Building Relationships & Finding Joy: A Chat with Marianne Jackson of Kennedy Events
Featuring Marianne Jackson, Senior Executive Producer and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kennedy Events
Marianne joined Kennedy Events in 2016 as a producer but has always adored building relationships and sales. She took on the role of Senior Executive Producer and Director of Strategic Partnerships in 2023. At Kennedy Events, she focuses on mentoring the event production team and growing new business while expanding our existing relationships.
Her experience of expansive event production and her effervescent enthusiasm for bringing people together have given her the reputation of knowing who you need to know within the event industry. She’s always in pursuit of connection, preferably while sharing a delicious meal and event anecdotes.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Insights into Marianne’s professional transition and her creative flair
Evolving trends in event management
The significance of considering diverse personal needs in corporate gatherings
The foundational role of core values in shaping a business’ clientele and team
In this episode…
In today’s episode, Paige is excited to sit down with the multi-talented Marianne Jackson, Senior Executive Producer and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kennedy Events. Marianne dives into her colorful world, revealing her journey from producer to business development maestro, highlighting the evolving landscape of team celebrations in a post-COVID era. Expect to hear about her commitment to inclusive event planning and the way she faces challenges head-on with grace and strategy. Beyond event logistics, we’ll explore the importance of core values, how they shape client relationships, and how Kennedy Events stands out by infusing delight into their work. It’s a rich conversation filled with insight, laughter, and invaluable tips from one of the industry’s best.
DOWNLOAD THE TOP TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS PODCAST EPISODE FOR FREE
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Book: Traction
Shea Cibulsky - Senior Manager, Global Adoption & Retention Events at Adobe
Ari Shapiro - Host of NPR’s “All Things Considered”
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.
Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.
To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.
Transcript
Paige Buck [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Solution Seekers podcast. I'm your host, Paige Buck. Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Kennedy Events' own Senior Executive Producer and Director of Strategic Partnerships, Marianne Jackson. Marianne joined Kennedy Events in 2016 as a producer but has always adored building relationships and sales. She took on the role of Senior Executive Producer and Director of Strategic Partnerships in 2023. At Kennedy Events, she focuses on both mentoring the event production team and growing new business while expanding our existing relationships.
Her experience of expansive event production coupled with her effervescent enthusiasm for bringing people together has given her the reputation of knowing who you need to know within the event industry. She's always in pursuit of connection, preferably while sharing a delicious meal and event anecdotes.
Today's episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs, from in-person to hybrid and virtual. You can learn more about us at kennedyevents.com Thanks for sitting through all know laudatory. I know how you hate being talked about.
Marianne Jackson [00:01:30]:
I know that's like my least favorite thing, right?
Paige Buck [00:01:34]:
And every time I do this, I'm like sitting with a guest being like, just hang tight. Come and see.
Marianne Jackson [00:01:40]:
Yeah. When I was asked to do this, it was like, can you join Paige to talk about yourself for an hour? I'm like, how many hours have I already done that?
Paige Buck [00:01:48]:
Can I? Well, you're such a superstar in our team, I thought it would be good if we could catch up and share what you've been up to, all your favorite things. This is just a “Raindrops on Roses” song medley of Marianne. So why don't you start off - this is a new favorite question. I might have to start asking this of everybody. What are a few of your daily rituals that you find most important?
Marianne Jackson [00:02:15]:
Yeah. So I just want to start by saying that I live in the forest in northern Michigan. I live in the woods, and I recently built my dream house, and it's a pink house in the forest. And every morning I wake up and just have this gratitude of seeing the sunrise from the east side of my house and just going through the dappling sunlight through the woods. It's like amazing. So that's how I start my day. I'm always at my desk, usually by like 8:30. I've got a Yeti filled with my green tea.
Marianne Jackson [00:02:45]:
I know that you're a tea drinker, Paige, too, so you can empathize with that. That's about all the caffeine I can handle, though. And then I really like that I'm on Eastern time, so I usually have kind of, like, 2 hours of quiet time in the morning to just kind of focus before the meetings start. Another part of my daily ritual is I'm pretty diligent about taking a lunch break because when you're working remotely, you don't really have the opportunity to sit down with your colleagues and have a lunch break. So I'm like, get up from my desk, have my lunch break. I like to watch a sitcom rerun. I got recently into “Designing Women.”
Paige Buck [00:03:24]:
Oh, my God. I was going to say, what are you watching? “Designing Women.”
