Cultivate Valuable In-Person Meetings and Events with Eric Rozenberg

Why most meetings waste money and time

00:00Bill Gallagher: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken, Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:28Bill Gallagher: There we go. Most meetings feel like big cost centers, big waste of money and time. You wonder why you're even doing it. Eric Rozenberg turns these big meetings where you all gather and fly in or do whatever you do, the hotel expense, everything else, into something that actually impacts the business, that drives the strategy of the business. His Why First Blueprint is what we're talking about today: turn face-to-face meetings into something with actual measurable results, measurable momentum for your business.

01:10Bill Gallagher: I don't know, I'm feeling a little groovy today. This is Bill Gallagher. This is the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I guess I haven't been in studio for a little while making, recording a show for I don't know, I've just been traveling so much the last little bit. It's nice to be home doing something. So we bring our show to you every week with a story, a lesson, an example from a business expert, a guru, an author, somebody in the world of Scaling Up, growing your business, leveling up. And we do that every week. There's more than 630 shows now, wherever you're getting this right now. So like, subscribe, turn on the notifications like that, and you'll get them in your feeds. If you go to our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter, join us for one of our monthly workshops on scaling or something to do with growth. Put on workshops every month, either virtual or in person. And you can find all that and more at scalingcoach.com. Scalingcoach.com is, oh, look at that long title there on the screen. But scalingcoach.com is the website to go to and that's where you find all that and more.

02:07Bill Gallagher: Anyway, without further ado, let me introduce our new friend, Eric Rozenberg. And Eric joins us from Florida today. He is the first European elected chair of the global board of MPI, the Meeting Professionals International. He is the host of the Business of Meetings podcast, and they got lots of episodes on making great meetings. He's an entrepreneur and a two-time bestselling Amazon author. We're going to talk today about his work on the why of meetings and how to make meetings better. He's also the founder and president of Event Business Formula and lives in Florida with his wife, but he's originally from Belgium. So Eric, welcome to the show.

02:57Eric Rozenberg: Thank you, Bill. I hope you have the subtitle for people who don't get my accent.

03:04Bill Gallagher: Your accent's not too bad. You've been in Florida long enough. Florida and Belgium is an interesting combination, that's for sure.

03:13Eric Rozenberg: Absolutely. I'm glad to be here. We're glad to be Americans with my wife, our three daughters, and to be working and living in this amazing country.

03:22Bill Gallagher: Mhmm. Yeah. So let's talk. Pardon me, a little something in my throat. Why don't you share with us first how you got your start in the whole event business? Like, what drew you to events? How did you come to be so tied to that?

03:44Eric Rozenberg: Thank you. Yeah, so I was a student in business in Belgium and a member of AIESEC, which is International Association all over the world. I was participating in meetings and congresses, helping organize them as well. And then when I graduated, all my friends were going to the large firms, and being involved in the student organization I was in touch with everyone recruiting at P&G and the same consulting and everything. But I didn't want to work in a large firm. But I didn't know what I was going to do. And I met a guy at the barbecue who had a stockbroker company, and I developed his entire marketing department. And after two years, everything was done. I was not passionate about the financial world, and I met a couple on holidays and they told me that they were doing incentive trips. And I said, what is that? They said, well, it's corporations that are creating unique programs to reward their best salespeople or their customers. And it's basically something you cannot reproduce if you go with your friends and family on holidays. I was like, woah, that's amazing. I didn't even know there was an industry doing that. So long story short, I got into partnership with them, didn't work out, and I decided to start my own business.

04:59Eric Rozenberg: And my two first clients happened to be Cordis from Johnson & Johnson. They do the stents. Someone from the family working there introduced me. And the other one was a friend from AIESEC who was the number three of Café de Colombia, Juan Valdés. And so I got into the meeting with the president, and then I did all the meetings, customer programs for them for years. And that's really how I started. It's a fabulous industry. I know sometimes it's considered, people saying, you're wasting money on meetings. It's because they don't know that it can be used in an effective way and it's part of the strategy. And just in terms of economic impact in the US, it's $1.4 trillion of economic impact. So it's a mega industry that's sometimes not very well known.

