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.