company that becomes a client of yours you have been

able to create that relationship quickly and easily, some of them that it’s taken a bit more time and a bit more effort, but persistence and just keeping that at the forefront of your mind that you’re trying to be friends and add value to them.  It sounds like that’s what’s really given you your step up above some of your other competition.

Greg:  It does, it does, and you know what, every body is different.  I’d be lying if I told you that we’re the better solution for everybody but at the same time as I know and so do other event planners out there, we know that we’re the better solution for a certain client, but maybe that client has a very different friendship with somebody else at another event company.  It takes time, and it’s always going to take time, again, I’ve talked to a clients who sign a contract the same day I have met them, which again is extremely rare, but, I have also taken five, six, seven years working on one client.  Just to earn their business, just to earn a small portion of their business, and I may never get it, but at the end of the day is, what I remember, I don’t try to call them seeking business all the time, I try to call them just to follow up because, again, if you going to work with somebody, it’s good to have some sort of foundation, to work with that person, at least, you got time to get to know that person.

There are times where we’ve landed clients that we probably did invest a lot of time in getting to know and they turned out to be a little crazy, and we think back ourselves like, man this is great business, but we should got to know this client a little better because we didn’t know that this client was going to be a diva or crazy or demand everything without having a budget.

So, you just never know, so it’s not just about making money, it’s about gtting to know your client because you don’t want to be stuck for six days in the middle of the Atlantic ocean or the Pacific ocean doing an incentive trip and then all of the sudden, you can’t run away from your client because they’re just a little nuts.

Dave: Right, yes, sure, it’s all about just getting a good fit, not just for them, but for you as well.

Greg:  Correct, and the relationship has to run both ways.

Dave:  Yeah, sure, ok, awesome, and now, one of the other things that I get asked all the time, or get told all the time, is that a lot of the event planners I speak to, just don’t seem to have time to do everything they need to do.  They’re working weekends, they’re working evenings and then still kind of struggling to get everything done.  Do you have any tips or advice or strategies that you’ve used in your business in the past to either save time or streamline processes or something like that?

Greg:  So there’s a few that I think they work pretty well first and foremost, if you can’t afford to get an assistant, then look at the local colleges in your area for some interns.   I think a lot of people have done that before, I think a lot of people are not thinking of the full process, though.  So before you actually put any posting out there, make sure you have come up with a game plan for that person whether you decide to pay them

or not, make sure you come up with a good game plan, so that when they step into your office or your home office or even if they’re working from home, they have a game plan, they know what you do, and what order – like a book of knowledge essentially –  they know the process, or standard operating procedures rather, they know the process to follow.  So if they can’t reach you, they just go to number 4 or no.5 and no.5 says, get all my business card in order, bla bla bla, or if they can’t do that, ok, they go to no.6, what is no.6 say, please call so and so on, they have events over the next year or four months and just the reaffirm bla, bla, bla, so that’s one way that you can save time and money on the process.

Another way, if there’s a so much going on is to try to knock out everything at one time.  I think where I was losing time was when I was focusing on one client at a time and I have found better ways to streamline.  Some people would say, I want to focus on this x client right now, this x client needs this, well that’s going to take me an hour and half doing some sort of spreadsheet or Excel or whatever to do that.  And then this client needs some sort of slide show for their meeting, ok, I’m going to spend an hour making this slide show and transition and bla, bla, bla.  

What I found that helped was when you’re working on two different things like that – and some people could see it in different ways – but what I’m working on for that involves my analytical brain and then I try something that involves the creative side of my brain, my brain has to readjust, my brain has to take time to focus on that area.  So what I found works better is, let’s put together the three or four clients that need to have some sort of spreadsheet done, maybe we need to revise the P&L or the budget, whatever it is.  So I’m going to focus on nothing, but excel work right now, and that excel process, ok this client, client A needs to, we need to revise their P&L or their budget, client B, we need to go and change around their airfare and change on the manifest because it’s all on spreadsheets, client C needs to do something, client D needs to do something.

Now that I’ve got the analytical part out of my way I’m going to go focus on the creative part, so now my mind is focused on the creative part and I’ve actually timed myself, I have saved about 13-20% more time by doing that process and, so when you start equating that out of an hour, that would be 6 – 15 minutes or so, so I started looking at that and I said, hey I’m saving up to 6 – 15 minutes an hour doing stuff like that, it may not seem like a lot of time, but you know what, when Friday comes around and you got extra hour or two hours to get something else done, it starts helping you out.

So that’s what I’ve done that and I don’t know if it works for every body, but that just a couple of ways that I’ve saved some time.

The other way I’ve saved time – and here you need to have a little bit of money, but there’s great sites out there, there’s Elance, there’s Fiver, there’s sites out there that will help you.  So, let’s just say  you’ve gone to a networking event, and I come back with 200 cards from the networking event, maybe my assistant is out for the day or maybe my assistant is doing more valuable things that I need to get done, perhaps my intern

isn’t going to come in for a week but I gotta put these cards in, I gotta follow up with these people today or early tomorrow morning, so what I’ll do is I’ll go on Elance, or I’ll go on Fiverr, or I’ll go on Craigslist if absolutely have to, I’ll find somebody in the area, I’ll drop my cards off to them, or I’ll just do a quick scan of them and send them the zip file, they will open it up, they will clean it up for me and then I can import and do what I need to do.  

So that’s just another way that I can save my time and my money on something like that, just tedious little things.  As event planners there’s a certain amount of money that you’d like to make an hour and it’s much easier to pay somebody 5, 10, 15 or 20 dollars on a small project like that, than it taking up 2 or 3 hrs of our time trying to do it.  

Dave:  Yeah, definitely.  I love that, and it’s very timely as i’m right in the middle of writing a blog post at the moment about using virtual assistants and freelancers from Elance and oDesk to do things like social media and the little jobs you’re talking about so that leads onto that quite nicely.  And I love your idea about batching your different tasks and working on your analytical things all in one go, even if it’s were a number for just some clients and then moving on later and doing the creative, I think that’s really smart and it’s saving 13 – 20%, as you said like if you’re doing that on lots of different clients, that adds up to a huge amount of time.  So yes, that’s perfect, that’s great information, thank you!

And now one other thing is just, I’m not sure to ask this, but are there any strategies that you use for either money saving or for maximizing profits?

Greg:  So, I think one of the biggest areas that most event planners agree on is, if we can try to use one vendor for multiple things, that increases the margin.  That increases more concessions that we can give to the clients as does, obviously the hotel, if we’re doing the catering, or the F&B, the lodging, the space and renting things through the hotel, they are going to be able to give us a bigger concession.  That’s one of the areas that I think is just an easy money saving area.  You may spend a little bit more, but you have more margin to work with and to do things with the client that you may not otherwise have.  

Some of the other areas that I have found to help with making money and not just for us, but for a fundraising effort is to do a lot of co branding, a lot of time people would say, oh, we’re looking for a sponsor and this sponsor is a $100,000.  Well, that hundred thousand dollars spot might not always be the easiest to get, so obviously, I think it’s sometimes it’s better for the non-profit to maybe find two clients coming in at $50,000 dollars and then they both can take advantage of the hundred thousand dollar level.

That saves money, believe it or not, when you’re looking at the numbers on paper, fractionally, it costs a little bit more, because maybe you’re putting in extra seats at the table, and maybe you’re paying an extra two or three hundred dollars to get it, but

you’ve just secured that position and made more money faster than it may have taken more time and more labor and more phone hours or networking hours to get secured.

So on the back end it may have cost you a $1,000 for the labor to try to get that $100,000 sponsorship, but on the other hand, it cost you $200 of worth of concessions to get two companies to coming at the same level.  

So there’s something like that, that help raise funds and also do things for us.  One of the other things that we’re using when we are trying to make more money as well, is we do try to get our clients, maybe to find a co-sponsor.  

So, let’s just say, it’s an IT company, well, what we’ll try to do is we try to help

them get one of their suppliers, let’s say that company has their suppliers, may be a wiring company or a co-ax company or a computer company, we’ll try to get them to co-sponsor or underwrite the entire event – like pharmaceutical companies do too – but we’re trying to get them to underwrite the entire event or a part of it, so that way

the IT company puts their portion of their budget, so let’s say their budget is a $50,000 to begin with, but let’s say IT supplier said, we’ll kick in an extra $15,000, well, that $15,000, that just helps us as the event company make more money, but now we can add more quality to the event and do something extra that maybe wasn’t accounted for to begin with, so that’s just another way to make money.

Dave:  That’s brilliant, I love that,

Greg:  Yeah, obviously, there’s a lot of other different ways to make money, obviously, we try to always be ethical in all of our decisions, try to make sure that moraly all of our decisions are right and just, if we’ve ever feel that we’ve been unethical or we collected funds that we didn’t deserve to collect, we’ll try to do everything we can to refund the client.  

One of the other things that we try to do is some sort of a bid out, so when we’re bidding out for something like, let’s say catering, and the client has a menu, the client is very very firm on the menu, they didn’t say that they had a particular caterer, but they’re firm on the menu.  What  we will do is we will find ways to give them the same menu that they want, and sometimes we can find a better priced caterer that isn’t in the area that we’re currently having an event.  Because let’s just say a caterer from 45 miles away really wants this business, well let’s just say that we charge the client $50,000 for catering, and let’s just assume that the caterer in Chicago says, we’ll do it for $45,000.  OK, fantastic, Cre8aD8 just made $5,000 and the caterer gets his money.

Well, if we’re looking to try make more money, and the client is open to it, we’re going to reach out to a caterer that’s maybe 30, 40 mins, maybe an hour outside of Chicago

and this caterer like – I can do this manu the same if not better than that caterer and I’ll do it for $35,000 – so, if they’re come in at $35,000 the client already agreed on, “hey we’re going to pay you $50,000, make it happen  at $50,000 you can keep whatever you can because we know it’s going to be expensive”, we just made a profit of $15,000.

We’ve given them something that they wanted, desired, demanded, requested, if you want to call it that and on top of that, because we have this as one of our policies, we tried to 100% of the time do business with a local, a minority owned or a disadvantage business, so we definitely try to look for the female business owners, minority business owners, veteran business owners, small businesses and locally owned businesses.

I’m not saying that the big guys aren’t great but it is in our culture to try to do business with companies that are at a disadvantage because obviously, they don’t have millions of dollars to plug in to marketing or advertising, so we definitely try to get back business in that way and our clients love that of course.  So that’s where we’ve also made money, because we find caterers that are willing to do it for a fair price, that they would consider an awesome price because they don’t get an opportunity like that every day and we increase our margins.  And on top of that we try to find different things to kick back

to the client as well, there’s certain cases where – again, everybody is in business to make money – but there’s certain cases where you look at the money you made and you’re like, “you know what, we made a lot more money than we expected to, we should do something with this money”, so we’ll donate it, we will do something for the client, or what we will do is we’re donating in the client’s name, so now it’s a win win, or maybe we’d add something else into the event, may be we’d add some free photo booths or maybe we’ll take care of their valet costs, it’s all about value add, but at the end of the day, when you’re start doing that numbers, you still make more money than you anticipated.

Dave:  Yeah, and that’s great, and i can see from your website that one of your main

missions is to always surprise and over deliver on what you’ve arranged with the client so I can see that as a very good way to enable you to do that which is awesome!!

Greg:  Correct. We’ve definitely learned from some of the other event companies that’ve started doing it and we see that as a great start so we’re going to do what

we can to give back to our clients and the community that serves us.

Dave:  Yeah, and that’s great, well, thanks very much Greg, you’ve given some amazing tips here’ I’m really happy to have you on and we’ve gone  little bit over time, but please tell every one, how to contact you?

Greg:  Well, obviously, you can just search for me, Greg Palomino on Linkedin,  CRE8AD8 Events is every where online, social media, and our phone number that everyone can simply reach out to me, my direct phone number, my direct online is 210-846-8900, we’re always open to calls, we always have an open door policy whether it’s for competition, for vendors, for employees, employers, we’re always open to everything,  

So if there’s anything that I can ever do, you ever need, use have a question before you hire another event planner, you just want a second opinion, give us a call, we’ll make sure we take care of you.

Dave:  Wow!!, that’s incredibly generous of you, especially giving out your personal number, and I love what you said back there about including competition because that’s one thing that so many event planners who I’ve spoken to are always so worried about, what their competitors are doing, and they have a scarcity mindset, it’s clear that you’ve got an abundance mindset, which’s that there’s enough room for everyone and every one can do business and everyone can profit,  so that’s amazing and I love that.

Greg:  Well, thank you very much and I appreciate you including us and i love giving my time and wherever I can and I appreciate everything you guys have done.

Dave:  That’s Awesome!! well, thanks very much Greg it has been great to have you on.

Have a great weekend.

Greg:  Thanks so much Dave.

Dave:  Thanks a lot. bye. Bye bye --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you found this helpful, then please share with your friends or colleagues and add your comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners, perfecteventproposal.com. I will pass on any comments or questions to Greg personally.

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Interview – Seasoned Event Planner, Carroll Reuben, shares tips from 40 years of experience.

Transcription:

Intro: Hi there, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacksand Perfect Event Proposals.

Here today with me, I’ve got Carroll Reuben on the line. Carroll is an event planner with over 30 years experience in the corporate and association event side of things. She’s a fellow Brit who has been in the United States for over 40 years. She has been lecturing at California State University for the last ten years and a guest speaker at California Lutheran University and Carroll really had some awesome insights. Last year when I spoke to her, she was very straight down the line and quite blunt with some of her views which I really respected, and she really gave me some amazing feedback on my project so I wanted to get Carroll here today.

Dave: Welcome Carroll.

Carroll: Thank you very much.

Dave: No problem. Thank you for being with us, so if you could just give us a little bit of detail about your background? How you got started in events and what happened from when you started to where you are now?

Carroll: I started event planning in the last century [Dave laughs] in London. I had graduated from college and went straight to work for the national Coal Board with a team of five people who were producing a ‘Mining Congress’, which’s just another way of saying a conference in this country. This was before the days of computers. It was even before the days of the electric typewriters.