Marianne Jackson [00:03:28]:
So good. And then usually from noon to five or one to five, I have pretty solid meetings because my Pacific time team is online at that point. But I also try to be really diligent about setting the boundary to get away from my desk at 05:00 and then whenever I can, I go down to the beach. I'm about five minutes away from Lake Michigan and do a beach walk.
Paige Buck [00:03:54]:
Your life sounds amazing.
Marianne Jackson [00:03:56]:
I know. I try to make it sound amazing.
Paige Buck [00:03:59]:
You're like, and this is when I'm not traveling for two weeks to two months at a stretch. And don't get to rest.
Marianne Jackson [00:04:05]:
Exactly. Yes.
Paige Buck [00:04:06]:
And since you mentioned “Designing Women,” it made my brain jump to “Golden Girls.” I was delighted and shocked that at a recent dinner conversation, we could name all of them, even though we haven't watched it. It was like, how is this in my brain? Can you name the “Golden Girls”?
Marianne Jackson [00:04:25]:
Oh, Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and, Sophia
Paige Buck [00:04:28]:
Got it much faster than we did. We sat there for several minutes being like, okay, come on, come on. Rue McClanahan. What was hers? Come on, come on. But even, like, how is Rue McClanahan's name still in my head? It's amazing.
Marianne Jackson [00:04:39]:
I mean, I have Golden Girls magnets, and my guest room is kind of a little bit of an homage to Blanche. So I'm a stan.
Paige Buck [00:04:48]:
Love it. Oh, my God. That's killing me. I can't believe I asked the right person. So we have core values that we live and breathe here at Kennedy Events. Definitely think the best businesses and the best small businesses have core values that really resonate with their team. Which ones speak to you?
Marianne Jackson [00:05:09]:
Well, I. Because I've been at KE for seven years, I actually had the privilege of being part of the genesis of these core values. I mean, I remember sitting down with you in a hotel lobby and with another colleague and Maggie, the founder, and coming up with these core values, and they are so entwined in our everyday operations. I think that the one that's my favorite, though, is delightful. I've never seen that as any other company's core value. And it resonates for me because I work so closely with clients from the inception of their first introduction to us to renewals year after year. And I hear from the clients all the time that they miss us. They miss our team after an event wraps, and that they can't wait to work with us again.
And I think that that's indicative of that delight. And I was also thinking about our competitors. A lot of our competitors, they're selling that same service, right? There are all sorts of great event agencies out there, but we're also selling our personality. We bring so much humor to the process, our panache, and it's about who you like and who you trust. And it's not just clients. It's our colleagues, it's our vendors. And that's why we've got such a big renewal base, I think.
Paige Buck [00:06:34]:
Yeah, I think it's humor, it's grace, it's warmth, and just to share how we came up with those core values. And we did not invent this process. And sure, many people have put a lot of thought into how core values get developed, but we got the process we used from the book, “Traction.” What spoke to me, because I remember, if you start describing this, you're like, oh, my God, how will we ever come up with these? And you think of them as being client-facing, and they need to be these little pithy statements. And if you approach it that way, they end up being aspirational and they don't ring true. And they also can feel like, doesn't every business need to do that? You go to a bank and it's like, integrity, honesty, security. You're like, I should hope so. It's a bank.
Marianne Jackson [00:07:29]:
Yeah. I mean, there's literally nothing disingenuous, I think, about any of our core values, and it goes back to sitting down and I don't know how many sticky notes we went through.
Paige Buck [00:07:39]:
Well, and so that sticky note process and sharing with listeners that it's brainstorming qualities that you already have on your team. It's like, look at your best people. And when we were doing this four years ago, we were gathering our best people, you and your colleague, and saying, what qualities do you have that we think make you the best at what you do and that our clients remark upon, and that are the distinctions. And then we end up, as you said, like this wall of post-it notes and narrowed that down to and grouped it until we had five. And they became not just like, oh, that says who we are, but it says who we are going to continue to be and how we'll hire, how we'll hire, how we'll fire, how we'll grow people, how we'll measure their success, and how we measure how we do day to day.
Marianne Jackson [00:08:34]:
I mean, I like that we identify that in our sales deck. So it's like, from the first introduction to us, it's like, these are our core values. This is who we are.
Paige Buck [00:08:42]:
And if you don't want delightful people, you can go away.
Marianne Jackson [00:08:45]:
Exactly.