05:50Bill Gallagher: I think we all have different kinds of meetings. Like, many of us participate in trade shows or we go to conferences, and then we have our own sales meetings. We have customer meetings, user meetings. We have different kinds of things like that. And then you might also go to meetings or participate in organizing meetings. You and I are both in the EO organization, and we have been involved in both organizing as well as participating in those meetings in different ways over the years. There's a tremendous amount of money that gets spent, and we've all seen it where it goes wrong, where you pick the wrong hotel, the wrong time, you forget why you're doing the meeting. People get involved and they pick the program and then they start to fill it with things. Like, after a while, I was at a meeting in the Middle East just a couple of years ago. And so many of us walked out of the meeting like, why this hotel? Why this city this time of year? Who picked these speakers? It was just awful. I mean, there were moments that were great. And I would say that meeting was mostly salvaged by a few, like the actual human connections, not by the actual intended content, which was, well, all the speakers had been speaking before. They were all skilled at what they did. It was just like slightly off. Like, the purpose of the meeting, focus, the relatability of it was just a little bit off. And so the whole thing, like tremendous amount of money, it's not no value, but a very limited value where it could have been different.

The 10,000-person meeting with eleven different objectives

07:28Eric Rozenberg: Absolutely. I actually created a methodology with my business partner back in Belgium, but it started with the question I was always asking, especially sales directors. Why do you do a sales meeting every year? And they went, oh, because we do it every year. And I'm thinking like, oh my God, how can they even go to their board afterwards and justify that? And the best example I can think of is…

07:56Bill Gallagher: I'm sorry? I said because we did it before, because we did it last year, we did the year before, right?

08:04Eric Rozenberg: Exactly. It reminds me of a meeting I had with a board member, head of marketing and events and communication, of a very large financial institution in Belgium, which is an international brand. And there were seven people and we were discussing their upcoming 10,000 employee meeting. And I was asking them questions, and after I don't know, twenty, twenty-five minutes, the only thing I could hear is we need to align people, we need to align people, we need to align people. Great.

08:35Eric Rozenberg: Then I look at them and say, can you do me a favor? Sixty seconds of your life. Please, each of you, take a piece of paper, write down which is for you the three main objectives of the bank next year. And I collect the paper. Guess what? Seven people, eleven objectives. And I look at them and said, you want to align 10,000 people, you're not even aligned yourself. So in that case you have two options. The first one is who the hell is this guy? But thank God they went for the second option, which was like, ah, you made us think really. And so we start reviewing with them the whole process from the local wine and cheese evenings up to the sponsorship of the national soccer team, and we start looking, why are they doing this? What are the questions they should be asking? Who should be invited? How are they going to measure the impact? And that is a completely different approach. But I was just first of all by asking questions. And too often, people that are leading organizations, as well as the people that own an event business, are going straight to logistics instead of saying, okay, what's your industry? What are your challenges? Why do you do that? Who are the profile of the people coming? How are you going to measure success? And only then, of course, the logistics is very important, but it's almost a given that if you're working with professionals in the field, the logistics will be great. So it's more going back to the strategy. Why does a company invest sometimes a big amount of money? And I would tell you that I'm always surprised how much organizations can pay consultants to come—and we're talking like millions of dollars—and then when it comes to sharing the outcome, they just ask a junior person in the company to put a meeting together, thinking that it's going to inform everyone. It's fascinating how people can quickly forget about that.

10:37Bill Gallagher: As you talk, one of the things that occurs to me is that a lot of times people just sort of assume that, well, you put the right people in the room and you talk about the usual things and it's going to be fine. And for sure, like the meeting in the Middle East that I went to, it did accomplish something, right? We got together. But it missed an opportunity. They did bring people together, something moved, but there was a lot of money, right? You think about flying people—hey, $2,000 to $10,000 a person. Then you got the hotel, then you've got the meeting room and the AV and the food, and like, oh my goodness, right? It adds up.