That started me in meeting planning because with that team of five people, we were doing a congress for 2000 delegates which was going to last for two weeks. Because it was international they were all going to bring their families to London, which meant we had about five thousand people. We had to educate them, entertain them, accommodate them, feed them and transport them – All in four languages!

Dave: WOW!! This is your first ever event?!

Carroll: This was my first ever event and it was such an adrenaline rush. I decided that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Dave: Oh, Great! I can imagine. It sounds like a situation where you’re either going to love it or run a mile.

Carroll: That’s right.

Well, they say, to be a good meeting planner, you have to be suicidal.

Dave: Haha, And you agree with that?

Carroll: You have to be able to stand a heck of a lot of stress and not be distressed by it.

Dave: Sure, Forbes Magazine recently had event planner No.8 in the most stressful jobs in the world.

Carroll: It is but you must not be distressed.

Dave: Yes, exactly. Keeping your cool and being diplomatic is definitely some of the most vital traits for an event planner, so going from your first event, how was your career developed?

Carroll: I came to this country and started my own business in 1981 and I started the business as what’s known as a multi management company where I manage conferences and trade shows for several trade and technical associations.

I specialized in high technology and engineering because that’s very analytical and that was my comfort level. I built it up to 14 planners and analysts working for me and we were doing fifty to twenty major events a year all around the country and in Europe. That I put to sleep, or put it out of it’s misery if you like, or maybe put myself out of my misery after 8 years. I went to work for one of my clients, which was Southern California Eddison, and for a further five years I did all their commercial and industrial events.

Dave: And how did you find the transition from having your own company to then working for a client?

Carroll: Oh, it was wonderful! I didn’t have to worry about payroll.

Dave: Lol – I can imagine. You’ve got your job to do and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about the rest.

Carroll: Though having my own business did gave me a unique insight into more of the profit and loss and return on investment of the events.

Dave: Yes and this is something that I know you’re very aware of now which is great.

So, when did you finish working for Eddison?

Carroll: I left Eddison in 1995 and then became executive direction of a nonprofit association in the healthcare environment. I was there for one year because I learned that I wasn’t entirely comfortable in the healthcare world. I preferred my engineering and technology, so I chose not to renew my contract even though we were doing about 60 continuing educational seminars a year and a major conference.

I left them and went to work for a dot-com. This was when the dot-com world was just exploding and I took a company that had just started in that arena, they were literally living on folding chairs and tables, and over the five years I was with them we took our educational conferences to being award winning shows on the front cover of most of the meeting planning trade magazines. We were very, very successful.

Dave: Wow!! That’s amazing. And where did that leave you then when the bubble burst?

arroll: When the bubble burst, I sort of sat back and it was one of those years

where everything sort of piles in on you and I took a step back to reevaluate where I was and what I was doing then, I decided that it was time to give back and that was when I started teaching at California State University for their event planning courses and started speaking for many of the associations.

I always been giving seminars for Meeting Professionals International, but now I ramped it up to be far more, and I started my consulting with various organizations that I met along the way doing their budgets, their sponsorship programs or whatever special needs they had as far as the event planning, I would come and fill in that special need on a contract basis.

Dave: Well, that’s great!!

You sound like you’ve obviously got some amazing and very varied experience from lots of different areas, but all with event planning, so one of the first things I want to ask you about, which’s one of the biggest frustrations I hear from event planners every time I interview them is just not having enough time, so are there any tips or strategies you can share with the audience of anything that you know that’s great for saving time?

Carroll: Use your technology wisely.

You have to be proficient with your Word processing, your Excel spreadsheets and any other technology. Don’t use the wrong tool for the wrong job. If you’re talking database management, use the database program. Don’t try doing it all in Excel because you won’t have the same capabilities. If you’re using Word, then learn how to use Word to the fullest extent. It’s an amazingly powerful processing system.

Also, if you can add other technology to it to make your life faster or save money as far as outsourcing, such as desktop publishing or Graphics, then do so.

Technology is your friend and you MUST use it.

Dave: Yes, I totally agree with that.

I do speak to a few event planners that describe themselves as an untech savvies. Is there any advice you can give to those people?

Carroll: I’m a little impatient with those people.

We’ve been using computers for nearly 30 years now. They’ve been on our desktops for 15 to 20 years. It’s amazing to me that people that have a career of this nature have not embraced it as being the tool that’s going to make their life so much easier.

Dave: Yes. I definitely agree with that.

Ok let me re-phrase that then, for those event planners who find it hard to keep up with constantly learning new technology, are there any particular platforms or programs which you think an event planner really should focus and prioritize their time to learn?

Carroll: Excel, and where do you learn it? YouTube.

Dave: Yeah!! Sure, YouTube is definitely the best for pretty much learning anything.

Carroll: It’s probably the primary learning tool for learning most accepted software programs on a computer today from the Standard Microsoft all the way to The Adobe Suites. You can learn it all on YouTube.

Dave: Right. And other than Excel or Word, are there any other types of software or platforms that people may not be so familiar with that you think it would be really useful for them to take a look at?

Carroll: As far as project management goes, Fast Track, which is what I call Microsoft project light is an acceptable program because it has templates already built into it.

The key thing with the timeline is to identify all the tasks that have to be undertaken, their start date, their end date and the resources that are going to complete them, and in some cases you have to monitor the cost factor. Fast Track will allow you to do that and will allow you to build gantt charts, so you’ve got a picture of what’s happening as well as words.

Dave: Brilliant!!

So, Fast Track is a project management tool that allows you to layout all your ideas and put them into gantt charts. Is there anything else that you can achieve with that tool?

Carroll: Well, if you’re realistic about inputting exactly how long each task will take and then you start to overcommit to yourself, it will tell you.

If you’re putting in that you’re working a basic 40 hrs/week and then you start building your task list and you say, ok, each task is going to take me x number of hours and it finds that you’re pushing yourself to 60 hrs in the week, then it’s going to tell you.

Dave: That’s Awesome because that really comes down to time management and as soon as you start managing your time to that level of detail, then you’re going to be able to find out way you can save time.

Carroll: Exactly. There’s another program for those people who are doing room layouts. It’s calledMeeting Matrix which’s a graphics program.

It’s free to meeting planners at the base level. The way it works is that, major facilities, hotels and conference facilities pay to upload their floor plans toMeeting Matrix and then when you sign in toMeeting Matrix, you can download that floor plan and then with the tools that meeting matrix provides, you can put in your tables and chairs and staging and everything else and ultimately develop your floor plan. In major hotels like New York, Chicago, LA and it will also convert it to a three dimensional image.

Dave: Well, that’s brilliant!! Because that’s something that’s come up a few times when I’ve been talking to people about proposal writing and getting the 3d images, they say that it can sometimes cost a lot of money, so if this does that for free, then that’s really brilliant!!!

Carroll: It’s a very good program. The only thing is that it’s only runs on a PC so if you’re running MAC, then you have to run a parallel simulator.

Dave: OK. For people that are using MAC and want to use that program, I’m sure they can figure out how to do that.

For time saving, just to recap, you said, really learn Excel and Word, use YouTube, check out Fast Track and Meeting Matrix as well as two of your top tips, so that’s really great.

How about in terms of money saving? Are there any strategies or advice you can give for that?

Carroll: As far as money saving goes, the first thing you have to do is to lay out your template in Excel so that you can itemize all the categories and then each item, because the bottom line is that you have to know exactly how much it costs for each attendee to participate in your event, and you only do that by determining whether each expense is either Fixed or Variable.

Dave: Just quickly in case people aren’t 100% sure on that, could you define Fixed and Variable costs?

Carroll: Fixed costs are those costs that don’t change no matter how many people show up. For instance, room rental. If room rental is $500 a day, it doesn’t matter if there’s one person in the room or thirty people in the room, it’s still $500.

A variable fee would be your food and beverage, which you can adjust. You start with a base projection based upon the number that you’ve chosen, but if you see through registrations or RSVPs that this number is going to exceed your original projection all fall far belowed, then you can vary it. And the formula must be that you total all your Fixed costs and divide by the estimated number of attendees, you total all your Variable costs per person, and then you divide them to get the cost per person to attend.

Dave: Right, and then once you’ve got that figured, how would you use that to help you save money?

Carroll: By setting up that template properly and doing all the formulas correctly.

By doing a very simple saving, for instance, you’ve decided that you’re going to change the asparagus on the entree for green beans and you’re going to save five cents per entree on a lunch for three hundred people, then that could mount up. All you need to do is to change one cell and you can see the differences that are made to the bottom line.

More broad tips, if you’re serving morning breaks, lunch and afternoon breaks, for the lunch, only serve the salad and entree and prepare a dessert that can be served in the afternoon break such as carrot cake or something like that, so you don’t have to add more food for their afternoon break. You’re actually using the dessert from lunch.

Dave: OK. Just going back a step, you mentioned about the template that you use, could you tell us where did you get that template?

Carroll: It’s one I designed probably 20 years ago.

It goes in conjunction with My Classes and My Book. It’s a template. It’s very simple. It’s simply an Excel template, but all the formulas are built into it now and it’s available for people that purchaseMy Book and you can get it from My Website.

Dave: Great! Please tell us a little bit about your book and your website.

Carroll: The title of The Book is ‘Event Budgets Made Easy’ and My Websiteiswww.MeetingExcellence.com.

Dave: Brilliant!!

If you do want to get hold of that template, then just go to Carroll’s websiteand you will be able to get a copy of that template.

Thanks Carroll!

In terms of new business, it’s always getting new business, it’s always on top of many of the event planners agendas that I speak to, any advice for that?

Carroll: It’s called Networking, Networking, Networking.

Dave: Yeah!! I can see that, because out of all the two hundred people I’ve spoken to, about 98% of them get almost all of their business from referrals, so how would you advise people to improve their networking?

Carroll: Linkedin is a primary source for that.

Make sure that the summary is up to date. Visit it frequently and see who is following your profile even with a non paid subscription, you can see at least five people that have followed your profile in the last seven days.

Take a look and see if it’s somebody you want to reach it to and if you can help them. And the other thing on Linkedin is testimonials. Every time you do a great job ask for a testimonial and keep them coming.

Dave: Brilliant! That’s great and that ties in very nicely with the Live Training Sessions that I’ve been doing every Wednesday, where I’m advising people about how to improve their proposals – testimonials and references are definitely high on that.

So, do you just ask for written testimonials? Have you ever asked for video testimonials?

Carroll: I haven’t asked for a video one as yet.

I’m a perfectionist. If I’m going to put a video up there, I want it to be really good. It’s going to be HD and I’d rather to just go with a good written testimonial than a bad quality video.

Dave: Right. I can understand that. When it comes to testimonials, do you have the other person write the testimonial completely or do you give them a few things that you might like them to include?

Carroll: No, I let them write it completely and I’ve been blessed by having some really great testimonials.

Dave: That’s brilliant! Your reputation stands for itself and having testimonials is really the only way that other people can easily get to know what your reputation is. That’s very valuable.

How about getting higher paying clients or higher value clients?

Carroll: I would say that a lot of my personal marketing has been done through my speaking and writing. When I took on the speaking tour with MPI and HSMAI and the Society of Government Meeting Professionals.

I do those peer to peer presentations not for the money, because they don’t pay that much, but it has definitely provided me with some good results as far as potential clients, because people that are coming to those seminars, basically are looking for help and I have had several clients come out as a result of some seminars that I have given in Chicago, New York and Washington DC.

Dave: Wow!! Awesome! Does that tie in with your lecturing at the university? You mentioned previously that you also have a network created because of that.

Carroll: Yes, because that’s the extension program. The students there, many are currently employed as event planners and want to increase their knowledge and education or their companies are supporting them in professional development and I have had some fairly big organizations that send their people to the classroom and I’ve always had the philosophy that you can always email me and I will answer an email. Just let me know that you were a student.

If you want to sit and chat about something, as long as I got a cup of coffee on my desk I’ll chat on the phone, but if you want me to do your work, then you have to pay me.

Dave: Lol – Well, that’s definitely fair enough.

Your experience and your situation are excellent and very different from some of the audience.

Do you have any advice for any of the event planners that maybe a little more new to the industry and don’t have the opportunity as yet to speak at different seminars? How can they potentially find higher value clients?

Carroll: I’d say, first of all, if you’re starting out, decide what your passion and you’re specialty is.

It’s awfully easy to be a generalist and say I’ll do any event that comes along, but decide whether you want to be a special event planner or if you want to be a corporate and association planner, or if you want to be a destination management planner. Pick your lane and make your reputation in that lane and target your marketing to that specific lane.

If you make a shotgun approach and just call yourself a meeting planner for anything that comes along, then you won’t develop the same specialty in those events that you do. Your reputation has to be painstakingly earned and then you have to promote yourself constantly. Self promotion is a lifetime exercise, not just when you’re looking for a job or a new customer.

Dave: Yeah!! That’s really brilliant advice. Thank you! I totally agree with everything you said there.

One of the other aspects or frustrations that comes up to me a lot is Scaling.

A lot of event planners feel that they do a great job with getting their business going and then they get it to a certain level and it plateaus and they feel that they just don’t have enough time to take it to the next level. Is there any advice that you can give for those planners?

Carroll: First of all, this is a very personal selection as to whether they want to grow or not.

Are they willing to take on payroll and employees or they just want to stay working with contract employees where they will just draw from other Meeting Professionals International? That’s a good resource for other meeting planners if you’re looking for some to partner with to come and help you with a project and I’ve done that many times myself.

The other thing is Interns. If you go to your local extension programs at universities or city colleges, very often they have some event management programs and the students are more than willing to do an Internship, so they will gain experience. This could be on a part time basis. It could be on a no pay or minimum pay basis, but very often you can find students that would be more than willing to come and help you over that next level, so that you can take on a little bit more work and have them do the day to day administrative work involved in meeting planning while you pursue something else.