Paige Buck [00:08:47]:
If that's not important to you, then maybe we're not the team for you.
Marianne Jackson [00:08:50]:
Move on.
Paige Buck [00:08:51]:
Well, okay. So that kind of dovetails perfectly with who are some of your favorite clients that we get to work with?
Marianne Jackson [00:08:58]:
Oh, my gosh, so many. And I think when I talk about the favorite clients, it's like these people also become friends, and they don't even feel like clients sometimes anymore. It's like their colleague, too. Right? We often hear that we act as an extension of our clients’ team, and it kind of feels like vice versa sometimes. So, I mean, the first person I would want to shout out would be Shea Cibulsky at Adobe. She was a client of ours back when she was at LeanData. I think that was it. The first time we worked with her was, What was that? Like? 2018, 2019?
Paige Buck [00:09:37]:
2010. Yeah, 19. They have the biggest event, an ancillary event, to Dreamforce.
Marianne Jackson [00:09:45]:
That's right. Yeah. I mean, she's like elegance embodied. Right? She's walking like a 30,000-square-foot venue in Louboutins. But she moved over to Adobe. I remember she gave me a phone call in August of 2020, mid-pandemic, and said, I'm at Adobe. I'm piloting this brand-new customer training program. It's going to be virtual events.
I'm not doing it without you. It made me panic. I called up Maggie Kennedy right away, and I was like, oh, my God, this seems like a huge opportunity. And, I mean, flash forward, four years later, how many? I think we're going on to our 14th show with her. Yeah, we're going to Adobe Summit, which is a massive flagship event of theirs. We're going to be there in just a few weeks in Vegas.
Paige Buck [00:10:41]:
The thing about Shea is, Shea is one person, and she doesn't have a whole team reporting up to her. It's lonely. And I think there are a lot of folks like Shea in marketing teams and event teams around the world being like, I'm asked to pull off this huge thing. There's a lot of eyes on me. And also, they have given me no support.
Marianne Jackson [00:11:05]:
Absolutely. I mean, she, when I talk about us being her, like, she doesn't schedule an event unless it's our availability. Right? It's like, can you guys do this? Okay, then I'm going to schedule that event for that date. I also love that she's going to be speaking at Cvent Connect, which is a big industry event in San Antonio in June. She's been invited to be a speaker. She's going to talk about how she developed the program, the Experience Makers at the Skill Exchange, and I'm going to be attending. Get to go support her and cheer her like, that feels very full circle.
Paige Buck [00:11:45]:
That's awesome. Who else?
Marianne Jackson [00:11:48]:
I'm like, another client. I mean, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Bloomberg. Kennedy events already had Bloomberg as a client when I came in. You guys started working with them in 2015?
Paige Buck [00:11:59]:
I think so.
Marianne Jackson [00:12:00]:
Sound right? Since then, I mean, we have really become an extension of their San Francisco based team. So Bloomberg is HQ in New York. They've got offices here in San Francisco. They've got an incredibly talented events team in Lauren and Daron and Noor. And when, again, it's like the friends. It's like they tap us anytime their plates are too full. Right?
They're tapped with a lot of events, and then they pull us in for the larger events that are coming in, but that relationship, too, I feel like they know our entire team. The trust is deep. Another one I want to name is probably one of my all-time favorite events we ever did was for NPR, “How I Built This” summit. Paige, do you remember when we went to DC together and got a tour?
Paige Buck [00:12:50]:
I’ll never forget when we went to DC together and got to tour, be the little, like, public radio nerds that we are and realize that a lot of these radio voices have handsome and very attractive people behind them.
Marianne Jackson [00:13:03]:
Right? Like, we're really kind of huddled in the corner and be like, oh, my God, is that Ari Shapiro?
Paige Buck [00:13:06]:
Yes.
Marianne Jackson [00:13:09]:
Like, so full-on fangirling in NPR. And we got to work with John Isabella, who's literally the kindest, most lovely client ever. He gave us so much runway to really envision how we take the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts campus and turn it into this summit that is like, all of these super fans of NPR. It was like, all of the like-minded people like us!
Paige Buck [00:13:34]:
Yes. And that event was so vibrant and required so much of them. It's easy, I think, to look at an organization like NPR or Adobe or Bloomberg and go, they wouldn't need us. They have all the tools and resources they need internally, and then realize they need a massive– they need outside eyes. They need outside expertise. They need outside production resources that they don't have the time to go get themselves.
