Some planners chose to be meeting planners; some “fall into” the profession, others take an educational route and still others aren’t sure how they fit in; but what they all have in common is a great affection and attraction for planning meetings and events. Here, we profile independent planners who, because they were “in the right place at the right time” are in a position to now share their winning formulas for outstanding meetings and events.

When Bill Gates Is In Town

Daphne J. Meyers, CMM, not only has more than 20 years of corporate and independent meeting planning experience but she has spent most of them garnering a number of achievements and accomplishments in the meetings industry, including the launching of the first event planning course for Minnesota State University-Moorhead and serving on MPI’s Global Corporate Circle of Excellence, among other endeavors.

Meyers, a single mom with an eight-year-old son, has a B.A. in English and credits her psychology and theology minors as helping her on more than one occasion to deal with people she encounters in her work.

As managing partner of The Red Barn, located in Fargo, ND, Meyers plans approximately four events a year, including an annual leadership conference for a natural resources and utilities company. The three-day event for upper management executives is comprised of approximately 750 attendees and their guests. “The key role is project management of all conference components in the way of timelines and deliverable tracking,” Meyers said. “We’ve been doing this for several years and work closely with the internal team to plan Web site registration, venue logistics, hotel room block management, staff schedules, financial tracking, transportation and external speaker management.”

In 2009, however, the event was stopped midway due to flooding and blizzard conditions. This required close integration with communications and the executive team as how to best handle the emergency situation although, all in all, it was not her most trying event.

That happened several years ago when she worked as a program manager for Partner Events at Microsoft. For this particular event, Meyers said, Bill Gates was planning a trip to their Fargo Microsoft offices. For the visit, Meyers and her team scheduled a special forum and invited some local elementary, high school and college students. Somehow, it got reported in the local newspaper that the general public was welcome and that changed the whole scope of event management in terms of security, venue and a whole lot more, she said.

“At the time, and I’m not sure if it’s still true, Bill Gates did not do public events for obvious reasons, and here we were with thousands of people expected to attend, plus the press conferences and ‘meet and greets’ with local dignitaries. We had to move Bill around 13 times that day; but it all turned out better than expected with the only ‘oops’ being the press leak.

“We notified Bill Gates’ office of what had happened and decided it would not be a good idea to have the paper publish a correction saying it was not open to the public. Instead, we decided to leave it as is and proceed with an altered plan.”

In addition to reconfiguring the meeting setup for a larger group, they discussed what would have to be added to the original plan to design a new plan to cover additional registration and security. Although the event was free, the team still needed to get an idea of how many people might actually attend after reading about it in the newspaper. So, they ramped up the content on the Web site to inform the public and initiated a ticketing process to allow for easy tracking.

More than that, Meyers always gives a lot of credit to her internal and external partners. “At Microsoft, we were a very good team, especially on that day. We had already managed a number of large, complex events so, to us, this was just another event we needed to manage effectively.”

Meyers, a self-professed “control freak” is at her best when she approaches everything strategically. And she means everything: “Why we order types of food, how it is served, where tables are placed all the way to content and messaging. I am always asking why and what result do we expect from it and are we getting that result,” she explained.

In her own business, which is divided among planning events, teaching and speaking assignments, Meyers is working on developing new business for her company. She noted, “Planning cycles are definitely shorter and budgets are tight. A lot of organizations are waiting later to get budget approval before they start their planning process.” She will use the same set of tried-and-true principles to pull it off, which include setting specific timelines and staying on top of them. Meyers uses her creative skills to “accomplish the same things I have before but with less time and resources.”

What is the best part of the job? “Owning my own business definitely allows me a lot of scheduling freedom to make more time for my son. It also allows me to work when I am at my best (which sometimes is 10:30 p.m.) rather than ‘office hours.’”

Meyers is a confident business person, a much-needed quality especially in these trying times, who gives her clients increased value while managing costs responsibly. She added, “I feel confident, but I never say they will go off without a hitch. There are always hitches. It is how you are prepared to handle them and respond. I feel best about those times when something went wrong and how I handled it. I pride myself on my ability to respond calmly in very stressful situations and understanding how keeping my cool flows through the other individuals involved.”

Taking The Plunge

Everyone needs words to live by, and for Lee-Anne Ragan, it’s “Take a deep breath and dive in.” It’s a motto that has served her well as president of Canadian-based Rock.Paper.Scissors Inc. (RPS), an international event planning, training and entertainment company, which was founded in 1992 as a sketch comedy troupe but then expanded in a variety of directions. She joined it in 1998 and is now its president.