Dave: Yes, that’s great! That’s a really good idea.

I like that because the Interns are getting exactly what they need and you’re getting what you need as well, so that’s a perfect answer.

You did mention briefly about partnering with other event planners, how would that work. If you’ve got a client, then how would you structure that partnership?

Carroll: The way I’ve done it is that other meeting planners that I’ve brought in are on a contract basis.

We’ve established either a rate for hour or a project fee for that planner and I built that fee into the budget for the total event.

Dave: Great!! And when you’re doing that, you’re basically taking them on another contract? They kind of being your assistant planner?

Carroll: Exactly.

Dave: Excellent!!

That’s some amazingly useful information Carroll. Thanks very much for that. I really appreciate it and I’m sure our audience appreciate that as well.

Just one last time, if you could just remind everyone, where they can contact you?

Carroll: OK. My email is [email protected]. My website iswww.MeetingExcellance.com and you can purchase My Book for $29.95 on that website. I would be very happy to answer any questions or help anybody along the way.

Dave: Thank you!! That’s much appreciated.

I’ll be putting links to all of those in the show notes.

Once again, thanks very much for sharing your years of experience with the other planners in the audience and I really appreciate that you’re taking a time, so thank you and have a great day!.

Carroll: Thank you so much Dave. Take care.

Dave: You too. Bye. Carroll: Bye, bye. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will make sure to answer everybody’s questions! Thanks!!

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

How to Write a Winning Corporate Event Proposal

Every growing company wants more business! From interviewing almost 200 event planners I’ve discovered that the overwhelming majority have no idea about what really makes a proposal appealing to a company.

I decided to write this post to teach you what in-house planners really want from your proposals and how you can stand-out in the crowd and win more business.

In the event world, the first step to landing a new client is usually a referral, receiving an RFP, or even a cold-call/email to a company to get their business.

If good fortune is shining down upon you and the company is interested then you may be asked to provide a proposal for the event.

This is your opportunity to shine, but standing-out amongst the massive amount of competition can be difficult, especially if the prospect is reviewing 5 or 10 proposals at once.

I frequently speak to experienced planners that still find the proposal process confusing; Or those who are frustrated with trying to write proposals without essential information – like a budget; or those that really don’t know what the most important considerations are when creating a proposal.

To help you, I’ve interviewed in-house planners that send out and review proposals for their companies. I’ve quizzed these planners to find out everything you need to know to make sure that your next proposal hits a home run & you get the job.

I was expecting to hear that it was based entirely on financials or familiarity with the company but I was blown away by the answers I received:

There are two main areas that your proposal must address:

Budget is vital no matter whether a budget is given or not. You need to get a Yes to the questions “Are they within the budget?” or “Could they be within the budget?”.

Reputation and perceived level of service are also hugely important to the shortlisting process. If you have not worked with the potential client before then you will need to prove these in your proposal.

So how do you make sure that these areas are not only covered but covered in a way that will allow your proposal to stand out brighter than all the others?

1 – Budget

If there is a budget then make sure to stick to it. Feel free to add optional extras to show flexibilty, creativity and innovation but the budget should be adhered to.

But, what should you do if there is no budget given?

Emily Obukowicz, Event Planner with tons of experience working with large companies to select independent planners based on their proposals, answers my question: Why do companies send out RFP’s without budgets and how would you suggest a planner responds?

“The executive team would usually pass down some specifications for an event but they may not have any idea of the budget themselves”. They often use the RFP process as a fact finding mission so they can figure out the budget they will need. Emily also says that the “proposal is usually a starting point for the budget, not the end point” and that they would usually go with a mid-range budget knowing they will probably add more to it.

So if you are faced with writing a proposal and have no budget information how should you handle it?

Emily says that showing flexibilty with pricing, perhaps giving low, medium and high budget options or different packages would be the safest route to take. You don’t even need to go as far as three options but the important point to take away is that if they feel you can accommodate the budget, whatever it may turn out to be, then you will be placed at the head of the pack.

2 – Reputation & Perceived Level of Service

If you’ve worked with the company before then you will have no problem here, but if you are a totally ‘blind applicant’ and are looking to acquire a new client then this is where you have your work cut out.

Luckily Emily gave me a number of awesome tips to make sure you stay ahead of the pack.

Design & aesthetics – First impressions are just as important with a proposal. If your proposal looks professional, creative and polished then there is a good chance your service will match up. Occasionally, if they are receiving a lot of proposals to review then the first cut may be based purely on design alone.

Attention to detail - Next comes a closer look. Spelling & grammar are obvious things to check but formatting and answering all of the questions in the order they were given are also important. These being flawless will make the internal planner’s job easier and the idea of working with you will be more appealing. Not to mention that the quality of your work will be perceived through the proposal.

Innovation – Being seen to go the extra mile with renderings, video, slideshows or anything at all that will make your proposal stand-out from the rest will get you noticed and improve the chances of your proposal being chosen.

References & testimonials – The best approach here is to do a bit of digging and try to find out if any of your past clients or current testimonial cases has a direct connection with the client. Make sure to highlight instances where the potential client may know your past clients or provide references and contact details clearly.

So, address the budget, even if not given, and make your proposal STAND OUT. Any type of innovation or something that sets you apart from the competition will make a huge difference. Try different designs, add more images or video but don’t forget about accuracy and attention to detail.

It’s also worth noting that Emily repeatedly made the point that small and medium sized event planning companies actually have an advantage over the larger ones as they are more likely to value the business and go the extra mile to make the event a success.

So if your company is on the smaller side and you’d not considered finding RFP’s for corporate jobs then perhaps you should start checking them out. They are easier to find than you’d imagine. Check out this free report for three super simple tips for finding RFP’s in your city today.

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

The 5 Keys to Successful Event Planner Time Management

In the last year I have interviewed a LOT of Event Planners about their daily work.  I’ve quizzed them on the tasks they need to do, how they structure their days and what their biggest frustrations are.

It quickly became clear, like after 2 or 3 interviews, that almost every planner I spoke with had some serious issues surrounding time management.  I often heard “there are not enough hours in the day”, “I never have any time”, “I always have a million tasks to do” – Sound familiar?

In this post I am going to share with you the approach of the legendary teacher of business success, Chet Holmes.  The practices I am about to share have really affected the way I plan my day and helped me to be way more productive and I am certain that every business man and women should be exposed to these ideas at least once.  These are 5 essential elements to Event Planner Time Management!

It would be a good idea to get a pen and paper and complete the quick exercises as you read through this post.  Each one will only take 1-2 minutes.

Before I move on I should highlight a central theme to Chet’s teachings.  He associates much of his success to pure ‘pigheaded determination & discipline’.  Where most of us start things, whether new projects or trying to instill new habits, we often go through the motions for a few days or weeks and then let it slide.  Pigheaded determination & discipline are what often separate the successful from the rest.

Below are 5 simple steps for time management that I recommend following.  As Chet so elloquantly writes “don’t think about whether you’ve heard these before.  Think about whether you are applying the discipline to implement them”.  This is important!

Step 1 – Touch it Once – This is pretty simple.  If you touch it then take action on it.  Emails, mail, paperwork – if you open them then you must deal with them then and there.  Don’t open it until you are ready to take action on it.  Taking action does not mean that you need to complete the whole project, it simply means that you have done enough to not have to go back to that email or letter.  You may just add a task to your To-do list or make a quick call.

How this helps – This will ensure that you complete an action BEFORE being distracted by another phone call, email or client.  The point here is to stop living in reactive mode where every time your phone rings or you get a new email you stop what you are doing.  Constantly reacting and getting distracted is the biggest killer of time and efficiency so try the ‘Touch it once’ strategy.

Step 2 – Make Lists – Lists help you stay focused on high priorities and productive tasks.  The key to better productivity is sticking to the 6 most important tasks you need to complete each day.  Your goal is to MAKE SURE that these 6 tasks are completed each day – No matter what!  Write out the 6 most important taks that you MUST complete tomorrow.

How this helps – We all keep lists.  If you are like my husband then you may have lists that are pages long.  Even if not pages long then I’m sure longer than 6 tasks.  The problem with this is that we tend to do all of the quick, easy tasks first just to reduce the size of the list as quickly as possible.  We leave the more challenging and perhaps more important tasks till the end when we may have run out of time or energy.  Six tasks per day will keep you busy but also allow you to check everything off each day.

Step 3 – Plan Your Time – You have your list of the 6 high priority tasks you need to complete tomorrow.  Now you should estimate how much time you will need for each task and write it down next to the task.  Try to keep the total time down to 6-7 hours.

How this helps – If the total time to do all 6 tasks is going to be 10 hours then it is not realistic for you to do all of these tasks in one day.  Rearrange, split one task up over two days, do whatever you need to do to make the list manageable.  6-7 hours is good because you need to plan for distractions.

Step 4 – Plan Your Day – Now that you have your 6 tasks with times next to them you can plan your schedule for the next day.  There must be a specific time slot for each of the tasks as well as periods to check email, mail, voicemail.  If you are touching these only once then make sure you allot time to do this.  Include a couple of extra 30 minute periods for ‘miscellaneous’ tasks.  This gives you a bit of wiggle room when you get off track.  The most important thing here is that you have to stick to the schedule – this is where your pigheaded determination and discipline comes in.

How this helps – If you get this right you will spend the majority of your time in proactive mode where you are in control and you are getting all the things done that will move your business forward rather than constantly putting out fires.

Step 5 – Prioritize – Now look at where you have put the most important task on tomorrow’s schedule.  If you have left them until the end of the day, like most people do, then reorganize your day.  By the end of the day you will rarely have the energy or the time to take on the task.  Do the most important tasks first.

How this helps – We’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule.  This is how to make the most of it.  It’s likely that your most important activities will yield the highest returns so focus on them and stop putting them off till the end of the day.

Conclusion:

There may be days when you are on-site at an event where you really feel that you cannot follow these principles.   A big part of your job on these days is to react to client demands or crisis.  This is fine.  These days are exceptions and following the 6 steps probably won’t work.  But the main time that this approach will help you is on all the other days when you are back in the office in planning-mode. And let’s face it, this is the majority of your time.

You still may be thinking that as a busy Event Planner ‘there is no way I could implement these steps in my business’,  ‘I have to respond to clients and vendors immediately’,  ‘I have too many demands on my day to stick to a schedule’ and my response to each of these is – TRY!!

You may be right, at first it will be difficult to stick to the schedule you set yourself.  Emergencies will happen and you may be dragged in an unforeseen direction for a few hours.  This is fine, this happens.  The important thing is that you deal with it and then go back to the schedule.

The longer you stick at this.  The longer you demonstrate your own pigheaded determination and discipline easier it will become and the more productive you will be.

Get More Tips!

For more time and money saving tips specific to Event Planners download our free report and join the newsletter by visiting our blog here: http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/blog/

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Event Planners Get More Business – Start Cold Calling!

You may have referrals coming out of your ears and more business than you know what to do with.

If so, then that is awesome!!

Please contact me so I can find out how you do it and share that valuable knowledge with the rest of our community!

I have spoken with MANY Event Planners who find that referrals alone are just not bringing them up to capacity and filling their diaries.

They’d love to get more clients through other means, have tried and tested the more popular methods of creating a social media presence or hosting their own networking events but have not found these to be effective either.

I want to get down and dirty in this post and talk about something that most consider to be a bad or negative concept.

In this video I am going to highlight an age old strategy that is known to be effective, but is rarely used by Event Planners, as it is often a huge step out of your comfort zone.

Cold calling, canvassing, prospecting – call it what you will – takes guts, it takes motivation and if you can master this, you will NEVER be short of event work again.

If you have signed-up to receive my free report then you will have learned different ways to locate RFPs for corporate event work in your city RIGHT NOW. The next step to actually landing the job is cold calling the prospect.

Watch this video for some tips that will turn you into a master of canvassing…

Transcript:

Hi there, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacks and Perfect Event Proposalsand today I want to speak to you about cold calling and starting a conversation with clients that you’ve never met before.

I know this is pretty daunting for a lot of people or even if it’s not daunting for you, it’s always a little bit uncomfortable, so I wanted to basically dig a little bit into that because I’ve had a few people who’d given me a bit of feedback on the free report I am offering on my  website  – ‘3 Super Simple Ways to Find RFPs in Your City Right Now’.  It explains that  by doing particular keyword searches on different sites you can find these RFPs, and you find the contact details of the people you need to speak to, however I didn’t actually cover how to deal with contacting these people or how to do these cold calls.

So, how do you make sure that you get the best results possible and that your cold calls are really effective? This is important for event planners because I know that 95% of your work comes from referrals and if you don’t have any referrals coming in, then it’s out of your hands.  

So I want to give you a way that you can take back control by prospecting for clients.

Let me explain a little bit about my history.  I spent a year living in New York working for an event planning company, and a lot of what I was doing for that company was doing B2B telesales. I did go to the events, I did help plan them, but when we were preparing for the events, I was basically contacting potential speakers, sponsors and attendees to get some bottoms in the seats, so I had quite a lot of practice doing cold calling and I also spent about five years doing door-to-door sales, which  taught me a ton of really useful stuff for selling and one of those being that you really need to have a thick skin. You also need tenacity, and you need confidence, but all of these things are skills that can be learned, exactly like everything I’m going to go through today with cold calling.

If it’s not for you, if you hate it, then that’s fine, that’s pretty normal to be honest, just realize that cold-calling can help your business and if you can overcome the fear of rejection, if you can stop taking things personally, but more importantly, if you can be certain that you’re actually going to be helping and giving value to the people that you’re speaking to, the people you’re prospecting, then that makes it all easier.

In this article:  What we’re going to cover today is how to strictly target your prospects, the specific resets that you need to do, some ideas of script, the warm-up, how to work gatekeepers so you can get to the people you need to speak to, practice and how to close these conversations.