Marianne Jackson [00:14:01]:
I think, you know, you and I have had conversations about the impostor syndrome, where it's like, they need me for that.
Paige Buck [00:14:07]:
Yeah.
Marianne Jackson [00:14:09]:
It's like, oh, wait, no. We're actually full-on experts in this area, and of course, they need us. I often get taken aback of the value that we add to clients, and they're just like, the immense gratitude that they always shower upon us and our team. We couldn't have done this without you. And I'm like, you're right.
Paige Buck [00:14:27]:
When I think about the, and I have to do the work now to flip it on its head and think about the consultants and the third parties that we rely on, and think, our bookkeepers can answer the most straightforward question for me, and they're like, yes, the answer is 755. And I'm like, oh, my God, thank you. I never would have been able to come up with that myself, or I wouldn't have known how to think about this problem. And you were just pointing me in the right direction.
Marianne Jackson [00:14:53]:
Yeah. The valued partner, the trust, the loyalty. It runs deep.
Paige Buck [00:14:59]:
Yeah. If you could wave a magic wand and poof. We have a new client before us that's very excited to work with us, who would it be? Yeah.
Marianne Jackson [00:15:08]:
I'm like, Paige, you know the answer to this. Who would it be? You know who this would be.
Paige Buck [00:15:12]:
Oh, and Ronan Farrow just wrote a profile of him in the New Yorker. Phenomenal. And I have it bookmarked to read it already.
Marianne Jackson [00:15:22]:
I am a long-time super fan of RuPaul's Drag Race. That's my jam. I mean, I've watched every single episode. I watched the recaps on YouTube of the drag queens talking about the show. I would love to do some sort of drag race RuPaul sort of event. I know that they hold DragCon or even, like, a release party or anything like that. I'm always looking for ways that I can bring drag queens into our events, where I'm like, what if we have a drag queen MC? I just think drag is such a joyful art form, and it's being incredibly attacked right now, and it's misunderstood. And one of the things I really love about being part of KE is that our values align with the sort of clients that I'm really excited to work with.
And on the flip side, we've had clients that have come to us that, where the values don't align, and we have that integrity where we say, no, thank you. Yeah.
Paige Buck [00:16:22]:
I'm curious as somebody whom, like, well, RuPaul's Drag Race cannot escape anybody's consciousness fully, but somebody who doesn't watch it and dive as deep as you. Do they ever feature drag kings?
Marianne Jackson [00:16:39]:
No, they haven't. But they did recently have a heterosexual man, drag king, or drag queen. And they have definitely, in the past few years, been really open about trans women. And I think that when the show started, it was pretty vehement. Like, there are no trans women drag queens on the show. Right. And now it is celebrated. So there has been a sea change over that.
It's on season 16 now.
Paige Buck [00:17:08]:
Well, I just saw a small intro to a larger cabaret event that I was at. Had a comic, faux burlesque strip performance from a drag king that was absolutely hilarious. And it was to the macho, macho man song. But the drag king had, like, no muscles. And it was just absolutely hilarious watching him in his tank and he's, like, pretending he can lift weights. It was just the most joyous, fun performance, and I was like, I need more of this in my life. So good. Yeah, those are really good.
Paige Buck [00:17:48]:
So what are some personal milestones you're really proud of.
Marianne Jackson [00:17:52]:
Um, I mean, I talked a little bit about this house that I moved into. I built this house. I live in the forest, six miles away from Lake Michigan. I'm so proud that I have this dream job that allows me to live in my homeland where I grew up. My brother. He's a 9th-grade teacher, and he asked me to come into his school and talk about my career path. And I put together a presentation deck, and the name of it was “How I Landed My Dream Job and Built a Pink House.” And I have this incredible job. I live in my dream home.
get to travel all over the world. You hear that people ask, what would you tell your younger self? And I don't think my younger self would believe that I've manifested this. It's unbelievable to me all the time. Like, the amount of gratitude I feel every day that I get to live this life. I don't want to choke up or anything, but I'm like, I have my dream home and I have my dream job and I get to travel. I'm like, I get to do what I'm really good at and I get to have this. It's unreal.