11:23Eric Rozenberg: Absolutely. You know, what you described is also the international aspect and the cultural differences in management, and we can talk another time, but that is also a very important aspect. But we had a client which is the largest consulting firm in the world, probably. They had a new division which was more focused toward IT solutions, and one of the challenges was that the main company was not really recognizing them. And there was some sort of discrepancy in the brand and in the alignment of people internally. And so I was meeting with the head of that new division, and he said, we have this challenge. I said, okay, so what would be the best thing? Oh, the best thing would be for the global CEO to come and speak and broadcast that to the rest of the company. I said, wonderful. And they said, but I don't know when we're going to do that, where we're going to do that. And I was like, where is the majority of your people in Europe? Where is the CEO based? In London. Okay, just call his assistant, ask when he's got an opening in his calendar, pick the date, make sure he can come, and the rest we build around it. And it was like looking at me like, duh. So sometimes you don't have to start having complicated ways of looking at things. Always come back to the why of the meeting, to the why of the face-to-face in person. And the other thing I want to tell you that you mentioned and is so important, you know, people talking about technology, people are talking about AI is going to replace everything. I am so confident that it's never going to replace the face-to-face aspect. And yes, AI is phenomenal, and yes, you can be much more efficient, but the encounter you have at the trade show, the water cooler conversation, they don't happen online. And so there is a category of meetings or education that you can do online. But the rest, when it comes to business, when it comes to relationship with customer, when you do a sales team, with aligning all the company and making sure that everybody understands what's going on, as well as knowing what's going on in the industry, having new ideas, the serendipity of meeting someone face-to-face will never be replaced ever.

13:38Bill Gallagher: Yeah, that's really the key, right? When I think about my Dubai meeting, it's the time that we went to dinner. It's the time that we had the small breakout conversation. It's the little dinner and drinks on a boat that one of our friends organized and that I went along. And it's the dancing at 3 AM with the few of the people that stuck around. And were like, those are the times where we connected. Those are the times where you saw the character of people, where you grew to appreciate them more fully. Yeah, including the 3 AM thing, right?

14:18Eric Rozenberg: Absolutely. You know, that conversation in the bar, you know, that kind of thing.

14:21Bill Gallagher: You know, that's something that I would always make sure—

14:27Eric Rozenberg: You know, when I started my business, my first business, I was involved in everything. Nobody can do it better than me, it's my brand, blah, blah, blah. I mean, the classic mistake until I started delegating. But I would always make sure that the major program, even if I was not involved at all anymore in organizing it, I would be there the last evening at the bar with the client to prepare for the future. That's the best moment you have. Another thing that I'm thinking about, we're both coaching Accelerator for EO, okay? You can do this theoretically. We can do this online, and there's a part of this online. As you know, Verne Harnish is founder of that, not only of EO, but also the program, and we have videos of him explaining some part of the material, which is great. But when you speak in front of the entrepreneurs, when you see their reaction, when you ask questions, when you are an entrepreneur yourself and you hear other questions in the room that make you think about something else for your business, this is not something that you're doing online. You see the reaction, the nonverbal, and plus the interaction afterwards. So that's really a mix between hybrid, if you want, between what could be online but in person. And when you start thinking strategically about any type of organization, why are you bringing people together? What is the impact that you want to have? How does that fit in your strategy? Then you start looking at meetings as an essential part of executing a strategy.

Why AI will never replace water cooler conversations

16:06Bill Gallagher: You know, it's funny. So as we were recording, we're in the middle for that Accelerator program of Execution. The slides, the worksheets, the exercises, and the Execution Day—they're the slides and the stories that we tell. And I tell the same ones. I will have done this one again and again. There's a slight different emphasis. We're using more AI today than before, but the stories, the principles are largely the same. And I've now led this particular one for several hundred people this quarter across some different cities. And each person got different things out of it because of what they heard, because of what was going on in their life, because of the person they happened to be sitting next to that day, which maybe wasn't the person they were sitting next to the prior day or the last year.

17:04Bill Gallagher: Like that kind of thing, those unique serendipitous things. They give rise to insights and ideas that you can't get. The feedback from someone like you're working on your priorities or you're thinking about your meeting, and then somebody shares something that you weren't expecting, you weren't looking for, you didn't think it was broken in your business, and you realize, oh, I have a need for something. I have an opportunity. And I think there's a magic there. So constructing opportunities to gather people, right? And I mentioned being out dancing at 3AM and being in the bar and that kind of thing. And for sure, the connection. But you could also design it to get out of hand if you put too much social lubricant into the whole mix. If you set it up too crazy, like you can also, I've seen company meetings go wrong because we didn't stir the recipe just right. Let's talk about some of those. We're gonna talk about the FIFA World Cup, but before that, why don't you talk to us about a volcano going off and disrupting and bringing in?