Strict Targeting:  I’ve shown you in the free report how to target these people, how to find RFPs using different types of searches on Yahoo and Bing, how to find RFPs in three different event websites that are all free and how to find the contact details for anyone that you need to find, so that really helps with the targeting.

If you do want to download the free report, just go to the website PerfectEventProposals.com , and you will see either on the right-hand side or that pop up asking if you want this free report. Once you get it, it will show you how to find corporate event RFPs in your city right now because there’re tons of them around. They’re just that difficult to find sometimes.

Why Targeting is Important?  It’s important that you don’t waste time with a blanket approach, trying to prospect everyone and trying to call everyone. It gets your motivation down, and if you have a much more targeted approach and you personalize your calls, then they’re going to be more effective. You’re going to get a way better response and generally, your results are going to be much, much better than if you just try to contact everyone.

So it’s in your best interest to target and do the research that I’m going to come into in a second.

Who do you want to target? That’s up to you really. Every event planner is different. You’ve got different types of clients, but the main thing with cold calling and prospecting is that you really want to try to be calling only those that you believe are going to be ready to buy.  It’s difficult to identify these people because you don’t really know them, however  my free report will show you how to find people that are definitely ready to buy because they’ve already got RFPs floating around on the Internet, and they want proposals from event planners.

They’re the people that if you contact, you’re way more likely to get good results.

Specific Research:  Why research is important? It’s pretty obvious really; you’re in the event industry. You need to know a little bit more about your client. You want to stand out from all your competitors. I know that there’s a ton of competition for event jobs. You need to stand out by creating a good first impression and catching their attention;  then you’re going to stand out more than other event planners or event planning companies.

How to Research?  You can gain an amazing working knowledge of their last event, their business, their social media and other events that they’ve done. I’d recommend that, and I’ll give you some ideas of how to do that in a second.

You will also want to make sure that your positioned right either on your Linkedin profile or on your website to stand a chance of getting that particular event that you’re going to be bidding for.

When researching a client or an event, I recommend you trying to locate  their meeting minutes online from past events or general meetings. This is much easier for associations and big public companies because they publish their meetings. It might be harder for smaller companies, but if not, then meeting minutes are an absolute gold mine because they will often talk about their last event and especially the things they liked or disliked about it. If you can get that information, and in the few seconds when you’re introducing yourself you can mention or allude to it, then that’s going to make all the difference.  You’re going to position yourself as someone who knows what they want and how to solve their problems.

Another tip is using social media and social media tools to find out exactly what was going on in social media surrounding the last event held by that company. For example, if you’re bidding on the 2015 annual conference, try to find older social media posts that around the 2014 conference of that company. You will find these on their website or the websites of any other stakeholders, sponsor companies and also on the social media for any of these companies as well. Do the research, and I know that can take a little bit of time, but it’s worthwhile because if you’re seen to be someone who knows what she’s talking about and you’ve done your research, then it’s going to really help you get the job.

Create a Script:  This is important  because it gives you a little bit more security.

You’re much less likely to flounder around on your first couple of calls because you’re going to have this script that you will be able to follow. If you’re not used to doing cold calling, it’s probably going to be a little bit of a mess anyway so don’t worry about that. That’s completely natural. Just don’t pick your biggest, best client that you’ve spent hours and hours researching on for your very first call. I would definitely recommend doing two or three calls to smaller prospects that you’re not that bothered about if you get it or not just to practice.

Also practice with family, friends, loved ones, or even just buy yourself and record it.  All you’re really going to be practicing is the very first couple of minutes of the conversation opening. You can practice that over and over again in a very short amount of time, but having a script also going to really help you focus. It’s going to ensure that you get across all of the points that you need to get across.  (I’ll be coming to what you need to get across in a moment)

You’re going to have a lot more structure so you’re going to make sure that you can get their attention within seconds of saying hello to them. It will also really help you to make sure that you have the best chance possible of keeping this person on the phone because that’s always the difficult part.

How to Write a Script?  First of all, you want to just keep it really simple.

You want to do your elevator pitch right at the beginning, which’s going to be the description of the services, the reason they need you and the secondary benefits.  And you also need to be ready for objections. You really do only have a few seconds to grab their attention with this, so what I want you to do is just write out whatever sounds really natural to you for your first greeting and then I want you to list out the services you offer and tailor it to exactly what they’re looking for. Also, I want you to write a description of your services in less than two sentences and then you need to figure out why they need you, how you can fill the gap in what they have now and what they need. I’ll come to that later.

You’ll also need to be ready for a few of most common objections. Some of those are probably going to be like, oh we already have someone we use, we aren’t looking just yet, or like, what are your fees, so just be ready for the common objections. You’re probably going to know those objections more than me anyway because I’m sure you’ve come across them before.

As I just said before, the first call is always bad. Not everybody is born a salesperson, but it’s very easy to improve sales skills. It’s like any other skill. You just need to practice.

Warm the Prospect up Before the Call:  Let’s talk about warming up before the actual call. This is really good thing to do when you actually call them, it’s not a cold call, it’s more of a warm call and what you want to do is to make sure that you’re not actually a stranger to them when you first speak to them, so they’ve got a point of reference to who you are and why you’re calling them.

How to do this?  The best way to do this is by sending them a letter. Email can be good, however emails sometimes just get skipped over, get lost, or get deleted.  If you’re going to send an email, then do something a little bit out of the box. Video yourself for maximum of two minutes with a webcam and just do a personal email to them that they can open. It’s your face speaking to them and you can basically just almost make your pitch there and then leave somewhere in the email saying something like I will be calling you within the next 48 hours to discuss this or something along those lines or send them a letter. Even just a basic letter nowadays is more noticeable than an email.

Consultants that I speak to regularly, often send a small plastic trash can with $5 in to their prospective clients in the mail and have a letter along with it explaining how they’re wasting money with their poor website or advertising.  There are tons of other things you can do too, but having something in the letter that’s lumpy and really noticeable will peak their interest more and it will show that you’re thinking a little bit outside of the box.  I know for a fact that in-house planners want someone that can excite them and show a bit of creativity, so send this letter or this email as it will get their attention.

Another approach, which I’ve used is to send an email and then call within 5 minutes and ask, “Did you get my email?”. That’s a good in sometimes, but otherwise I would suggest 24 or 48 hours before. You want to introduce yourself and your services, but you don’t want to be selling anything in that email – otherwise, as soon as they pick up the phone, they’re going to know that it’s going to be a continuation of this pitch that you’ve already started in your letter or email.

You don’t want to be selling. What you do want to do is to try adding some value to the client – this will be a result of what came up in your research. You want to be able to give them some resources or information or news that’s going to help them with the next event. It may come back that they don’t hire you and they use this bit of information that you’ve given anyway and if so, c’est la vie. You did your best and you’ve started a conversation by adding value to the client. If they didn’t respect that, then maybe they’re not the client you want to work with, but hopefully they will notice that.

Then, when you do call them a couple of days later, you’re going to start your conversation with, “Did you receive the letter I sent you?”  or “Did you receive the package I sent you?” or “Did you receive the video email I sent?”.  That makes it much easier to get a conversation started in a completely cold call.

Work the GateKeepers:  Next, I want to go into working the gatekeepers.

This is really important because they’re often in your way. You cannot get to the person you need to speak to without going through them, so you need to recognize a few things, 1.They’re just doing their job and 2.If you can work them well, then they will make your life much easier. They’re just doing their job so respect them.

Always show appreciation and be super nice to the gatekeepers, the secretaries, and the personal assistants and stay positive.

Treat them with respect. A good way to do this is to ask them what their name is and use their name often in the conversation, they then know that you really respect them as a person and you see them as a person, not just somebody who’s on the way to getting to where you want to go. When you speak to them, be specific with your name, your company and the reason you want to speak to their superior and they much more likely to let you through thenm however if they do say no, I will definitely recommend also ignoring this.

You should still treat them with respect. If they do say no, don’t end the call there. I would pretend that I didn’t hit for the first time and just keep going and keep giving reasons to why I need to speak to this person, how it’s going to be in their best interests.  Or even better, I would ask the advice of the gatekeeper, I’ll ask if there’s a better time to call or if there’s somebody else who’d be better to speak to because then they’re seeing that you’re appreciating their perspective,  you’re appreciating their intelligence and actually by asking them to help, that gives you a much better relationship.

If all else fails, try calling out of hours. This also really useful. You may get a different gatekeeper or what often happens is that the gatekeeper maybe hasn’t come into the office yet and the person you want to speak to has come into the office and they take the call directly. So, obviously, before 9:00 o’clock in the morning is better and after 6:00 o’clock in the evening is also better, this actually works a lot more than you’d expect, so definitely keep that in your mind.

Practice – A Lot:  Why this is important because it’s the same for any skill you ever have tried.

You might be talented and naturally gifted with some things, but generally any new skill you start learning, you just start off pretty and wobbly, so just practice, practice, practice. Cold calling and getting new clients with prospecting are all about sales skills, so all you need to do is to practice .. a lot.

Things to Think about:  When you’re on a call, it’s really useful to try to substitute a lot of the visual clues that you get when you’re having a face to face meeting.

We communicate through visual clues that consist of about 80% of all communication – that’s body language, eye contact and things like that –  but on the phone we don’t have this so there are different ways that you can emulate body language. Things like mirroring. When you’re speaking to the client, when you finally get through to them, mirror or shadow or copy their energy, their intonation and their way of speaking. Are they speaking loudly or are they speaking quietly?  Just mirror them it goes a long way because it starts building more trust when they think you’re the same as them.

Next is standing up and that’s really a very good one to do. I do that a lot because it allows me to use my hands and to be natural just as I do anyway, so stand up when you’re on the call and also smile. It’s really weird, but people can definitely tell when you’re smiling, or when you’re serious, when you’re confused, when you’re thinking and also when you’re anxious, so just relax. Smile!! The worst thing that can happen is that they say no and the best thing that can happen is that you can get the job.

One of the most important things when starting a call is that you’re going to need to get their attention.

You’re going to need to tell them what you do but without being too salesy and the best way to do this is to ask them questions. Ask them about what they want to see at their next event and where the last event fell short. Try to ask all the questions that you think they’re going to add value to them, that are going to make them see you and their event in a different light.  What you’re trying to do is to determine whether there is actually a fit for you and your business.

Don’t just assume that it’s going to be a good fit.  If you can show that you’re concerned about that – you can even say “I just want to check that whether we’re the right fit for each other” or something like that – then they’re going to respect you for it because they’re going to know that you’re not just a shark trying to get any bit of business you can.   You only work with people that are a good fit for you – that goes a long way to helping with your credibility and just with how they’re going to think of you.

Closing:  Lastly, closing is probably the most important element.

The old sales saying is ABC, which is ‘Always Be Closing’.This is important as you need to try and close!

There are various parts to the Close and one of those is a pre-close.

This is where you’ve defined their needs and defined their goals for the event, then you’ve clearly highlighted the gap between their needs and their goals.  The clearer that you can define that gap between their needs and their goals, the easier it is for you to be able to explain your service in a way that shows that you’re more than able to fill those gaps.  Ad if you can do that, ideally, they will ask you to work for them on their next event.

There are different types of approaches to closing –

There’s the Assumptive Close – which is where you assume at the end of the conversation that’s everythings gone well. You assume that the sale has been made, so you say something like, “when should I send over contracts for you to sign?” or “what’s the next step in moving ahead?” or something like that. That’s a good way to bring towards a close and see what happens.

The next type of closing is the Alternate Close where you offer the client two different choices, so this could be something like, “so it sounds like you really need a company like us to help, we can either send you a proposal right now or I can just send you the contract if you’re happy after what we’ve discussed”.

The next type of close is the ‘worst case or best case scenario’ – You can highlight the worst case scenario, or highlight the best case scenario and you can show how you’re going to fill the gap and make sure that only the best case scenario happens.

Next is the Emotional Close. This is appealing to what their biggest desires and fears are.  During your conversation where you’ve been defining their needs and their goals, you’re going to be able to find these out and you’re going to be able to use your own emotion and their emotions to actually make sure that you really address their biggest fears, desires, dreams and just make sure that you cover all of them.

If those four different types of closing fail, then the main thing to be clear on is that you do need to NEVER leave the call without another call or appointment booked.  This is super-important!

If you can leave the call with the next communication already scheduled and already on your calendar, then it’s a successful call – you’ve got the next step in place and you’re still moving forward. Ideally, if you can get them to agree to either having a proposal or meeting or signing a contract, then that’s even better, but the main thing you need to do is to just make sure that you have some next step already booked in and don’t EVER end the call with just saying something like, “well, thanks for your time, I really appreciate it, I will be in touch” because that then gives them the escape to basically not to have to deal with you again.  Make sure that you book something!!

Outro:  OK, I hope this has been helpful.

please send me any personal emails you like if you have any other questions. I realize I didn’t really go through the exact script to use or the exact content to go through in your call, but you really should be able to do that, that’s should be fairly simple for you.

If you do want me to take a look at a script or if you have any questions, then just email me or catch me on Linkedin.

The website is PerfectEventProposals.com and you can catch me through the blog or the contact form. On Linkedin I’m Dave Ferguson 415. You can also get me through the Event Planner Productivity Hacks group.

I will answer anything that anybody sends me. I’ll definitely give you the time, so please do that. I also mentioned the free report in the beginning, I’ll be putting a link to that at the end of the blog post, so if you do want that, then just click on that link and join my newsletter.

Once again, I hope this helps. I’m trying to do everything I can give the event planners a few more tips and tools on how to go about different things like systemizing their referral process, cold calling and finding RFPs online and it’s going to be a ton more in my newsletters as well.

Thanks very much for taking a time, I hope this helps with your business and I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will make sure to answer everybody’s questions!