Paige Buck [00:19:12]:
I think you're such a good model for noticing joy, like, taking the opportunity to notice it and celebrate it. I was thinking that listening to you, because when you shared that presentation, I have to go dig it out because I meant to send it to my mom, I was like, look, this is what somebody who works for us feels about. This is amazing. But also, I know if my brother asked me to give a presentation, I do not have a brother and my sibling does not teach 9th grade. But if I were asked to come speak to a group of students, I would probably, I'm sure I would find some joy and fun in sharing it, but I'd be all like, wonky and listen up, kids. And you just had this really beautiful way of giving the perspective of thinking about what you want to do and how you can manifest what makes you happy.
Marianne Jackson [00:20:04]:
And let's be honest, any opportunity I have for an audience, I'm like, I will take it. Even if it's like 9th graders in their fifth period on a Friday.
Paige Buck [00:20:13]:
I ithink you should share with our audience that you have this secret superpower and also this occasional hobby slash fun skill you like to trot out of rewriting songs. Because I'm surprised you didn't rewrite an 80s hit for your 9th grade for the presentation.
Marianne Jackson [00:20:36]:
Yes, I started doing that for friends’ birthdays. I mean, this is like a good, literally like 15 - 20 years ago, friends birthdays. I would rewrite usually like an 80s song. So I think I've actually written a couple for colleagues. I think Maggie has one. Yeah, Maggie has one. I haven't done any very recently.
Paige Buck [00:21:05]:
Didn’t you do one for Jess?
Marianne Jackson [00:21:08]:
Yes, I did one for Jess to the Jack and Diane, the John Mellancamp
Marianne Jackson [00:21:19]:
Jess has one, Brenda, our colleague Brenda has one, and Maggie has one. Yeah, I need to resurface that. I need to bring it back. It's been a few years since I've dug into it.
Paige Buck [00:21:30]:
It's pretty amazing when it happens. So you are often out in the world for us and not at your pink house. You're out both learning new trends and I’m curious to ask you what you are actively learning about, what you're curious to learn about. And then I'll ask you about trends you're seeing and trends you're forecasting.
Marianne Jackson [00:21:57]:
Yeah. Moving from being a producer where I was just very much in the trenches of managing teams and being on site for 14-hour days at events to really focusing on the business development side and the partnership side, I have the privilege now where I get to attend a lot of conferences. Now I just show up to the events, and I get to learn from my industry peers. One of the things that I'm seeing a trend for is more team celebrations, more all hands meetings, bringing colleagues together. Right? We do that for our own company, and I find it personally invaluable. We're an entirely remote team.
And I think, post COVID, so many companies are partially or fully remote teams. So I'm seeing this hunger for personal gatherings, and that shows, and I can just speak to three proposals that I have in the pipeline right now. One is a fundraising kickball tournament for a software company, which it's like, every time something comes in, it's always like, have you done this before? It's like, no, but we have all of the skills and all of the tools to do it. So have we done a massive fundraising kickball tournament? No, but can we? Most definitely. Another one is a 30th anniversary for a major gaming company, and it would be at multiple offices across the west coast. And then another one is an all hands retreat in Mexico for a global tech company. So, I mean, the common thread there is, these are all internal events, right? They're all, like, fun behind it and bringing people together behind it.
Paige Buck [00:23:49]:
Yeah. And what I notice is both the demand and the challenge. We certainly know plenty of clients and prospects who are doing this because there's been some sort of, like, edict from on high, get everybody back to the office.
Marianne Jackson [00:24:04]:
Right.
Paige Buck [00:24:05]:
The way to do that is to have cupcakes. And it's like, how's that working out? Is that working out well? Are people actually stoked to come in for cupcakes? No, not so much. Some of it presupposes that they've laid the groundwork of having a team culture where people do want to be with one another. That's not necessarily true for everybody. And some people have a lot more work to do in meeting people where they are now, physically and emotionally. Do you want to hang out with your colleagues?
Marianne Jackson [00:24:37]:
Yeah. This is the struggle for me, is the introvert factor.
Paige Buck [00:24:43]:
Right.
Marianne Jackson [00:24:44]:
I am, like, the most extroverted extrovert. Right. And I feel like my metaphor, too, is I'm also not a coffee drinker, so I never think about, people need coffee in the morning.
Paige Buck [00:24:53]:
Right.
Marianne Jackson [00:24:54]:
So I have to challenge myself to be like, oh, wait, these big, massive company team gatherings. We need to carve out space for the introverts that need more recovery time and need moreq quiet space.