18:09Eric Rozenberg: Yeah, so I was still living in Belgium and had friends that we were having lunch with some friends. And you know, in Belgium it's totally okay to have a glass or two of wine during lunch. So I'm serving everyone, and my friend Mark goes, no, no, I'm flying this afternoon as a private pilot. I said, okay. Five minutes later, he's got a phone call, hangs up the phone, looks at me. He said, Eric, give me a glass of wine. I said, Mark, you're flying this afternoon. He says, no, they're closing the airport. I said, what do you mean they're closing the airport? I look outside, felt like it was in Florida, like a little cloud and everything blue. And he said, no, it's the volcano in Iceland that was the name of it had erupted, and there was a cloud of ashes that was going over Europe, closing the airport one after the other. And so there you are, having lunch with friends on a Friday afternoon, wonderful. And the following week we had five programs, including an incentive trip to Vietnam. And it was like all hands on deck the whole weekend, trying to find solution, working with different partners, going back to the client and being able to offer a solution. That is something that you don't see because it's behind the curtain. But then you go on Monday morning to the client and you say, listen, this is what's happening. We're supposed to leave from Charles de Gaulle on Wednesday. The airport is still closed. People are stressed because they don't know that even if they can leave, are they going to be stuck in Asia. So I think you should postpone everything for three months. And they look at me and said, how much is it gonna cost? I said, nothing. They said, what do you mean nothing? I say, no, the airline here, I have an email, they're postponing at no cost. And when it comes to the local program, my partner on-site just totally agreed. It's not our fault, including the major hotel in Hanoi, the dinner in Halong Bay, everything. And so we postponed, we helped them communicate. People were calling to say thank you because they were stressed to go, and it was supposed to be a reward. And so to be able to do that, not only you need to understand why an organization is doing something, but you need to have great partners. And by the way, everything was said on the phone with my partner going to the client on Monday morning, and I never signed anything with the client to say that it won't cost more. That's probably not always advisable, but that's something you can do with the right people. And quite frankly, Bill, in twenty-five years of having planned meetings, incentive trips, sales meetings all over the world in over 50 countries, I've never had one project that was executed exactly the way it was planned. That's honestly, if you cannot cope with unexpected and somehow getting a kick out of something's happening and say, okay, I'm gonna find a solution, then this industry is not for you.

21:22Bill Gallagher: You know, I'm reminded how often just before any meeting, there are all kinds of problems, threats, concerns, issues that can get away. It starts to look like, well, maybe this is a bad time. Maybe we should kick the can down the road. Maybe we should cancel. I was helped plan and deliver a meeting on Santorini a couple of years ago, and the meeting was originally scheduled for 2020. Right. Then obviously it didn't happen. It got pushed out a few years. Then everybody came together and they made lots of modifications and that kind of thing to the meeting. In the end, lots of people got COVID at the meeting even several years later. But of course it wasn't the same global emergency anymore because of the changes in the survivability and the vaccinations, things like that. But it was fascinating how we had to be flexible. I was recently, I was on a trip just a couple of weeks ago and there was a security situation and lots of airlines canceled flights. And it looked like several of us who were due to fly out in a couple of days, our flights were all canceled and nobody's flying and all the flights are full. I think I booked three, my friend booked five different other flights on different carriers and options trying to get out. And I started to look at reorganizing my whole world, right? Like I would have to do this and that and so many different things to deal with it. And then in the end, I ended up with a routing. So not everybody canceled. There were a few carriers that were still flying, and I ended up flying through a different city and it was a longer flight, but I ended up getting home actually a little ahead of schedule from when I was planned to be and no disruption. So staying flexible, creating different options always seems to be the better thing. Like not just canceling everything and freaking out, but like, okay, let's create a couple plan Bs and Cs and Ds and let's explore some things and let's see what we can do. And then, you know, I had a lovely flight home and my life went on as as scheduled. Cost me a little bit more money, but I also made more money that week. I don't know why. Like, maybe the stars were aligned or like something was a little bit better, right? Because of that. It took care of itself.