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Event Planner Showcase – Mark Bowling Shares His Top Time & Money Saving Tips

Transcript: Intro:  Hi there, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacks and Perfect Event Proposals and today I’m going to be speaking to Mark Bowling from BlackSheep Productions. He’s got over ten years of experience in the industry. I spoke to Mark early last summer while I was doing discovery calls to find out the pains and frustrations of Event Planners and what really impressed me was his forward thinking approach to his company and all of the great value information that he gave me on that call.OK, getting back today then.Dave: Welcome Mark.Mark: Thank you very much. My pleasure to join you.Dave: No problem at all. It’s really great to have you here.So, first things first, I’d like to just ask you about how you got started in the industry and where were you ten years ago compared to where are you at now?Mark: Absolutely.My background really was in telecommunications and transaction processing. I was more in sales and business development roles. BlackSheep Productions was actually started by my wife in 1999 and I really didn’t have the intention of being anything more than just working as an independent producer in the industry.In 2005 I was looking for new opportunities and my wife was pregnant with our first son. She’d gotten a couple of projects that were more technical and naturally as I’m techno geek myself I took those projects and I absolutely loved it.  It allowed me to be able to make a transition to the industry.Dave: Awesome!! That’s great.And it’s all come a long way since then?Mark: It’s been a fantastic journey.We’ve been really blessed with people that supported us as well as people that have invested there time and the clients as well. We’re always trying to live up to be worthy of the trust that our clients invest in us and it’s been just a fantastic ride.Dave: Excellent. So BlackSheep Productions now. Could you tell us a little bit about it? Do you do social events, corporate events,  or association events?Mark: The majority of our events are corporate events so into the sales meetings, product launches, road shows and franchise meetings. Really anything that’s event related that a company may not have the interior resources or bandwidth to be able to manage themselves.Dave: OK. Awesome!!And along your journey with planning events, is there any advice you could give to any of our listeners about how can you get new business?Mark: If we can look back over our success in the industry, we’d find that profits for our company is not the number one reason that we’re in business. We truly care to make a difference. We want to make a difference in our clients partners’ work. We want to make a difference in our vendors partners’ lives. We want to make a difference in our industry. We want to make a difference in the world and I think that’s one of the things that you really excited me about.I think this is a tool [Perfect Event Proposals] that truly can make a difference in the industry. I really was excited that you invited me to join you, but really looking beyond just a profit, but looking at the true reason that you’re in business and I think that’s one of the lessons that I’ve learned over the last couple of years.Probably another one is just how important relationships are.  Both on the client side as well as on the vendor side.Some of the greatest opportunities that we’ve had, didn’t come from people that traditionally would have buying decision power in the industry, but people knew who we were and what we did. So we’ve had great opportunities and we’ve had great relationships with  many people who’ve moved from company to company and as they’ve done that, they’ve taken us with them. It’s been great to be able to form those relationships that have really provided the foundation and we’ve been able to improve our growth process.Dave: Brilliant!!And for some brand new event planners, what advice would you give them to  just help speed up and give more strength to those relationships?Mark: I think that one of the things that helped us as we were starting out is that we truly looked for any opportunity to be able to add value to an event relationship.Going back again to my techno geeky side. I became known in our circle of friends and relationships in the Atlanta area, so people would call up and say, hey, I have this application that a client is trying to develop, have you seen anything like that? And so I became known as the techno guy and that helps open new opportunities for us as a company.Lisa has been in the industry going back many years before BlackSheep and just her experience of knowing how to work with executives and how to be able to manage people and knowing what happens  in the ballroom. It’s about the idea of becoming a knowledge expert in a subset and then using that as a foundation to grow. It’s about finding a subset that naturally speaks to your skills and then really just digging in and becoming an expert in that area.  Dave: Excellent. That’s great advice.And it sounds that you and your wife have a very different but complementary skills?   Mark: We do, we’ve talked about how we work together and I think you just hit the nail on the head.We really have very complementary skills. When it comes to ideas of design or just an experience of what works in front of that, I will always refer the decision making process to her, but when it comes to strategy or finances or technology, typically that would be something that would be falling into my lap.Dave: Great. That’s awesome.I know it can be really difficult to do it. Having a husband and wife team, but you’ve a good balance there which is great.Mark: Not always perfect, but I’d say one of the pieces is that we have some amazing people that we’ve been very blessed to do all the work with. Creative directors, technical directors, people with AV firms and meeting managers.They are all people that we would consider part of the BlackSheep family and I think that we’ve been able to create something that is unique and although we are a relatively small company, we have an amazing network of phenomenally talented people that have the same culture and I think that’s another thing that we really want to do as we grow as a company, that we really wanted be able to get this culture spread and embraced between us, just making a difference.We want to be able to approach each project and each client from that perspective so it’s not just Lisa and me, and we might have a difference of opinion on a certain project or a certain position, then we have just an amazing resource that we can draw on whenever we want as we have such great people with phenomenal experience that can really add to that.Dave: Excellent. That’s really useful to know, and how did you build this team?Mark: Always looking to get the right people in the right feeds on the bus, so I think that’s one other thing that we’ve always done and it takes real time to make it happen.Over the last couple of years, recognizing where we’re thinking we’re going in the company, trying to envision the types, the positions that we will need and then we will always be looking for people to fill those roles and I think what we’ve done is that when we got to a call, when we really truly need it, a technical director would help us evaluate things and so on.Concerning technology, we already had somebody that we can to for that. We’ve had people so when we wanted to make our first hire last year and add to the BlackSheep Team, we actually made a hire to somebody that we’ve worked with. Somebody that actually hired us as independent producers years ago. So, I think that pretty much the biggest thing is really just trying to find the right people all the time. Always be looking for them and don’t wait to the last minute when you absolutely need somebody, but always be looking for them.Dave: Great. In the end you’re making a big effort to hire the rock stars and the people that really are in the game which is great.So, we’ve spoken a little bit about this before and I know that proposals are big on your agenda, you don’t write so many a year, but if you just tell us a little bit about if there’s anything you found that helped with proposal writing or a little bit  about your proposal process?Mark: Yeah!! I think in our process it might actually be a little inefficient.We gotta start from scratch on every project. We have certain things that we would always include in every proposal. Things like who we are, what we stand for, all of that, but it’s really best for us that we try to start writing proposals from scratch so that we’re customizing the static solution for each individual client need and that would be very useful for doing creative proposals.If you look in the industry, I think it would be real easy to be falling into a trap. I’m always trying to chase opportunity and for small companies like us, it can become very expensive very fast because not only as joining other resources to be all together in presentations but it took me a lot of time and a lot of money to be able to respond so I’m always trying to be extremely selective and the best thing you can try is that we try not to respond to RFPs but really try to make sure that we’re the right fit with an organisation before we try to put the proposal together in the first place.Dave: This makes a lot of sense. It’s just a drain on time and money otherwise.OK, great, and talking about time and money, that brings me right to asking you, in your repertoire of business skills and the things that make you a great event planning company, is there any strategy that you employ to help save you time?  Because I know that is one thing that Event Planners never seem to have any of.Mark: There’re different tools that we use. Everything from doodle-meeting to Dropbox and so on. As a small company obviously, we’ve been looking for free things like conference calls and other things like that as a solution.As far as money saving, there’s a company here in the Atlanta area that opened up some really fun and new virtual office space. Those are fun places to hang out there. They really seem to set the culture of the group that we’ve put together, but not investing here in office space and things like that.  And that allows us to keep our overheads down to be able to drive more value to the client.Dave: Sure. I’ve just been to one of the virtual offices, a brand new one in San Francisco recently. It was a super-cool office!!And then  when you’re actually working with the client, is there anything else that may not be money ‘saving’ but that you can advise for increasing revenues?Mark: I think from a money perspective. If you make the assumption that a person is wisely steering his money, if you can treat your client’s money like your money, then I think that can go along way, and again you have to be careful to try to save too much money and try to find unique ways to be able to find unique situations for an awards dinner, or making a scene concerning what things that clients is going to need over and over from year to year, and make investments on their behalf, so that you can help keep cost down in the future.If the client needed ipads for events year after year, instead of continuously renting them, we invested in ipads. Some clients use decor ideas year after year and so we’ve made investments in some of those items.We were in-house ourselves and that allowed us to both keep our cost down and also recognising a little bit about maintaining those items and things like that and over the course of years, that does drive to the bottom line.Dave: Sure.So, is there anything that you can identify as being key driver of your growth?, because when I last spoke to you, it sounds like you’ve been going for quite a big growth spurt in the last year or so.Mark: Honestly, I think Dave that this goes back to the relationships.The biggest catalyst for growth that we experienced last year was due to a relationship that we have had for the last thirteen years and it’s a phenomenal lady that had gone from different companies and we’ve basically been able to follow her and where we were handling a very small aspect of previous events for different companies, the role that she found herself in this year really allowed us to be able to do a lot more and to be able to grow our team and to be able to add resources and take another step forward in our growth of the company.I’d say really just be aware of the relationships that you have and always try to foster those relationships because you never know where somebody might end up.Dave: That’s great advice. We spoke a little bit before about having relationships but also not having all your eggs in one basket, so how would you deal with that?Mark: It’s funny that you bring this up because that’s actually going to be a topic of our team meetings tomorrow.As we’ve grown over the last twelve months, we have a certain amount of risk associated with having one client that represents each significant part of our revenue, we’ve been through this before but now we really need to add balance to that risk, so we’re getting together tomorrow with the idea of how do we hook in some of the relationships that we’ve had in the past, that’ve been warm opportunities for us, – we’ve really never been a sales organisation but how do we potentially pursue some of those opportunities.Dave: Right. OK, and in the past, you always got all of your business from referrals and your relationships?Mark: No, we haven’t. Two of our clients actually found us through Google searches.It’s not our relationships, and I think we obviously would actually need some sort of presence on the internet and other marketing ways, but we have found one and we just called him the hand of God because the person wasn’t actually able to replicate the google search, and the other one was a little bit more intensional but they were able to find us and it wasn’t a relationship that we’d had previously at all.Dave: Awesome. Well, that’s actually great and that brings me on to your websiteThat’s something that really stood out to me with your company when I was doing the previous interviews last year and your website is really cool and really funky. I love the moving BlackSheep head.So you’ve been getting organic leads coming through your website? And do you think that’s partly to do with the fact that you’ve got blog on there or do you spend time with SEO? And do you do the technical side of the website yourself or do you  outsource?So that’s three questions actually.Mark: We do outsource that.We have a great partner here in Atlanta that has been fantastic for us, and concerning the blog, we’d a great feedback and even some posts that have been very successful, but I think that there’s some room there that’d be able to deliver more intentionally developed content there.                                                                    Dave: Sure. Is it big stuck on time, writing blog posts and content marketing and things like that? It looks like a great balance which is good, and do you use any advertising tool or method like Google Adwords or Facebook ads or anything like that?Mark: No, we haven’t in the past, but that can change in the future.Dave: Right. For me personally, I’ve used Facebook ads recently and I think that’s great. It’s so targeted but a little counter-intuitive as I always have people asking me – “Are professionals on Facebook?”.  My answer is always “of course”. Everyone uses Facebook now. It’s really great for ads and relatively cheap.I’m usually asking people I’m interviewing if you have any tips for finding higher value clients, what would your reaction to that question be?Mark: I would say that any client that we have would be considered to be high value at this phase of our growth.Maybe there are different opportunities that we might pursue at this phase of our growth and there maybe some opportunities that we might pass on as that might take us to another phase of our growth, so I think that would be the answer to your question.Dave: And that’s great.Since we’re coming close to the end of this interview, if there’s any one piece of advice that you would say has been the most important thing you’ve learned over the last ten years that you would give to a new event planner, what would that be?Mark: I think if somebody really coming into the industry, it’s really finding what it is that you love doing and trying to find what really fits within the industry, a combination of your skills and what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.Really pursue that and then try to find relationships that you can invest in so that you can get to know more people, exposing your ideas and finding new keys. Try to find the right people that you really enjoy working with as well.Dave: What do you think the best way of doing that is? Networking events, industry events or you’re doing that a different way?Mark: I’d say that we’ve participated in local events here in Atlanta which’s been great for us, especially early in our growth and then more recently some other industry events as well and we’re really trying to find opportunities to be able to speak in front of a platform within the industry as well.Dave: Awesome!!Well, thanks very much Mark, I really appreciate this.So if you could just tell our listeners if they were looking to get hold of your company, where would they go and if they had any questions for you where would they be able to do that?Mark: Absolutely.They can find us at BlackSheepProductions.com and they can contact me directly @ [email protected] or call me on 678 884 1155.Dave: Brilliant!! I really appreciate that Mark and I’m sure all of our listeners will as well. Thanks so much and I hope that 2015 will have much growth than last year.Mark: Thank you very much. I appreciate that and same to you.Dave: Thank you. Have a good day. Bye.Mark: You too. Bye bye.             If you found this helpful then please share with your friends or colleagues and add your comments by visiting my blog for EventPlanners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will pass on any comments or questions to Mark personally.                     

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Event Planner Showcase – Jeff Seigal shares 37 years of experience with you.

Intro:  Hi there, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacks and Perfect Event Proposals and today I’m here with Jeff Siegel. He’s an awesome event planner from the east coast, He’s been an event planner for 37 years, He started as a DJ in New York city in 1997 and now he owns The Spencer Daniels Agency with over 100 staff and they do over 500 events a year across the country including corporate events, social events and association events, so Jeff’s got some amazing experience which he’s going to share with us today.

Dave: Nice to see you Jeff, how are you doing?

Jeff: I’m good Dave, how are you?

Dave: Really great, thank you.

Thanks very much for coming on and answering a few questions today. So, you sound like you’ve got a great background, if you could tell us a little bit how you got started?

Jeff: I got started in 1977 as a disc jockey for another company because I needed to make some extra cash and through the years I worked my way up with that company and became a full time DJ.  I was doing all of the sales and managing the company that had 60 disc jockeys working for them back in those days. I stayed with them for 19 years and then it was the time for the owner and I to part ways, I started my own company.

Dave: OK, great and what attracted you to Djing and events?

Jeff: My friends just told me to call the owner of that company, I didn’t really ever think that I would be a DJ, and one thing just lead to another and I liked it – what was not to like.