Paige Buck [00:25:03]:
Or need and want an opportunity for one one-on-one or three small moments for connection and sharing and less, like, we're all doing this all at once and it's just one big. But we just finished a project like this for Tides, a really beautiful, wonderful, social justice oriented foundation here based in the Presidio in San Francisco, who grew hugely and went from being a local to a mostly remote team. And I walked through that space and found that there was so much desire for meeting your colleagues, meeting other teams, meeting people that you only know indirectly as someone who maybe does something for you once a month to get a chat processed. And they wanted an opportunity to share and connect and learn from one another. And you can have everybody in one big space and still be creating opportunities for those individual connections and it’s so rewarding to watch people gobble it up.
Marianne Jackson [00:26:06]:
Totally. I mean, our own company retreat is coming up in a month or so and we're going to meet a colleague that none of us have ever met beside myself. I'm so excited to meet her.
Paige Buck [00:26:18]:
Yeah. And I'm super excited for, we too have the work to do of being like, hey, so this thing is happening and we're all coming together and one person's like, what's that going to feel like?
Marianne Jackson [00:26:29]:
Right?
Paige Buck [00:26:31]:
Yes. Hanging out with twelve people all at once is really not my jam. And saying like, oh no, don't worry, we thought about that. We just have to back up and explain ourselves. We have a lot of space. We have a lot of space in our agenda. We have a lot of physical space, we have a plan for time to reflect..
Marianne Jackson [00:26:51]:
When you say it's like twelve people and we're going to do this for another client for 1200 people, it really doesn't matter. It's like the same parameters apply, right?
Paige Buck [00:27:03]:
Yes, absolutely. So you're attending a lot of events, you're getting an opportunity to learn. I know you, I don't know how long ago, time has no meaning anymore. You got a humbling experience attending an AI workshop. What are some of the other things that you're learning when you're attending these conferences?
Marianne Jackson [00:27:26]:
Honestly, I'm one of those people that is always just so hungry and eager to meet pretty much anyone. I will strike up a conversation with anybody. You mentioned the AI workshop. I think that I am one of those people that is kind of inherently resistant to newness. I don't know if you ever watched me work in a spreadsheet or try and adapt to a new tool, and it'll take me, like, a while to finally come around. Sitting in that AI workshop, I felt, wow, I'm behind the ball, and this is something that is coming in hot and coming in strong, and I need to not only personally adopt these tools to my workflow, but what can we bring to Kennedy Events and broadly to our clients. There's a lot out there, and I think it's moving at such a fast pace. And one of the biggest takeaways I had was the facilitator said somebody who has zero event experience who's using AI is going to operate at the same level as an expert who's got 25 years of event experience. And that was kind of like, took the wind out of me.
Marianne Jackson [00:28:42]:
Right?
Paige Buck [00:28:43]:
Yeah. Until they get on site.
Marianne Jackson [00:28:47]:
Right? Exactly.
Paige Buck [00:28:47]:
I'm like, they can make their deck. They can put their proposal together. Yeah, go ahead.
Marianne Jackson [00:28:57]:
The other thing, like I said, I always love to just chat with anybody, and it's like, when you're making those connections, they might not be the right person that's going to give you business or give you a great hot tip, but they might introduce you to somebody that can. And I think that that's so much about what my position is. You really have to get out there. Meeting face to face is invaluable. You can have a Zoom call, but you're not going to have that same bond as you would if you were, like, face to face. I'm finding so much value out of getting these in person events and getting to be at conferences and actually not producing them myself. Getting to be an attendee.
Paige Buck [00:29:40]:
Yes. Well, and there's value in being able to sit back and just observe, too, we so rarely get to do that.
Marianne Jackson [00:29:47]:
Last summer I attended a conference, and it took me a good 15 minutes to fully digest how much work went into all of the print and the signage. Because I'm like, I know how much work that takes. I don't know how many other attendees were walking the event floor and being like, wow, look at those banners. Look at all that weight binding. Wow, this is done beautifully. All that graphic design.
Paige Buck [00:30:12]:
I'm the person who's taking a photo of the little toiletry kit in the bathroom that somebody. Oh, look, they thought to put this out. I'm going to take a picture for our team.
Marianne Jackson [00:30:24]:
Exactly. There's so much work that went into this. I wanted to grab somebody next to me, I'm like, do you appreciate all of this? Somebody did this work.
Paige Buck [00:30:33]:
So close us out by sharing some horror stories. Or sometimes you overcame challenges. Because we've had plenty.