Volcanic ash grounds flights three days before Vietnam

23:48Eric Rozenberg: The unexpected is the rule, that's for sure. The mindset is also very important. I remember we're doing a product launch for Schweppes, Cadbury Schweppes, Agrum back then, and we are in Seville and everything is wonderful and we're in a three days program and it's the end of the afternoon and we got the Venenciador and the music and the flamenco and everything. And the sun is shining and I called the airline and they said, sorry, we're gonna be two hours late, because they obviously fly several times in the day. And they were like, shoot, the whole program was great and that's the last cherry on the cake that unfortunately it's not gonna work. And that's where mindset is very important. I'd speak with my client and Theo was his name. He said, I got this. And he goes, he takes the mic, and it was his main client. We had a total of 180 people. He says, ladies and gentlemen, are you enjoying yourself? Yay. They had a great day. Yay. You like the sun? Yay. You know, it's raining in Brussels. Oh, I managed to delay the flight for two hours. Everybody was, yay. So it's really, to your point, the question of mindset. Try to focus on what you can control. That's not only in this industry, obviously. But if you can focus on what you can control and the rest, what you cannot control.

25:13Eric Rozenberg: So be it. But also, if I may add another example: when it comes to defining what you're doing with the meeting, and that's the best example I can think of with an insurance company. The general manager, Luke, was asking me to do an incentive trip in New York, and I asked him, "Okay, what are the challenges that you have in the company?" And he said, "Eric, we're doing this for twenty years. I know you're gonna do a great job. Do an incentive trip in New York." And at that moment, I could have said okay, but I looked at him and I looked at my watch and said, "Five minutes. Give me five minutes, not one more second, but I need to ask you more questions." He said, "Okay, yeah." And we ended up by understanding that the two main challenges they had: first, they had three generations of people working with each other, actually sitting next to each other but not really working with each other. And second, those who were in the company for twenty years—you could do anything, they would be blasé. And those who were there for two years, everything would wow them.

26:15Eric Rozenberg: And so knowing that, I started preparing for the program in New York. Yes, we had the motorcade with police escort. Yes, we had the helicopter tour. Yes, we had the private breakfast with fashion show at Saks Fifth Avenue before it opens. Quite frankly, Bill, if you are in this industry, it's easy. You just make a phone call, it's fine. But what we did is that we worked with a company called Song Division and we rented the Sears Studio. And so everybody arrived and there was a band playing rock and roll. And Luke could say, "This one played with Bruce Springsteen, this one played with Billy Joel, this one played with Jon Bon Jovi." They were all very well-known musicians. And then he looked at them and he said, "Now we're gonna split you in four groups, because there's three little studios and one main one, and you're gonna have two hours with one of the professional musicians to find a tune on which you're gonna sing and to write the words of your experience in New York the last three days." And of course, in each group we had people that were there for twenty years and people that were there for two years in the company, and in each group we had the three different generations in the same group. So they worked together, then they were recorded and sang in front of everyone else, and in the evening they thought that they were done.

27:31Eric Rozenberg: And we were staying at the W in Times Square. We went out and started walking towards the Hard Rock Cafe. And if you know Hard Rock Cafe Times Square, they have a marquee that goes out. So we had a special authorization to take a picture on this platform. We had the logo flashing on the marquee when we were approaching. We had the private room. We brought the musicians back and we had the entire company on stage singing the most entertaining of the four songs. I can promise you, since then, every time they see the ball falling on December 31, or if they see a movie with New York, they go, "Once I sang on the stage of the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square." And that is when you're creating moments that people cannot duplicate if they go back with their friends and their family. And that's where you leverage the power of incentive trip, a face-to-face meeting for an organization.

28:28Bill Gallagher: Yeah, I think, I mean, that speaks especially to connection and memories, right? Creating a full experiential moment in time. For sure the sounds, right, but the sights and sounds. And then you're in a restaurant, so there's gonna be some smells, right? And then, like, everybody together. It's really evocative of something and you can picture and feel and think about that time that you were there. Absolutely. I was there. I know what that's like, right? And if you have that shared between people, then you have a connection between them, right? What bonds us as families? Well, family holidays, but also the challenges that we got through together where we helped each other out. Like, all of those kinds of things connect us. It's a shared experience.