I was 17 years old.  We were out at night clubs every night and we travelled every place in New York City, New Jersey, Atlantic City and Philadelphia, we were in all the hot spots between 1977 and 1990, it was a very cool time.

Dave: Yeah!! Sounds like tons of fun, so tell us about now then.  Your company name is The Spencer Daniels Agency and you’ve got 100 staff with nearly 500 events a year   which sounds like it’s doing awesome. Could you give us a little bit of brief run down, how you went from DJ to Spencer Daniels and the growth along the way?

Jeff: I’ve worked for the other company for 19 years and again started as a DJ and then also doing the sales and events overseeing and training other DJs and teaching them how to do things back in those days and then I ran the company with overseeing the office and so on.

When I left I already had 19 years of experience, then I started my own company. I literally started off with nothing. I put a DJ system on a credit card for about 4000 dollars, sent  a letter out to all the people that I’ve worked with and it started from there and with time went on, we added another sound system, added another DJ, another sound system. Somebody said, oh, could you do table arrangements, and I was like sure, so we started doing table arrangements then we started decorating. One thing led to another where I continually kept adding and buying things over the years. Today we have a five thousand square foot house, we have several trucks and trailers and I’m scheduling people to go do casino parties and DJ events and so on.

Dave: Brilliant!!

OK, that’s great to know for any of the event planners out there who’re working for an event planning company and thinking of getting enough by themselves and you just proved that it works really well. So, what advice would you have for those people?

Jeff: If you have that entrepreneurial spirit and you have the guts, I guess you should pull up your bootstraps and jump across the river so to speak.

Well, it’s scary. Today I would say just jump across the river, make yourself a plan, and you really need to work that part time entity along with your full time job and then at some point you will need to just make the jump because when you jump you might in the beginning as part time. Maybe you’re making an extra fifty thousand, seventy, eighty or a hundred thousand dollars.

People say, well, I’ll have to pay for my medical benefits. That money would change into three or four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand or more a year so you pay for your own benefits instead of somebody else paying for them, but if you want to be in your own business and you will be doing it full time and make your own schedule, otherwise you’ll do both

Dave: OK. Do you feel like you do get to make your own schedule?

One of the things I have from event planners often is that sometimes it feels like out of control with time and there’re too many pressures from clients and vendors and it’s hard to really take control.

Jeff: As an event planner or a producer you should know that a true event planner isn’t  necessarily planning the event, but they’re pulling all the strings together and coordinating.  But if as a producer, you need to know how to take charge although the bride or the corporate assistant or whoever you’re working with. You might think they’re in charge  then you need to know how to make suggestions that are really almost like orders, but you can’t because if you give them an order they’re not going to follow it, but you need to direct them so that you’re in charge. If you’re not in charge, you’re going to feel like you’re all over the place.

There’s no difference when you get to a venue and the caterer or any other person who’s in charge of something says, well, we’re going to put these over here and you say, you know what, it’s not really going to work the way that the client wants it to work, it needs to be setup this way and then, in my experience, usually they change the way the room works and that’s usually on the day of the event. They think they made the decision and when the client comes in, they want to feel they’re stars and they did this big thing for the client.

And as an event planner, I don’t really care what they think, because at the end of the day I really won.

Every event has to be successful because, 1.You’re just good as the last event and 2.What do I care?! I’m getting paid!! It’s a business. It’s a business that I love, but it’s not only about the money. I don’t care if the caterer wants to think he’s a superstar or she wants to think she’s a superstar because they’re just getting their little cheque and you’re getting the effect that you won the client to see as well and at the end of the day the client is not going to take he or she to the next event but he’s going to take me.                          

Dave: Yeah!! Sure, a cool head and a being a master of diplomacy are essential.

So, are there any big lessons you’ve learned along the way?

You mentioned in a previous talk before this call your original name wasn’t The Spencer Daniels Agency – was it?

Jeff: Correct. My original name was IM4Fun. It was a DJ company and people begged me not to use that name.

Dave: How long did you use that name for?

Jeff: I used that name for 2 to 3 years.

Dave: OK. And what made you change it to The Spencer Daniels Agency?

Jeff: I had a contract of a huge event with Compaq computers back in those days to do their national sales meeting and it was a very large job, a lot of components.

I had probably 45 or 50 people on staff for that one, all day event and I became friendly with the director of sales.  When everything was all set and done he said to me, you have to change the name of your company and I kind of laughed and I said, not you too, because many of my friends and associates around the company begged me not to use the name.  When I asked him why, he told me that he went in the front of the board of directors and they asked, who’s doing the national sales meeting and he said, oh, company called IM4Fun and they all said “I don’t think so”.

So we have two words, I changed the name of the company to The Spencer Daniels agency and calls and emails came in quicker and nobody hesitated, where I was having difficulties booking corporate work with the old company name.  When I changed the name of the company, the change in business was as quick as you can snap your fingers. People didn’t hesitate and they were excited. For some retail businesses, it’s location..location..location, well in the events world, it’s about the name of your company that could determine the success or failure.

Dave: Wow!! That’s great information. I would never have imagined that the name could be so important. Obviously for you it was a turning point.

Jeff: Well, for those companies that might want to sell in the future, and that future could be ten or twenty years down the road, it would be very difficult to sell Jeff Siegel Entertainment, let’s say, because when Jeff Siegel is not around, then there is no more company and how do you fix that?

When it’s just ABC Entertainment Company, it’s a name that you’ve created, a brand that you’ve created and within that market, somebody else can easily take your brand and move along. That’s why McDonald’s isn’t called something else.

Dave: Sure. OK, great.

And then in terms of getting new business, how do you get most of your business?

Jeff: Alot of our business comes from the events that we go out on every week.

At any given event, I would say there’s an average of a hundred and fifty people. So whether it’s a wedding or any other event, we make sure that everybody in that room gets our business card one way or another very nicely before they leave. We don’t have a signage out at somebody else’s event with our company name on it. Our signage is our business card.

So, whether we took candid photos and posted them later, whoever we took a photo of, we’re handing them our business card telling them that the photos will be up on our Facebook page, and then they go check out their photo or their friends’ photo and why they’re doing that people then see that we’re doing casino events, then they say also, you guys do photography too? And then we say yup!! We do it all.

If it portends to events, then yes, we do have those services and provide them, but  you should know that eighty percent of your business comes from twenty percent of your customers.

Market the rest of the people that are in the room. You don’t know what their jobs are, you don’t know who they report to, you don’t know who’s the CEO in the room maybe or who’s on the pulling team. Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a pulling bank or if Donald Trump is throwing an event in the towers in Manhattan.

Dave: OK. Awesome, that’s great.

Are there any other ways that you use to give your business cards to people at events, do you do it with gift bags or what?

Jeff: Gift bags never work for us.

People look in the gift bag and if they’re out of a bridal show or they’re out of an event where they’d get a gift bag, they keep the gift cards, but it’s too expensive for me to do gift cards. The other way to get a new business is through email campaigns and social media. Those are the other ways because people share with other people and then at whatever point in time that they might be having or planning an event, hopefully they think of our company and give us a call for a quote.

Dave: I’m glad you put that out there because I wanted to mention your Facebook page.  I’ve spoken to a lot of event planners, I’ve interviewed almost two hundred, and one of the questions I often get asked is how do you get most of your business and like you said most people would say through word of mouth. I’ve spoken to a few that have mentioned social media or advertising and things like that, but the overall impression is that it has never seemed to work well and I know that you make social media work for you in a great way without having to spend hours and hours posting, creating content or doing blog posts, so if you just tell us a little bit about how you use social media to help you get more of your business?

Jeff: One thing I’d tell everybody that if you have a reins, you can’t use the reins as a hammer. That’s the first.

Social media is a tool and if you don’t really use it correctly for you, there isn’t any specific way for that. Different businesses will use social media in different ways. You have to know in the event world how to use it. So, what we do is that at every event we go to, we have someone, he or she isn’t a photographer, he is just someone with a high end digital camera, because the camera will do most of the work. You just need to take pictures of smiling faces and you hand out a card to every smiling face that you take a picture of and you tell them that in a few days they will be up on our Facebook page.

We then after the party is over, after the weekend, we take all the photos we get from photo booths to DJs to whatever, we post them on our Facebook page and on our photo area on our website and basically then send an email to the client saying, hey, you can check out the photos, feel free to share them, whatever, because people are so intertwined to Facebook these days. There’s other platforms, but everybody who spending money is absolutely intertwined with Facebook.

They go on there, they take a look at their pictures and then you can start seeing through your statistics on Facebook as well as google analytics, how many, which groups and so on.                                        

We only have on our Facebook page (it’s about four or five years old), maybe eighteen hundred likes, after all those years, but there’s a lot of traffic from Facebook that goes to our website and then people maybe start picking up the phone or emailing us about their event.

Dave: That’s brilliant. That’s super useful.

I think for a lot of event planners and small companies, they feel that to have a good social media strategy you need to be constantly pumping out a lot of posts and comments and things like that but your method seems super simple. You just take tons of photos and you use those as a way to draw people to your Facebook page.

And also you mentioned in our previous call you also sell those photos?

Jeff: On our website, there’s an online photo store where we post the albums that if people want to, they can purchase the photos and we tell them that at the party.

I will tell you, it’s not a place where you’re really making money because at the end of the year there’s not a thousand dollars that’s coming in because of the photos on that website. However, though people are going there and looking and then they’re going to the Facebook page and they’re sharing the photos and that’s really where the numbers start to grow and then hopefully somebody thinks of us when they have their next event.

The other place that people use, which is the time consuming part, that isn’t set up is Pinterest.

Pinterest, you’d set up and put photos of your services. For an Event Planner, this is really has no different than what we do, even though whether a production company is, they would take pictures of different table arrangements, take pictures of different lighting setups, take pictures of different DJs or photographers or whatever it is for more of the services that they do in an event. Flowers and florists maybe.

And you’re not promoting the florist, you’re promoting, showing a picture of your service, because I had somebody emailed me yesterday and it was like, ok, so I set up a Pinterest page and they want me to repost recipes and other things. That’s not  what you need to do to promote your Pinterest page. Again, you need to direct them back to your website and your Facebook page.

Dave: Yes, with Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, all of those could be working for you great, because they’re all photo based and as you said, as long as they all just link straight back to your website.

That’s absolutely awesome.

Over your years of experience, is there anything you do now that saves you a lot of time?

Jeff: I very rarely physically go to meetings.

I usually talk to clients over the phone even on initial meetings. Somebody might send an email and whether it’s a bride or a corporate client, I might have a conversation on the phone for an hour or an hour and half with a corporate client, because looking to spend $20,000 or $30,000 or more and there’s a lot questions and answers that goes in the form of a conversation and on my end, I’m making numbers while I’m talking and listening to what they’re doing and what they did before.

Not that I don’t want to meet the client, but if I have to go meet somebody even if it’s within my local area. It’s an hour by the time you get ready and get there and meet, it’s an hour or two when you meet with them and it’s another hour to get back to your office and getting your stuff together. That’s four hours!!

I can meet five more people on the phone in those four hours and take care of several emails. I’m very good at meeting with people on the phone and that’s how most of our businesses structured.  Whereas other event planners, DJs, florists and so on, they seem to want to go meet with the person.  I’ve managed to figure out a way to not specifically have to do that unless it’s a very high end job, then there’s a meeting but it’s One meeting. Everything else that is e-mail and phone calls is in between the rest of my workday.

Dave: Great, and your clients tend to find this ok?

Jeff: Yeah. I mean, the only way you have no where and it doesn’t seem to be ok is in the wedding market, but the reality is, unless you’re in specific markets like long island in New York, maybe LA or in a big city.  But outside the big cities, most brides (and I have 37 years experience, I have a pretty good insight), most brides want to have a cinderella wedding however they can only afford six thousand dollars or something like that, so, there’s no champagne in that picture and they all are trying to figure out how to do it and then to the event planner, especially new event planners, it’s exciting to them and I get all that, but at the end of the day they’re not really making any money and they spend hours and hours and hours.

So, those customers from back in the day, they’re just not my customer,

Dave: Sure. That’s a good point.

Jeff: Being able to kind of choose your customers is often really important.

You don’t want to take every single customer just because they’re there.

Well, you’d be better off trying to make a deal with the bank than at the bridal show to present your services to every body rather than trying to take every single bride

and then hope one that has no money.

Dave: I just want to touch quickly on proposal writing. I know you said you write a lot of proposals.

Do you have any kind of tips (that you’ve learned from your experience) of things that work in a proposal really well, that tend to win more business and things that don’t work so well? Just anything you can share.

Jeff: The better proposals are totally done in an outlined form, separating all the different categories for whatever those categories might be that you’re putting the proposal together for.

If you’re doing decorating, then there’s a decorating area and then you’re starting with 1. Table arrangement, 2.Room decor, 3.The entrance. If it’s a music or whatever it is, be as detailed as you can and then  get it in an outline form and keep all your prices all the way to the right hand column because that’s how most people are accustomed to looking at a receipt. I suppose putting a price and there’s just kind of after the sentence or in different places in the outline and then, it will be easier for the customer, which is really usually a committee.

You’re doing those proposals to be read and presented to everybody else and then when they ask you questions, they can address specific numbers, letters and lines based on that proposal. I suppose typing a paragraph or two or three and then coming up with a price. It’s going to be tougher against somebody who’s doing it an outline.

Dave: Right. OK, so the advice is to do it like a high level outline.

Jeff: I guess it’s not going to be too long as well. Every event depends on the services. Your outline could be a single page.

I’ve done outlines and proposals that are four, five pages long, just using again an eleven or twelve point font. You don’t want to have anything crazy. You don’t want to have any kind of crazy fonts or funky stuff because it’ll turn people off. It needs to be like reading a newspaper and needs to be consistent and understandable.

Dave: Yup!! Brilliant. That’s great advice.

And I know that email is a massive time stuck for a lot of event planners. Is there any

thing, any tool or any kind of strategy you use to help kind of manage emails and not have it stuck all of your time?

