EnTrends [ahn-trends] Taking a Look at How Modern Entrepreneurs Work & Live! |
| Is Your Company Looking for a Place to Party? Relax, Let Her Do It - a Ten Year Update! |
Original Article: http://www.entrends.com/savethedate.htm
Q: What have been some of the changes that have occurred with you and your business during the last ten years?
A: There have been a lot of changes. In the past, we tended to only focus on events that were occurring in New York. But by 2003, I had opened five offices in five different cites: New York; Chicago; Washington D.C.; San Francisco; and Los Angeles. I think that, in the long run, the business model could have done really well, but I rolled out the business model in all these different cities and managed each location. I did not franchise. It was really, really stressful for me to pay the rent on all of those different offices. So, I kept some physical offices, but I also let some of my staff work from their homes.
We still put on events all across the country, but now everything gets routed to New York, instead of through the other cities. Last month, we had events in Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, and Palm Dessert. We are currently working on something for Europe that will take place in a year, so we have really expanded to put on national, and hopefully international, events.
Even though last year was a particularly horrible year for events, due to the economy, we were still doing around $30 million in business. That’s up from $20 million 10 years ago. One of the things that led to our growth was a change in our business model. In the past, we used to base our business on a revolutionary free service model where we secured venues for events. About seven years ago, however, a lot of my clients started asking us to run entire events for them. They wanted us to put on conferences or produce whole parties, instead of just finding the venues. So now, fifty-percent of our business is made up of consulting-based event fees and the other fifty-percent is comprised of securing venues and the services. It’s really been an interesting change.
Q: Is this how you wanted the business to evolve, or was it accidental?
A: It was a little accidental, just because I came up with this very unique concept that was free, and then all of the sudden we were starting to charge our clients. But every good business has to go where the clients want it to go. The old model of just securing venues took a very long time to explain to clients in other cities outside of New York. Our other clients wanted us to be on-site, running the actual events too. They wanted to know how we built the events and they wanted us to manage them. One of our large multimedia clients wanted us to have an office in San Francisco, so that was my first outside office. And when I saw the need for consultants, and the market started to turn downward, we began to pitch other services to our clients.
A: We became an outsource model. Let’s say there is a small-to-midsize company that has an internal marketing team but they need to put on a user conference or another type of event. They don’t always have the time or resources to plan a large, three-day conference. They need to focus on things like marketing the event, getting the talent, and creating the content, along with their other existing duties. To spend six months to a year planning a conference is just not an efficient use of their time, so they outsource the event planning to us.
Right now, this is very popular because a lot of on-site event planners have gotten laid off. Corporate event planning staffs have gone from five people down to maybe one, in some instances. Our clients may not have the overhead anymore, but they still need to put on events and conferences. That’s why we tend to do a lot of event planning for non-profit groups. Their internal staffs are often tasked with fund-raising and other organizational work, and our event planning fee costs about a third of what it would to hire an internal event planner. We will literally answer the phone as that organization, collect all the money, and do the RSVPs. We will plan the event from beginning to end.
For one of our larger clients, we are responsible for organizing their entire community outreach day. We are responsible for getting all 4,000 of their employees to about 40 different non-profits located throughout the triborough area to volunteer for a day. They outsource the project to us completely.
Q: Do you outsource the event registration process to other vendors?
A: If there are thousands of people attending an event, then we will use an electronic registration system. But even with electronic systems, you still wind up doing a lot of work by hand. So we still do a lot of that internally. I find that electronic RSVPs are not the same as contacting a human being, especially if attendees have not sent in their money yet. Most people still want to talk to a human being. Also, there is nothing as fool-proof as our own Excel spreadsheets and internal systems.
A: I’d say a lot of the big corporations are gone. They just stopped entertaining completely. If they got any type of federal money, then the perception was just gone. So the really big monsters, the ones that were my clients for a long time, we just don’t work with any more. But a lot of the small-to-midsize, and emerging companies, as well as non-profits, became a very big client base for us.
Q: How many employees do you have now?
A: We have about 15 full-time people working in New York, and then we have between 15 to 30 contract employees, depending on how many events we have going on across the country.
Q: How did your role on “The Real Housewives of New York City,” come about?
A: I’ve always been a sales person. My strength has always been sales and marketing, never so much the spreadsheets. If I had a good idea, I could rally people behind me. The producers of the show first came to me years ago, when it was a totally different concept. It was supposed to be “The Real Working Women of New York City.” It was going to be about me and a few other well-known business women that I am acquainted with. We all knew each other, and I said, “OK, come and do a reel and we will see how it goes.”
So they came over, they did the reel, and they said, “OK, we really like you, but we’re just playing with the title.” Then they said to me, “Ok, we’re going to call it, “The Millionaire Moms of New York City.” And I said, “Nope, I’m out.” And I just never really thought about it again.
Then the producers came back to me last spring and they said that they were re-casting for “The Real Housewives of New York City,” and asked if I was interested in being a part of it. To be honest, I was not interested in the least. I had never watched the show, and from everything that I had heard, it was just not for me. But, I said, “Sure, come on over,” because I never thought they would actually cast me. But I also knew that they were putting on all these parties on the shows, so I thought maybe they would need an event planner.
By that point, I had also heard about some of the other women on the show and how their business had evolved. I thought it was really interesting. I thought there was obviously a promotional platform there, and Bravo has probably one of the highest demographics of smart, educated, affluent women. That’s a lot of who my business’s demographics are comprised of.