29:15Eric Rozenberg: Or a shared vision. As you know better than I do, when you can share something together, which is an experience or a shared vision, then you can rally everyone behind it. And that's the power then that you have with teams.

29:32Bill Gallagher: You know, one of my dearest friends also produces events as a production company, a different kind of events. They do like the halftime shows, they do the expos in Dubai, they do the big games and the things like that that go on—the big spectacles. And they take years, and they cost a lot of money. And teams, you know, toil away in Kazakhstan and other places to create these big kinds of things. You have a story to share about FIFA World Cup. I think it'd be a good time to talk about that. You said you could talk for a while on this. I'll cut you off in twenty minutes.

Creating memories people cannot duplicate

30:15Eric Rozenberg: Yes. Yes. By the way, your friend putting on the halftime show—I think I know who you're talking about. This company and what they do just with the halftime show, I'm always fascinated because everybody's watching the artist. I'm watching the preparation.

30:30Bill Gallagher: Performers and they've got pyrotechnics and it's over the top.

30:34Eric Rozenberg: How they put that together, how they set up everything and dismantle everything in five minutes—it's spectacular. Really spectacular. So yeah, the FIFA World Cup was 1998, and it was in May that my client, which was Cafe de Colombia—Juan Valdez, the president—called me and said, "Eric, I have all the officials from Colombia. I have the top people in the coffee industry in Europe that are coming, so I need to have a group of 30 people for the semifinal and the final of the World Cup in Paris." And I went like, "But it's end of April, beginning of May. This is happening in July. I mean, everything is sold already." He said, "I know, but I can't help but I need you to deliver that." So I started looking, found somebody I had met at a conference that was involved in a professional organization. I thought I could trust her, which was a big mistake. And I went back to him, I said, "I found the person, this is the price for the tickets, it's insane." He said, "I have no choice." So he wired the money. I paid the tickets. We went with the hotel and everything, and then I went on the inspection a few days later to Paris.

32:03Eric Rozenberg: And she wasn't there. She sent me somebody who's like an interim person. And I looked at that lady and I said, "She doesn't have the tickets, right?" I had this sixth sense. And she said, "I don't think so." I became pale. So first thing, I went back to Brussels and I went to see the president of the company, my client. And I said, "Listen, this is what's happening. I don't think that she has the tickets." And he became—Bill, he was like pale. I thought he was going to faint. He said, "You don't understand who's coming." I said, "Yes I do." And I told him, "So you remember the first time we met, you said the people that you know in the same student organization, when we promise something, we deliver. I don't know how, but I'm going to deliver." And so for a month I met everyone in the industry, in the soccer part in France. And if you were involved in 1998 for the World Cup in Paris, you know there was a big scandal all over the media about the fake tickets. And major companies had 100 clients and on the morning of, they couldn't go because they were fake tickets. So long story short…

33:21Eric Rozenberg: I found somebody who had a ticket, but not only for the semi-final and the final. In the package, which was extremely expensive, there was the concert of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras under the Eiffel Tower. And so I bought the thing. I went back to my client, I said thank you for your trust, and said here are the tickets for the semi-final, here are tickets for the final. By the way, thank you for your trust. Here, you can invite everyone to the concert of the Three Tenors. And he had tears in his eyes. It was just amazing.

33:57Eric Rozenberg: And so we went there and it was Friday, July 10th, 1998. I'll never forget. We're coming back from the concert of the Three Tenors, we're going to the hotel. It's about midnight, midnight thirty, and then he looked at me and said, oh, by the way, on Sunday, in two days, we need first to have a reception at the consulate, Les Invalides. And I look at him. It's impossible. I cannot be there at 2:30 and have your reception, and at 4:00 we need to be at the Stade de France. France is playing against Brazil. Everybody's, I mean the traffic is going to be insane. It's impossible to do it. He said I have no choice, it's a political thing.