Jeff: Unsubscribe from everything you don’t use.

I used to get just in the morning about 70 emails coming in of different things that really were just delete..delete..delete..delete..delete and even deleting, it’s time consuming. So go through your stuff carefully because there’s not really that much stuff that you need to subscribe to. That really you need to look at all the time and even in your customers emails. It depends upon what they’re emailing because sometimes it’s just ok and send. You don’t have to start typing anything. You go through them pretty quickly.

The rest of the day I pretty much have my desk all day and I answer emails, as I’d answer a phone, but if I knew it was a telemarketer before I pick up the phone,

an email you absolutely know, so, you could just ignore it and delete it. You don’t really have to waste any time on that.

When customer’s email though, you want to answer them even if it’s just ok and hit

send or it might be something that you might want to pick up the phone because they want to add some other stuff or anything else and make the sale and not necessarily email them back.

Dave: Awesome. That’s great.

I totally get it with the unsubscribing. I am the same way, I wake up and got a lot of different newsletters and one thing I do use, I put some notes into the blog and a link to one of my previous posts.

There’s a Great free tool called Unroll.me which automatically unsupscribes you from everything you don’t want and I will put a link to that.

Also, jeff, what would your biggest piece of advice for event planners to help them save money or make more money? Do you have anything so you can impart?

Jeff: To save money and make more money, first I’d say surround yourself with people that are smarter than you are.

Take a look and see how other people are doing sales for their company in your market. If an event planner is in Dallas, you don’t really want to pay too much attention to the event planner who’re in Manhattan because it’s two different markets, two different prices.

You, for example, might be 90 miles outside a major city which puts you in the country. You’re not really in an urban area, you’re in more suburban. Even if people are commuting, that market is going to be way different than the market that’s in the major city.

You need to take a look in your area and surround yourself with people who’re smarter than you in the cities, but you have to understand and learn how to apply those things to your market.

Dave: That’s brilliant advice there Jeff.  

I totally can understand why for any business I’ve done in the past, you’re always kind of looking at your competitors but not looking too far in this. Looking to your direct local competitors is a great way to just know which direction to take.

How would that save you money?

Jeff: It would save you money because in talking to those other people, you want to be able to offer….Let’s say if you were doing events on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best event, then you want to figure out how you can offer people a ten at the price of a seven and not give them seven. You need to give them ten, because the other competitors, they might take a job and then when the event goes off and the customer is not totally happy, many people in the event world not just event planners will say, well, you were only paying x, you can’t get that expensive car because you didn’t pay for it, you paid for a less expensive car.

You need to figure out through networking, through relationship building, which comes from surrounding yourself with those other people.

Some of those other people could be website designers, they could be people that are from PR or advertising agencies, they could be people in the news media, it’s really being wide range. Beside understanding and knowing how much is that guy, the local bar getting to strum his guitar for four hours, what’s the bar owner paying him on a wednesday night how much is the florist charging for that mother arrangement?

When you start to put all these things in perspective, then you will be able to go to the florist and say listen, I’d love to work with you, I know that arrangement is 50 bucks for those roses and all other things and I need you to give them to me at 40 dollars or 35 dollars or say, what is really the best price because hopefully I’m going to do twenty events a year with you. If that florist isn’t willing to do anything, then go talk to another florist. And then after that, it’s just learning how to really put it all together and  how to produce events at a level of ten.

Being the best event and somehow, someway, even if it means you have to take a little less profit and giving it to them for the seven, whether you do that in the form of a discount or any other suitable form. Let’s say if the event is ten thousand dollars and you’re going to charge the client eight thousand, it might only cost you six. Well, you made two instead of four, but it’s like on shark tank. Lots of people watch shark tank and people would say, I’m not giving up seventy five percent of my company in exchange for becoming a multi millionaire, I’d rather keep my company and not being a millionaire, give up seventy five percent of your company and become a multi millionaire.

In the event world, it’s not that moment that you become a multi millionaire but it’s ok to give up a little because you wind up doing the hiring process for people, they will be more satisfied and you’ll get more work which will make you more money and then that discount, you’ll be able to produce those ten thousand dollars events or twenty whatever. Maybe at the full boat, that’s when added services.

Dave: Awesome. A ton of information.

Just as a reminder, a case of utilizing your network, asking for discounts, giving your client more than they bargain for in order to get more business.

Yeah!! That’s amazing Jeff.

So, How do people get hold of you if they want to ask you a question?

Jeff: The easiest way is probably my email address so it’s [email protected].

Dave: Brilliant.  OK, that’s awesome.

Thank you so much Jeff, you’ve given us some amazing tips and advices. I’m sure they’re going to be very useful for our audience and I wish you the best in 2015 and looking forward to speaking to you again soon.

Jeff: Yup!! Same for you Dave, thanks for having me.

Dave: That’s awesome. Thanks very much. Bye.

Jeff: Yup!! Bye bye. Did you find this interview useful? Awesome – please share with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit too! And Please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will make sure to answer everybody’s questions!

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Event Planners – Make Goal Setting Your Best Friend!

Did you make a new years resolution, set yourself personal goals or set even more formal goals for your company this year?

If so, then the chances are you have already half forgotten about them.

Even with the best intentions it is tough to set a goal and succeed in meeting it.

That’s why you need to watch this short video and learn how to turn any goal into a plan of inevitable success.

Now you’ve learned about not just setting outcome goals but how to break those goals down into milestones of daily, weekly or monthly ‘process’ goals.

Process goals are much easier for you affect than outcome goals and the plan that going through this process gives you will create a clear path for you to walk in order to meet these goals.

Gone are the days of setting random goals and never knowing how to get there.  Now you know that any goal you set is achievable if you plan out your route to get there.

I mentioned in the video about setting yearly goals but really I would suggest setting 3 month goals as these are the most worthwhile.  Three months is the perfect amount of time for setting achievable goals. Please share with your friends & network so they can benefit from learning how to reach their goals.  They will love you for it and Please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will make sure to answer everybody’s questions! ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Video Transcript: Intro: Hi, this is Dave Ferguson from Event Planner Productivity Hacks and Perfect Event Proposals and today I’m going to speak to you a little bit about Goal Setting. In this article: It’s January 14th 2015 while I’m recording this, I know I might be a bit late in the game talking about goal setting as most people have probably already done that. But I am pretty sure that I can help add a lot value to the goals that you’ve already set and hopefully make them a lot clearer and a lot easier to actually reach. So what I would like to discuss today is a Why goals are important, what goals actually are, what goals are not, specificity (try saying that with a lisp), why specificity is so important for every successful entrepreneur and business person and then how to create a plan that will ensure you reach your goals. Why goals are important: So why does everyone always talk about goal setting? Now the main reasons are that without goals we don’t really have a direction, you could subconsciously be following goals but setting goals will give you a clear direction. I’m going to come to this in a little bit, but a goal is kinda like a compass, you set your goal and you know the direction you need to move in and that is really useful for a business of course, so I will come to that a little bit more. Secondly goals help coordinate teams, so if you’re more than just a one person in your company then at least everyone in your team knows the direction your company moving which is really helpful to just make sure that everyone is going in the right direction, Another reason is that goals allow you to measure success, by quantifying a goal, you can at least then tell whether you have made it, if you’re close or not. Also knowledge is power so once you start measuring these goals, than you can start learning what you need to tweak, what you need to improve on, what’s working really well so you can do more of that. Those are the main reasons that setting goals is really useful. My History with Goal Setting: My history of goal setting isn’t particularly great to be honest. Last year I set my first lot of goals that were really worthwhile but before that, for years before that, I’ve been setting goals because I’ve read it’s really important, I’ve heard on podcasts, I mean every single business book you ever read pretty much going to tell you, you should set clear goals, so I’ve been doing that but my goals have been really vague. They have all been outcome goals, which is the type of goal that most people set. Usually something like, I want to make $50,000 in revenue this year or I want to lose 50 pounds this year or I want to save a $100,000 and add it to my retirement or something like that, these goals are just all outcomes and these are really really hard to affect but I’m going to show you how to turn those outcome goals into process goals which is much more useful and easier to meet. So, my previous goal setting sessions often resulted unattainable goals or I’d been setting them & not really kind of knowing how to get there or even knowing if they were really possible. I’d find out a lot later that they weren’t really possible, my expectations were all over the place. But as I said I recently, or actually the last half of last year, started doing this goal process and it has been brilliant!! It’s really increased my productivity and it has made my business shoot forward. I know that it’s worthwhile so this is what I wanna talk to you about today. What are Goals: So what are goals? Goals are objectives, they are an end result, they give you direction but they are not a plan. As I mentioned before, a goal is like having a compass whereas a plan is like having a map. Now which would you rather have, I mean a compass is great, you know the way and it tells you exactly what direction to go in but when you set off from that journey, you don’t know what obstacles are in the way, you don’t know what mountains are there, what rivers are there, so you may have some nasty surprises and you may end up taking a lot longer than if you had a map. A map is a plan and it will highlight obstacles, it would tell you what to watch out for and how to work your way around them. So what I want to show you is this, how to turn the current goals you’ve already set, if you have set them. If you haven’t set any at all then we can set some new goals but I want to show you how to turn those goals into a plan or into a map, Why Simply Setting Goals is Not Enough: Now, why it is simply setting goals not enough, I mean it’s a well known saying and in business circles I see all over the place, “A goal without a plan is just a dream” and it’s really, really true. Just saying that you want to make a million in revenue this year but not actually planning how to do that is pretty worthless. Now, I was listening to a webinar last week by a guy called Peter Shallard who’s known as the shrink for entrepreneurs and he’s a really cool guy, he is really knowledgeable and he is a psychotherapist for entrepreneurs. He has done a study over the last few years of thousands of entrepreneurs and business people trying to figure out why some people are wildly successful where others are not. In this webinar (I’m not going through everything because it took him an hour and half) he talks about the four pillars of successful entrepreneurs or business people and the first pillar that he mentioned is Specificity, What is Specificity: Now, what is specificity, really it’s just basically having clear goals and a plan to reach them, so the first thing you need to do once you know what your outcome goals are is to prioritize them, so I would say go split these into business and personal, but we’re going to talk mostly about business right now and list out all of your goals for your business then I want you to cross off everything except your top three goals. Now prioritizing the goals is really, really important because you need to know which ones are most important and which ones you need to spend most of your time on. If you have too many priorities then this is exactly like having no priorities, because you’re not actually putting one as more important than the other, which is exactly what a priority is. Limit yourself to three priorities maximum and then list them out, but you really want one to be the overriding priority and this will help you to know where to begin, which is a really useful thing to know. Outcome goals are ok but if you don’t know where to begin and how to reach them then they are not going to be very useful. Prioritizing helps you know where to begin and what you need to do each day to reach your goal. That type of specificity is what we’re going to create with our plan. How to Create a Plan: The next thing we’re going to talk about is how to create the plan. As I mentioned, a plan is like a map and that map is going to highlight all the obstacles you’re going to meet. On the map you will be able to see exactly how many kilometers you need to go to get there, you’re also going to see how much time it’s going to take. Break down monthly goals into weekly and daily goals: So the first thing you do with your map or with your plan is to break down your outcome goal into monthly goals so we’re going to use the example of my goal for the next 12 months is to make one million dollars in revenue. Now, it doesn’t really matter what this goal is, I am just using this as an example, so yours may be lower, maybe higher, maybe exactly the same as the one million in revenue. Firstly, break that down into monthly goals so it works as $83,000 a month which is pretty high!! But it works for our example, so $83,000 a month. Next, you need to figure out the process to reach that amount, so if it is to reach $83,000 a month, maybe you need to put on one big event a month or two medium events or four small events per month. Just figure it out and try to to think of all the different ways that you can make that amount of money. Next, you’re going to break your monthly goals down into weekly and daily goals. On the list above, you’re going to choose the most appropriate of what you’ve found works for you and you’re going to break those down, you need to make $21,000 per week or $700 per day, just knowing that will really keep it clear in your head, where you are at the end of each day or the end of each week or the end of each month in reaching your goals, and that let you take appropriate action. So you know that or it’s going to be one small event per week, or one medium size event every two weeks, or one large event every month. Figure out exactly what you need to do each day: Once you know that, then you can figure out exactly what you need to do every day, so if it’s not looking likely that you’re going to reach your goal, at least you can know that ahead of time, you’re going to be able to tweak your process, try to bring in extra ways to reach there and extra income streams and things like knowing that you need to do four small events per month. Now, you can start figuring out how do I do that and then you need to start looking at your current process or the process that you’d last year, so how many proposals do you need to send out to get four small events a month or two medium events or one big event ? Figure out what your success rate of proposals is, if you’re sending out proposals and you get 50% of the proposals you send out, you win the client or you win the job then at least you know that you need to send out X amount of proposals to reach your targets. Now that you know these numbers, it becomes a lot easier, you can experiment where and be creative in different ways to reach your goals, partnerships, join ventures, adding additional services, changing your pricing, anything like that can be used might help you reach your goal. Once you’ve set your plan ( and I suggest you do that over the next week ), that’s not set in stone, you can change the plan, you can tweak it as you move through the year, but I do recommend that you don’t change your goal, unless you really, really need to and you realise that you’ve set a goal that’s really not going to happen, then it is fine, do it, but if you can stick to the Goal and just make it your priority to actually reach that goal then you might surprise yourself and make a huge leap in the last quarter of the year, you may surprise yourself. OK, that’s how to create a plan. How to reach your goals: Now, how do you actually reach the goals and how do you make sure that you follow the plan because setting a plan is easy, following the plan is not necessary as easy. Firstly, obviously you’re going to be committed, you going to make sure that you do the tasks you need to do and I would recommend that you work on the tasks it takes you to reach your goals every day BEFORE anything else, before opening your e-mail, before doing anything, there’s going to be days when you’re in an event or you got a client meeting or something first thing in the morning so it is not going to be possible but try to just get into the habit of doing the task that helps you reach your goals first, make it your absolute priority to get those tasks done every single day. Now that you know exactly what you need to do, it should be much much easier for you to actually reach your goals. There’s a great book called The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, I definitely recommend you reading that because that’s all about habits listing process and getting into the habit of doing certain things and if you could combine what he talks about in that book to your goal setting process and your goal reaching process then it can be really really powerful. Outro: I’d love to hear from you just to know if this is helped, I love to hear updates of your goal setting and how you are going with reaching your goals, so please get in contact, please leave comments below, I will respond to every single comment and also please share this with any friends or colleagues who you think this might benefit. Thanks very much and look forward to speaking to you again soon, Thanks.Now you’ve learned about not just setting outcome goals but how to break those goals down into milestones of daily, weekly or monthly ‘process’ goals.Process goals are much easier for you affect than outcome goals and the plan that going through this process gives you will create a clear path for you to walk in order to meet these goals.Gone are the days of setting random goals and never knowing how to get there.  Now you know that any goal you set is achievable if you plan out your route to get there.I mentioned in the video about setting yearly goals but really I would suggest setting 3 month goals as these are the most worthwhile.  Three months is the perfect amount of time for setting achievable goals.