I also have always wanted to start a foundation and do non-profit work related to motivating women to become entrepreneurs.
The producers eventually came back to me and asked me to be on the show, but it took a very long time for me to sign my contract and feel comfortable with the situation. I said to them, “Why would you ever want me? I am very different from the other women who have been cast. I’m not going to make good television for you.” They responded that they were not casting for that type of personality and that they wanted someone who was normal and relatable. So I said, “OK, I will give it a try.”
Because it was the first time that someone else was brought in to the cast not knowing anyone else, they had to figure out a way to integrate me. So, the natural way was through event planning. I wound up coming on late in the show’s season, and it had been a really bizarre season. It was just dark, and weird. My plan was, if anything I would say could be questionable, or could even come out sounding poorly, I was not going to say it. So I kind of took a back seat for awhile.
I think, as an entrepreneur, that you can’t be afraid to fail. I thought that this television show was a huge opportunity, and while I knew that I couldn’t control how they would edit it, I knew that I could control what I would say on it. So, it’s basically been one enormous PR machine for me, either for good or for bad. Honestly, none of it has been too bad. I am on it and people see me. They know the name of my company and they know me. I’m Googled all the time, and I have gotten many, many calls from people who have seen me on the show and wanted to know what my company provides. There is also an enormous industry event put on by a company called Bizbash. They have become the national event planning resource. They asked me to be their keynote speaker for their upcoming conference in October. That’s an enormous opportunity for me, and I don’t think it would have ever happened without being on the show.
Q: How has your lifestyle changed over the past ten years? Do you still have that piece of beachfront property in the Bahamas with no electricity or running water?
A: Yes, I still have it, and no, I haven’t built on it! I have been asked a couple of times to sell it, for about a hundred times what I bought it for, actually. But it’s still there. It’s like my piece of mental health.
I have since married, I have three children, and I bought a house in the Hamptons, along with an apartment in the city. I live in Tribeca with my husband, my daughter who is five, and twins who are two years old. Now we go to our house in the Hamptons on the weekends.
Q: How has having a family affected you running a multimillion dollar business?
A: Well, you have to look at the whole of your days. There are days when I am 70 percent business woman, and 30 percent mom and zero percent wife. Then there are days when I am 90 percent wife and 10 percent mom. There are days where I try to get it right, with a third dedicated to each, but the goal is to try to get the 100 percent right. It may not be all in one day though. I have also really tried to simplify my life. I moved to Tribeca and I moved my office three blocks away from my home. While it’s not as convenient for my employees, it works for my life.
I also try to focus during the time that I am with my children, purely with my children. I get up with them at 7 a.m. and, from that time, until I walk my daughter to school at 9 a.m., I am a mom. I go to work, I try to get out by 5 p.m and, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. or 8 p.m., I am with my family. I have dinner with them, I give the kids a bath, and I put them to bed. I try to make any of my client events or dinner plans after 8 p.m..
Now, clearly, I am an event planner, and we produce events at night, but I really have enough great staff that I try not to be away from my family too often. Or, I will try to go to the setup of an event and then I leave so I can still put my kids to bed. I make no plans on the weekend. That’s my family time.
As far as my nights go, after my kids are in bed, I usually get back on the computer. I work a lot at night. I don’t have a nine-to-five job and I don’t go to bed early. From 8 p.m. until midnight, I work. It is what it is, but that’s the trade-off.
A: Well, I already mentioned that I am going to be speaking at that conference in October, and I think that will be incredible for my business. I think the show is going to continue to generate a lot of PR and we’re going to be doing a lot more Save the Date branded events. My clients have been very corporate in the past, but now, because of what has evolved, I am getting a lot more sponsorship type events and fashion events, which is really interesting for me.
I think it’s hard to separate what’s next for me, versus what’s next for the business. To me, it’s all the same, but I really do want to start a foundation. I really want to have a non-profit arm to my life. I would like to be a combination of a female Tony Robbins, and an Oprah, but not so much a talk show host as a motivator of change.
I mean, Oprah got the country to read again, and that’s powerful. I believe that, after the things I have been through in my life, and all the things that women have to go through, I believe in the “Yes you can.” I just don’t think that there are a lot of positive role models out there for women who are married and have a family, who want a career. You have people like Oprah or Ellen, but they don’t have children. So they don’t really speak to that lifestyle. Then you have some talk show hosts that have families, but who don’t own businesses. It’s difficult to find somebody who represents a woman who is really trying to make it all work and doing everything.
Q: So what about writing a book?
A: I do have an agent, and I have a writer, so it’s in the works. I just feel like there are so many other books by the show's cast out right now, and mine is not like those. It’s an entrepreneurship book. It’s a book about trying to figure out how to be a woman and how to say, “OK, I can have it all. I just have to figure out the priorities and how to make it all fit.”
When people use to tell me that I couldn’t have it all, I would get angry. I can make it work for me. I don’t think there are enough people out there saying this. I had three children under three when my twins were born, and I was married, and I was running a business, and I had started another business. I just think life is about inertia - a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Jennifer's Photo: © 2009 Michael Molinoff |
Q: How have you continued to grow your business during the recession? 
Q: How has your clientele evolved over the last ten years? 
Q: So what’s next for you and the business?