34:40Eric Rozenberg: So we went at 2:30 to the Invalides, and when they came back an hour later, it's 3:30, thirty minutes later we need to be in the Stade de France, which is impossible. So we go in a maroon Renault Espace. I'm with the president in the first car and we wait, and he said Eric, let's go. I said please give me five minutes. And here you are, the police escort that was actually going to Charles de Gaulle to bring Henry Kissinger who was flying there. I had managed to get in touch with the dispatch and the person responsible for that. So they came officially, said that we were in the car, and we went from the Invalides to Stade de France in less than thirty minutes on the day of the final with all the traffic blocked. We were going counter traffic. We arrived just in time and it was the final. I can tell you, since then, I've never had so much stress over a period of six months. But we're still thinking, talking about it today. There's always a solution. Always a solution. But obviously, that little bit of luck.

35:45Eric Rozenberg: But this is something, and I shortened the story because we're on your podcast and I don't want to bore people. But if I tell you all the moments that I thought I had the ticket and that someone was lying, that someone was trying to sell fake tickets, and then they were, it was just insane. And finally we went to see France winning three-zero against Brazil, which for Belgians hurt a lot, because in Belgium, we support Belgium, and then we just want to know who's going to beat France. That's the only thing that matters. We want anybody to beat my enemy. It doesn't matter, we'll root for anyone else.

36:19Eric Rozenberg: I'm supporting the US, so I don't have to bother about that. But it was just amazing. A unique experience with access to the Club France on the Champs-Élysées. It was just a unique experience. And next year it's coming now here in North America, so I'm not doing that. I'm not planning meetings anymore. I'm helping business owners in our industry to grow their business. But the next time I said I can help you with everything, but I'm not responsible for the tickets.

36:58Bill Gallagher: Well, if you find yourself on the West Coast for that, you'll have to come visit us, maybe stay with us for a day or two. Do some things. I know they're going to do some stuff up in Seattle, but yeah, it'll be very busy.

37:12Bill Gallagher: So I'm hearing a few things, right? I'm hearing about creating memories and emotional connection, creating some feeling around things and touching on all the senses. I'm hearing like experiential. I'm also hearing like the importance of remembering why you're doing the meeting, or actually just thinking about and declaring why. Like sometimes you forgot why, you didn't say why, you just said a meeting. It was unconscious. And then it becomes something to invest in, not a big mere expense. You're spending money to create a particular outcome that drives something. But you know why you're doing the meeting. And we've alluded to it a little bit, but maybe now is a good time to walk us through, what are the seven steps that you take companies through?

Police escort to World Cup final after fake ticket scandal

38:04Eric Rozenberg: Yes. So thanks for the question. I'm not going to go into the details, but starting with the most important one that you mentioned, and that to me is the key to the whole process, is going there and positioning yourself as a strategic partner. If you are the commercial director of company XYZ and I come to you and I say Bill, how many people are coming? Do you want double room, single room? Do you have any vegetarian? Do you want a welcome cocktail? Do you want a farewell dinner? You immediately look at me as the specialist of logistics, and I'm not differentiating myself from anybody else.

38:47Eric Rozenberg: Now, if I come to you, and instead of asking those questions, which are important, but we'll come to it later in the process, if I come to you and say, if I understand you well, your industry, the main challenges is this. From what my research told me, you're trying to do this with your company and those are the objectives that you have next year. And you say yes. Who is coming to that meeting and what do you expect them to do afterwards, and how is this going to impact your bottom line? I'm positioning myself in a completely different way. And so that's the very first thing, is to understand the industry that your client is in, to understand their challenges, and then to move into the specific meeting and what it is that they are trying to achieve.

39:38Eric Rozenberg: And then you go into the design based on all of the above. Obviously, you have the execution, you have the feedback afterwards, but what you do, the next step, is to measure the impact. And in order to measure the impact, you don't wait till that moment. It's part of the first conversation. And you can even link sometimes your fees to the success and have the opportunity to have even a flat fee or success fee based on those outcomes. But it's very important to know what you're going to measure and how you're going to measure it.

40:14Eric Rozenberg: For instance, we had a client. They were doing an annual retreat and they had specific objectives, and we had the flat fee and different bonuses based on a survey that they would answer, a specific question that we agreed upon from the beginning. And the good thing is we had two charter planes for the company in two different locations, so when we were flying back, people had to answer the survey in the plane. If not, they couldn't get out. So we got all the results. And so when you're able to measure that, then it's a different story for your client as well. Again, if you're the commercial director of a company, I give you all the data, you can go back to your exec meeting and say this is what we invested, but this is how we're measuring it. And that can be even one, two, three months down the road.