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Event Planner Inbox Management – Save Time

I always hear from Planners that their Inbox is the source of a lot of pain and frustration.

Do you find that you are constantly reacting to new messages? Are you always being distracted from something you are working on and find it hard to get things finished?

If so then you are not alone. This is why for the next installment of the ‘Gmail series’ I am going to introduce a simple but effective tool – Inbox Pause.

This short video explains it all.

It’s actually kind of amazing how such a simple tool can really help with Inbox management, and how much this can affect your day.

If you want to take control again then use Inbox Pause or something similar.

Please let me know if this tip has helped you as that is my goal by visiting my blog for Event Planners -http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/ so I know through your comments if you have any special questions or comments for me.

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Save Time Scheduling Your Next Client Meeting

For my next installment of the ‘Gmail Series’ I’d like to show you an awesome tool that I use daily.

It’s brilliant for reducing the number of emails that need to be sent in order to schedule any type of meeting or call.

It’s another free Gmail extension called Assistant.io and this short video explains exactly how you can use it as an Event Planner to save you time every day.

I’d love to hear any of your comments or questions so please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners -http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/ I promise to respond to every one. And, if you think that this video could help you save time each day then please share it with friends or your peers so that they can benefit too.

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Event Planner Time Saving 101 – LastPass

I'm starting off with the basics here & wanted to make sure that you are using a password manager like LastPass.

If you are not, then I highly recommend starting asap.

They are free.

They save you tons of time.

They make your passwords much more secure.

Here is a video explaining what they are and how to use them.

I hope this helps!

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments by visiting my blog for Event Planners - http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/ ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————- Video Transcript: Hi there, I’m Dave Ferguson from perfect Event Proposals and Event Planner Productivity Hacks.Today I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about something that I’m constantly surprised that not everybody knows about or is using.It’s a nifty little tool that I’ve been using for about 4 or 5 years and it saves me a lot of time every day and week.You may be using this because a lot of people are, but for those of you that aren’t I just wanted to tell you about it because it’s something that is really important – a password manager.I use ‘Lastpass’ so I’m gonna talk to you about that today.If you just Google ‘password manager’ you will be able to find a lot of them and a lot of them are free.If you’re not already using one you might be asking ‘what is a password manager?’ and quite simply it’s an app on your computer or mobile device that stores all of your passwords and usernames and then you can just go to any site and with one click you will log in.I will be talking a little bit on the screen share about security because that’s a question a lot of people have.As an Event Planner, you are probably accessing tons and tons of different software every day, whether it’s for your personal life, or for work, or for a client or anything.  You may think that you don’t waste a lot of time logging in or trying to remember your passwords.But with Lastpass password manager you will be able to log-on almost instantaneously.That one minute that you spend logging in to each account adds up. Count how many times you log in to any online account every day and I bet it’s in excess of 60 times – That’s an hour every day if it takes you one minute for each account.With Lastpass the good thing is that all that time is saved.  You will get that back.  That could be an hour a day which I know as an Event Planner, or the ones that I’ve spoken to anyway, the one thing that you often say is the biggest frustration is not having enough time to do anything.  Which is the main reason that I’m giving you these productivity hacks to just help in any way that I can to save you time and make you more money.As I said, password managers store all of your account information for any site whether it’s facebook or bank accounts or any thing.I’m just gonna quickly show you exactly how Lastpass works.  It’s very simple so it’s not gonna take long.  The company taglineis ‘Simplify your life’ and they did a good job with that, so I think well done to them.The first step would be just to download the free download.  What this will do bring a little icon into your browser menu and when you click on that and it will access your Lastpass vault, which will give you a long list of all your usernames & passwords for every site.Now, you may think this could be bad for security in case someone gets into your computer and then he can see all of your passwords and you are right that is something to think about.But I think that Lastpass actually makes your passwords more secure than they were before and I’ll tell you exactly why.You need to create a password for your Lastpass account.  Make that strong, complex, secure & write it down and make sure that it’s not easy to crack.Then when you go to log in to any site.Firstly, I will show you how quick it is, you just click here on the icon, click your username and then you’re signed in – that’s it!That’s what you have to do for every single site, you don’t have to remember the password.That’s gonna save you a ton of time! But the other really cool thing that it does is if you’re joining a new site you can have a password generated for you.Just click here & I can generate different ones, I can change the length and choose one I will use as my password.So this will mean that my access to each individual site is way more secure than it was before I started using LastpassIf you’re anything like me then you might have two or three or four different passwords that you use for pretty much all your accounts and really they not that difficult to crack.I had some problems with identity theft and it was a complete pain that behind so I feel way more secure now that I use Lastpass and I save a lot more time as I never need to worry about forgetting a password or username.So overall it really has simplified my life.That’s really it today, Lastpass is just something that will save you time, that time will save you money, and it also save you hassle.Thanks very much for watching!I hope this is helped and please write any comments below, good or bad, just as I know where I can tweak or improve in the future and if you like to contact me directly then feel free to email me at [email protected], See you next time..

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

How to get all your vendor quotes with one email!

After interviewing so many different kinds of event professional to find out your biggest pains and frustrations it is clear that regardless of which ‘type’ of planner you are you spend a huge amount of time using email.

I mean, great communication is the foundation to a great Event Planner, and with the multitude of people you need to communicate with to organize even the smallest event it’s not surprising that you often feel bogged down with email.

For this reason I am creating a series of posts focused on streamlining your email processes. I am certain that I can help save you time every single day with a few simple hacks.

Now, I know that a lot of you will be using all kinds of different webmail clients and email providers and I cannot cover them all so I am going to stick with the most popular and the one I know best – Gmail.

Even if Gmail is not your primary work email account it is still worth your while to watch these videos as they are super short and will give you valuable hints that may well translate over to your specific email provider.

I am kicking off this series with great hack on how to send RFP’s or simple requests for quotes to multiple vendors and suppliers with one master email.

Why send 20 separate emails when you can just send one to everyone?

I hope this video helps!

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on how to make Streak work for you by visiting my blog for Event Planners http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/. I will make sure to answer everybody’s questions! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Video Transcript: Hi there, I’m Dave Ferguson from perfect Event proposals and the event planner productivity hacks group. In the group I put a tip a few weeks ago that didn’t get a really much engagement so as a little surprised because I’ve mentioned this to some of the event planners that I’ve been interviewing and I got really great response every time I mentioned it, so I thought, I just shoot this quick video just to explain it a little bit better.

I’ve heard over and over again that getting quotes from vendors can take an enormous amount of time and be quite frustrating. Lots of emailing, back and forth, calling and waiting to hear back from them.

I know this process really slows down progress when it comes to creating proposals and just dealing with your clients.

So what if you could just send one email to all of your vendors with one click, then maybe do the same thing a day or two later to follow up on all those ones that you haven’t heard back from?

Surely this would save you a ton of time with emailing and calling, you just get all of your quotes in one from one email.

The good news is this is really, really easy. Let’s move over to the screen share and I’ll show you exactly how to do this, see you there..

OK, so I’m going quickly to show you how to use Streak to send multiple emails to your vendor list with one click. Now streak is using Gmail so if you’re using an email account for your webhost or something like that you won’t be able to use this tip, although is worth looking to see if your host has something similar. If you are using Gmail, then just Google ‘Streak Gmail’ and you will get this page.

Click straight through to the homepage of Streak and you will see the orange button, I’ve already installed it but if you haven’t installed it, just click on the orange button and it will show up on the top of your Gmail account. You will be able to see streak there, now the other way you will be able to notice it is installed properly is if you click on ‘compose message’, in the recipient field you will see ‘mail merge’ option.

So that’s what we gonna be doing, a mail merge.

I’ve already created a sample email, which is just giving the specifications for an event and asking for a quote, but first what you need is your email list.

So you’re gonna have to have an excel spreadsheet that’s got your list of companies along with the first name, last name and email address. That’s all the fields you need really.

On this list you can see I have catering companies to AV companies to florists to venues. You may want to do that and so you can send a quote request to everyone in one email or you may want to separate them up a little bit.

But the point is you can send one email to multiple people at the same time and it makes things much much quicker and easier for you!

So once you’ve got your list, just click on ‘file’, you need to ‘save as’ and save it as a comma delimited file, a CSV file.

Find the CSV comma delimited as a couple of other ones, if you’re using a mac you probably need to use that one, I’m on pc so comma delimited and then you save it.

I’ve already saved it so I’m not gonna do that, and then all you need to do is to go to click on the mail merge, upload CSV, find the CSV and then you’ve got your list of suppliers and vendors uploaded.

Now what I want to personalize it a little bit. I will change ‘Hi there’ to include their first name. I will go to the bottom right hand corner and click on ‘insert template’, I’m gonna insert the first name. And then I’ve got another X here, I want to also insert the company name so I will go to the same place, insert company name.

Now when I scroll through these it changes the first name and company name and you can do this with many different fields as you want, if you want to make it even more personalized you can add different fields such as some thing number four is like a subject or the specific element of the quote that you need from that person, you could also add another column in your spreadsheet, but for now we just gonna have those too.

I’ve got ‘Hi Lisa, I am planning an event on behalf of my client on the 30th January 2016. There will be 600-700 attendees over 3 days. Then you just put away your other specifications needed for you to get a quote back quickly, I’m looking for two quotes from your company for this event, one for your services at a low-cost and one for a high-end budget. Please respond as soon as possible as I am on a tight deadline to respond to my client’ – actually that would be better if we just put within 48 hours would be even better and that’s it.

So you’ve got that, now what I’d do is click send and you can see it was sent out to all 22 people/22 companies.

I’m gonna stop this now quickly because I used fake email addresses, but you get the point. So what I would then do is give them the 48 hours and then if there still some people that haven’t sent you quote yet, I would send them a follow-up email. I’d just use the same list and take out the people that responded and send a follow up in exactly the same manner.

This, really, really cuts time and makes the process way more manageable – rather than sending 20 separate emails and then 20 follow ups, just send 2 emails. Hopefully it will also cut down the time that you take to get the quotes and I know from an event planner that any bit of time you can save is really worth it because you’ve got a million other things to do anyway.

I hope this helps! If it has, please leave a comment below, if it hasn’t please leave a comment below – that is just as valuable because I’d love to know how to improve, and if you just want to say hello, leave a comment below,

Thanks very much and I see you next time, bye

[perfecteventproposals-blog]

Welcome to the Event Planner Productivity Hacks blog!

Hello and welcome!

I created the short video below to introduce myself and tell you a little more about what I am planning for this blog.

My goal is to bring you content that is going to be of great value & save you and your Event business time and money – as well as bring in more, higher value clients!

I’ll be producing written blog posts, video posts and recorded interviews with top Event professionals.

I hope you enjoy & find them super useful!

See you again soon.

Dave. What would make this all worthwhile for me is hearing from YOU. Please leave your feedback and questions by visiting my blog for Event Planners, http://www.perfecteventproposal.com/,  so that I can improve and produce the content you really want to see.Just one sentence there from you will really help me to make this blog amazing so don’t be shy. Leave your comment now.  :-D ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Video Transcript:   Hi there, My name is Dave Ferguson and I thought just to shoot this quick video to kind of introduce myself, let you know little bit about me and little bit about my intention for this group and the blog that I’m creating.You can hear from my voice and my accent that I’m from England, I moved to the states earlier this year, summer 2014, and in the last couple of months I have moved to Oakland California, so that’s why I still have empty walls in the background there.I should get this out in the open straight away that I’m not an Event Planner, I have worked in the event planning industry ten years ago in New York and I have in the last year being working very closely with Event Planners.So, you might be asking yourself why should I be listening to this English guy with a lisp when he’s not even an Event Planner and you’ve been in this industry for five, ten years or something like that.My goal is not to advise you on how to plan great events, where my expertise and my experience comes in is more with businesses – streamlining businesses, creating businesses and getting new business.So over the last year I have interviewed almost two hundred event professionals. Those interviews have gone anywhere from half an hour to two hours long and I have spent all that time just trying to really find out what the biggest pains and frustrations in the industry are and I think I’ve learned a ton of information from social planners, from association planners, from corporate planners, from in house planners.So it’s quite a wide and varied group of interviews that I’ve been doing and I’ve been finding the biggest pains and problems and I really feel like I know what you guys go through day to day.One area that I know I can help with is the problem that nobody ever seems to have enough time to do everything, so I’m gonna be giving you content, tips, hacks and strategies on time saving, on money saving, on how to get more business and how to get higher value clients.That’s my goal, I’m gonna be bringing out content and the form of these videos, blog posts, and a recorded podcast.So, please give me feedback, please be active in the group, please just tell me what you like and what you don’t like about the content I produce, the more I know what you want, the better I can make it for you, and that’s about it for now but I will be producing more videos and I hope you enjoy them.Thanks very much!