Marianne Jackson [00:30:42]:
Yeah. I mean, it was funny. Our more junior colleagues, when I'm training them, a lot of times they'll ask me, how do you know all of this, though? And it all just comes from event experience. And predominantly, I just call it event trauma. I feel like anybody that's worked in the event industry has that event trauma of, like, things go wrong and they're going to go wrong. I think that the one big takeaway for me, and maybe this is like my midwesterner mentality, is that pretty much any obstacle can be negotiated and overcome if you're willing to be nice and friendly and listen and offer compromises and food helps. But I don't know how many times I have told my more junior team to say, like, you pick up the phone, you have a conversation, somebody is not being an asshole just for the sake of it. There's something behind it.
Dig a little bit deeper. And I think by adopting that sort of mentality, nobody's out to get me. Nobody wants to ruin my event. Everybody at the event wants there to be success. Right? Through that, I've been able to wrangle really ornery teamsters on like a New York City loading dock in 18 wheelers. You were at that show or renegotiating a hotel contract when the client failed to account for a load in day for 1000 person event. Right? It's like, oh, wait, what do you mean? The program starts at eight in the morning with a plenary for 1000 people, and we don't have a load in day.
Paige Buck [00:32:25]:
How did you think all of this stuff was going to arrive there?
Marianne Jackson [00:32:28]:
Right? It's like you have a panic attack and then you kind of take a deep breath and you're like, it's solvable. It's solvable. I think you have to, a lot of times in events, tell yourself first thing, is anybody dying? Is anybody in cardiac arrest other than myself? No. Okay, let's fall for this. Yeah.
Paige Buck [00:32:50]:
One of our producers, Jen Dorland, likes to say there are no hearts in coolers here. And it took me a second to be like, oh, right, that's the same as like, this is not brain surgery, but this is consistently ranked one of the top five most stressful jobs. And I've known that since I was like 23 years old and remembered thinking, wow, I'm in a stressful job. It doesn't feel that stressful. But I find it exciting, but never able to justify in my mind how our jobs could be nearly as stressful as, say, ER nurses or doctors or EMTs or firefighters. And yet there's something about the intensity and the urgency of the moment when everything has to come together that can make it feel that way.
Marianne Jackson [00:33:41]:
I mean, I've always said, too, like, my favorite part of an event is strike because you've made it through. It's like, you've made it through it.
Paige Buck [00:33:49]:
Well, I like the lull in the afternoon of the second day of a conference where you're like, they've gone back into their sessions after the snack break. And then Malia, one of our other producers, used to say, now we're just babysitting.
Marianne Jackson [00:34:05]:
Yeah.
Paige Buck [00:34:06]:
Now we're just watching. Look, everybody's happy. They're great. We're just waiting for them to all walk out the door so we can then strike and be like woohoo! It’s over! But I think what you just shared about kindness and warmth and going such a long way and why people people and delightful are in our core values, it's the antidote to the stress of this work that we do.
Marianne Jackson [00:34:34]:
It is. And it's something that I hear not only from our clients, but also our vendors. It's something that stands out to our vendors. We have a reputation in the industry for being the nice ones. I think that there can be a reputation of event planners, of kind of having this diva persona. And the angry pointing and get this done now. And we are really respectful. And I don't care what your role is on site of that event. If you're on site at the event and you've got a job to get done, you have reverence in my book.
Paige Buck [00:35:12]:
Yes, we appreciate the security guard, the bathroom attendant, the loading guy. Absolutely. And I think sometimes they're surprised when you make eye contact and say, thank you.
Marianne Jackson [00:35:23]:
Yeah.
Paige Buck [00:35:23]:
Too bad that they're surprised, because it says something about how they're treated the rest of the time.
Marianne Jackson [00:35:28]:
Exactly.
Paige Buck [00:35:29]:
Yeah. Any final thoughts, words you want to share?
Marianne Jackson [00:35:36]:
I'm like, if anybody knows anybody at RuPaul's Drag Race, please send them my way.
Paige Buck [00:35:41]:
You manifested so much. You can manifest. I'm sure you can. Well, thanks for talking with me, Marianne. This has been delightful.
Marianne Jackson [00:35:50]:
Anytime I get to chat with you, Paige.
Paige Buck [00:35:52]:
Thanks.
Marianne Jackson [00:35:53]:
Thank you.
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PAIGE BUCK
Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.
About Kennedy Events
Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.
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