Small Players: Every Planner Has a Story

The so-called mom-and-pops of the meeting planning world are hardly a homogenous group. There are indeed one-person shops that organize one or two meetings a year for one client. But there also are others who have found their niche, and a way of doing their job, that allows them to single-handedly manage the meeting needs of Fortune 500 companies and some of the largest associations in the world. No matter what, they all have an interesting tale to tell about how they confronted a challenge that led to a career and a business.

Some of these meeting planners were entrepreneurs who were already in some area of the business and took advantage of an opportunity that came with a challenge, such as a shift in the industry or downsizing. Others started off as reluctant volunteers who were asked to organize an event, found it to be fun and were surprised to learn they could make a few dollars at it.

Here are the stories of just a few of them.

• President: Jane Ann Hart
• Headquarters: Brigantine, N.J.
• Year founded: 1992
• Staff: Sole proprietor
• Sample clients: Weill Cornell Medical College, Novo Nordisk, Holtzbrinck Publishers, Pharmaceutical Advertising and Marketing Excellence Awards (PhAME)

Back in 1992, Jane Ann Hart was a meeting planning manager with Schering Plough. She thought she saw the way companies like hers in the pharmaceutical sector were going: toward cutting costs, redefining their infrastructure — and outsourcing their meeting planning services to third parties. As a result, JAH Meeting Planners was born.

Today, Hart's company manages meetings, events and incentive programs nationally and internationally. It produces a minimum of 15 programs per year, almost all for corporations, with attendance ranging from 20 to 1,000.

"I have not produced a tradeshow, although I have managed meetings for clients where we have incorporated a tradeshow as part of the program," Hart said.

• Founder and president: A.C. Schrader
• Headquarters: Las Vegas
• Founded: 1957
• Staff: 16
• The numbers: Serves 16 medical universities throughout the U.S.
• Sample clients: University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Emory University

Although 14 people work in the Oak Park, Ill., office for the company A.C. Schrader founded 50 years ago, he and his wife Dorothy still handle their accounts from their own office in Las Vegas.

The specialization in university health care programs all started, Schrader recalled, when he attended a World Health Organization meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, in the '50s. "I got talked into representing a university by the minister of health," he said.

That has evolved into what Schrader does today: Organizations like WHO and the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention send him a wish list of international sites (about 18 per year) where they'd like to hold their annual meetings on epidemiology and public health. A.C. and Dorothy then go about fulfilling those requests.

The Schraders identify university medical programs that could be featured participants in each of the destinations. Medical students, interns, professors and practitioners from those universities then present their research on epidemiology and public health in meetings at the host site.

• President and CEO: Catherine Griffin
• Headquarters: Darien, Ill.
• Founded: 1997
• Staff: Sole proprietor
• Sample clients: Big-name pharmaceutical companies

Twenty-five years ago, Catherine Griffin was working hard as a city planner, but decided she needed to make a career change and wound up in travel school. "I wanted to try something different, and I worked my way up," she said.

Griffin moved through a succession of jobs in the ensuing years in the travel, incentive and meeting industries. When one company she worked for decided to downsize, she took it as a sign and put out her own shingle, A La Carte Planners, in 1997. Griffin was already part of a freelance meeting planner's network, so some jobs began to trickle in.

"The first six months were rough," she said. "But I picked up more work and filled in at different companies as a contract planner."

It didn't take long for her to tap into a specialty. Griffin grabbed a tiger by the tail, the pharmaceutical meeting market, and morphed her one-person shop into a successful company.

• Managing partner: Gary Rosenberg
• Headquarters: Culver City, Calif.
• Founded: 1988
• Staff: 5
• Sample clients: California School Nurses Assn., California Dietetic Assn., Quality Healthcare for Culturally Diverse Populations

At the risk of stating the obvious, Gary Rosenberg said it pays to network. Rosenberg met Marge Risinger at a Meeting Professionals Intl. (then Meeting Planners Intl.) Southern California chapter event in 1986.

"We were independent meeting planners, and she had just moved here (Southern California) from Colorado," he said. "A few months later, I had a potential client who seemed too big for me to handle alone. So we partnered on that and represented ourselves as bigger than we were."

They officially launched their company in 1988, and ever since they have kept it determinedly small. One employee handles exhibit sales and management, another registration and speaker liaison, and a third takes care of badging, credit cards and such. Rosenberg and Risinger each have about half the accounts, dealing with hotel logistics and planning with clients, but everybody is cross-trained to do everybody else's job when and if necessary.

• CEO and founder: Loretta Lowe
• Headquarters: San Francisco
• Founded: 1998
• Staff: Sole proprietor
• Sample clients: Key software companies, NAIFA Peninsula, Peninsula Estate Planning Council

As a sole proprietor (at least, for now) Loretta Lowe is used to working on her own, but that doesn't mean she believes she can be the best possible meeting planner without any help whatsoever. She's the first to admit the need to share ideas with others in her profession.

In fact, Lowe is one of the co-founders of the Web site MeCo, which stands for Meetings Community.

"I also teach meeting and event planning at San Francisco State University and would like to think that I have helped some future professionals in some small way," she said.

As an independent meeting planner, Lowe serves about eight to 10 clients a year, some with multiple meetings in that time period. In the fall, she'll be reaching out for some help and hiring her first employee.

She's also often asked to make miracles happen. Lowe spoke with Tradeshow Week from Spain, where she was visiting sites in Puerto Banus for a client who wants a sales conference with a James Bond theme. Her mission? Convince an Aston Martin dealer to loan her a $500,000 car for the event.

• President: Tiffany Danley
• Headquarters: Dove Canyon, Calif.
• Founded: 1982
• Staff: Four full-time, three part-time
• The numbers: $1 million in revenue in 2006
• Sample clients: Denny's, El Pollo Loco, Coca-Cola, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard

Tiffany Danley's first event was the 1982 premiere of MGM/United Artists' film "Cannery Row."

"There was no such thing as event planning then," said Danley, founder and president of Success Unlimited. "I was working with civic groups in Monterey County, Calif., as a volunteer. The local chamber of commerce told the studio about me. They needed someone to do this event in three weeks. We attracted 200 movie critics, raised $75,000 for the Steinbeck Library, and Success Unlimited was born."

In those days, she organized four to 10 festivals, concerts, sporting and special events every year. By 1987, her company was producing and managing corporate meetings and marketing campaigns. Six years later, her annual calendar had 20 to 30 events on it. She's coordinated food and wine festivals, Beach Boys and Pointer Sisters concerts, and events in conjunction with a visit to Northern California by Pope John Paul II.