Ragan, who has an M.Ed. (specializing in cross-cultural conflict resolution), a B.S.W. (Community Development), and a Provincial Instructor Training certificate, has nearly 20 years’ experience in the industry and has a diverse list of clients ranging from the United Nations to IBM.

“I came to this type of work through a combination of education and opportunity. I’d had my first child and found that my employer wasn’t open to the idea of working part-time or job sharing. So I left my job with no plan of what I was going to do. And that’s when clients started calling. That was almost a dozen years ago and I haven’t looked back since,” Ragan said.

Today, RPS includes interactive events where participants are encouraged to laugh, learn and lead. “We often use improv comedy to anchor the learning, which ramps up the engagement a hundredfold,” added Ragan. Accordingly, clients call upon RPS requesting a wide variety of entertainment, learning and training events, especially teambuilding events. “We have designed a number of teambuilding events for the marketing department of A&W, Canada’s original hamburger quick-service restaurant and now one of the fastest growing.

“RPS entertainment events organizes about 40 events per year and uses improvisational comedy routines to highlight issues in our clients’ workplaces, from stand-up scenes, where we highlight the CEO’s typical day, to a game show-like event where clients compete to win prizes and the comedians leave them laughing at issues that pertain to their own everyday work life.”

One of Ragan’s most demanding assignments was working with a high-profile international client for a combination teambuilding and entertainment event for about 400 people. “Unfortunately, it was out of town so we didn’t have much time for a sound check and, despite our request, there wasn’t a sound technician onsite during the event,” she recalled.

“The sound was terrible and I quickly learned that no matter how brilliant you may be, if people can’t hear you, it doesn’t matter.”

At another out-of-town event, Ragan arrived for a site visit only to find a fireplace smack dab in the middle of the meeting room — “a huge fireplace that made it so I couldn’t stand in any one place within the room and have everyone see me. It wasn’t possible to move the event, or the fireplace, and I spent the entire day moving back and forth so half the room could see me at one time.

“I learned from that event that no matter how brilliant you may be, if people can’t see you it doesn’t matter.”

Still, as Ragan noted, these were all pivotal learning experiences that, as a result, motivated her to develop detailed technical requirements on her company’s Web site. Furthermore, client contracts spell out these requirements. “Scheduling lots of client consultation to determine if we’re a good fit for them, being clear about what we can and cannot do, and creating a detailed contract that outlines all of this” takes up a major part of her daily management routine.

“I never promise that there won’t be any problems. What we can and do promise is that our experience has taught us how to deal with many of them. It’s better to under-promise and over-deliver, than the opposite,” said Ragan.

Helping Clients Look Good

Talk about school spirit. Lisa M. Haynie’s first experience with meeting planning was in high school when she was involved in expensive extracurricular activities. Instead of getting an advance on her allowance from her mom, Haynie organized fundraising events for the whole team. “Some of the programs I created are still an activity that has become a yearly tradition for the school,” she said.

After her college years, Haynie worked in the marketing department of a healthcare software company. Haynie’s big break came when the president wanted to host a users conference: “The gal that was put in charge just had a baby and did not have the time she originally thought she would to work on it,” Haynie noted. “So, I was in the right place at the right time, and the role fell to me.”

Today, Haynie, a CMP, has more than 13 years’ overall experience planning meetings, conferences, trade shows and charitable functions for a variety of organizations and clients from the healthcare, technology, corporate and association/nonprofit sectors.

She and her “right arm” Erin Ingersoll, CMP, are the managing partners of Seattle-based Meeting Visions LLC. “The number of events we do averages out to about 10 per year. We like to keep the number low because the majority of the events we plan are conferences that take at least a year of pre-planning. More specifically, we do about six conferences including user conferences, summits, gala events and fundraisers,” she said.

According to Haynie, her management style is that of an open communicator, and she strives to ensure that everyone who is working on the event feels like a part of the team.

Currently, Meeting Visions is working on a conference for a client it has served for eight years. Although client familiarity often helps produce a successful event, the challenge here is the budget, which is significantly lower than in the past.

Haynie has a plan of action to counter smaller budgets: “But, we will pull it off by negotiating with vendors for lower costs for audio-visual, hotel room rates and other outside resources. We will not have the same level of well-known keynote speakers, and the evening events will not have the same bells and whistles that their attendees are used to,” she added. “Still, we are planning to address these changes with the opening remarks of the CEO. Everyone understands that we are all feeling the impact of the economy, and we will stress that the reasons they attend the event — education and networking — are still the prime focus for the conference.”

The most trying part of her job, she related, is the interoffice politics that can delay decisions in the planning process. On the other hand, Haynie said, “The best part of the job is the satisfaction you feel after the event is over, and you have helped your client look good to her boss or customers.”    C&IT