Lessons from the Field: Find Yourself a Great Team

This blog post continues a series of lessons from the field as a new event business. See: Lessons from the Field: Be Open for Business; Lessons from the Field: Focus on Great Strategy; Lessons from the Field: Become an Expert, not a Jack

Lesson 4: Find yourself a Great Team.
In my last blog I spoke about become an Expert and not trying to be a Jack-of-all-trades. As an Event Expert surround yourself with other Experts who fill in your weaknesses. This could be as employees or independent contractors, or even more simply as fellow vendors with whom you work. Building a great team of colleagues will support and promote your business as your develop and grow. They will be the partners who make you look good and vice versa. So the task is to surround yourself with great people – for me that means creative, curious, at-their-best, innovative service providers who demonstrate that willingness to think and the appetite to try new things.

And you may just find a funny thing will happen. If you know yourself, remain open to possibilities and deliver great service, your team will do the sales work for you. Indeed, I have yet to really need to sell myself. Through diligent networking locally and internationally, by attending and speaking at conferences, by entering and winning awards, by being an actively engaged member in industry organizations - like ISES, the absolute best spend of money I have ever made – I have developed a great community of colleagues who have kept me in business. By delivering what I promise and offering something unique, one of my biggest surprises has been that the variety of individuals and vendors who I have enjoyed working with on projects continue to bring me along with them to the next one, reinforcing our teamwork and building bigger and better events every time.