41:05Eric Rozenberg: And last but not least, at the end, is always trying to do something different. Don't try to do something bigger or more expensive. Always look at doing something completely different that ideally they're not going to compare. When it comes to sales meetings, it's very easy because there's new material, there are new products, whatever it is. But even when it comes to an incentive, I was thinking of Sony Music, was one of our clients. We did a fabulous

41:35Eric Rozenberg: Incentive trip in Zimbabwe. I went to Victoria Falls and everything. They came back, the client came back and bought a page of advertisement in the industry magazine at that time to thank them for the amazing program. And two years later, we had to do another program for the same people. But this time we went to India and did something completely different. They went back, they bought the cover of the magazine. The competitors were calling my clients, 'What did you do with them? It's just insane.' So it just starts with why you're doing this, understanding the industry, understanding the objective, understanding the challenge of the client. Go back to specific meetings, how you're going to define success, what is the objective that they're trying to reach, then you go into the design, then you go into the execution, then you go into the measurement, and then you go into the follow-up and doing something completely different. And so at every step of the way, there's a different approach, there is different questions you should ask yourself. And that's in summary, if you want, how we've looked at it and where we were able to win business even during the subprime crisis with my business partner and I. At that time we developed that methodology. But at the end of the day, it's going back to say understanding your clients, understanding the needs, focusing on the customer. That's what it is, instead of going straight into the logistics. And that's how I think that will improve our industry, but also how we use the face-to-face meeting in a more strategic way for any organization. And I can summarize that by telling you that you can think of any business challenge: aligning your team, motivating your sales team, relationship with customer, sharing information, whatever it is. If you want to be successful down the road, you will always have a face-to-face meeting.

43:38Bill Gallagher: You know, bringing in the face-to-face, we started to have face-to-face meetings in the latter part of 2020 and even into '21 by being creative with it, right? And that was among the most extraordinary constraint of our lifetime. But we had, generally speaking, we had outdoor meetings and we created environments where we could begin to come together and have outdoor meetings again because we saw it was important to have the unplanned times. We do great Zoom meetings. I have a Zoom meeting tomorrow for some hours with a team in New Zealand, and they're very productive. They're very efficient in times, but we don't get the richness that we get with the other meetings. Now, if we can get them together and me remote, or we can do some things to improve it, but complementing it with something. And this is true, like across the board, right? I was running a fashion jewelry company with my wife some years ago, and when I first came into the company, they had a number of meetings with like department store buyers and others in these drab buying offices in New York. And it was really depressing spaces with bad lighting and things like that. Everybody'd arrive and there'd be bags opening up. There was nothing remotely glamorous about it. Yet our customer, our partner would not sell our product in that way. They would put it in a beautiful showcase and then there'd be people smiling at you, be the music in the background, or maybe somebody playing the piano or that kind of thing, like a great created experience. I looked at other companies and I'm like, we can't do this anymore. And then I looked at some of our trade shows and they were abusively expensive and often just crowded, noisy crap shows of things. So we started booking premium suites in cool hotels and then bringing in like cookies or food or things like that, and picking a playlist for it and decorating the room and showcasing the thing, and then bringing people into like a beautiful hotel and welcoming them. Here's a glass of wine or something. Mostly they declined the wine or champagne, but they, because it's North America and we don't drink in the middle of the day here, right? Unlike you Europeans. Right? So we put that, they'd be like, 'Oh, but I'll try that little truffle' or something like that, right? So we created memorable experiences for people. And when I think about that, like with all employee meetings, customer meetings, that kind of thing, had a fairly significant company a few years ago, a thousand people in this company. And the owner's like, 'No, we're just going to have it in our training room.' I'm like, 'Your training room is awful. It's a windowless dreadful room.' And so they have 35 people in it. And then the next time I really, and I'm like, this was a depressing thing. You didn't make your people feel special. Bring them here and you saved yourself the hassle and maybe a little bit of money, but you don't need to save that money. And so I pushed on it and the next meeting was in La Jolla. And now we're in La Jolla in this large house that they rented on the beach, and we were meeting. He's like, 'This is I think the best meeting that I've ever had.' And it was a little cramped. It wasn't a professional meeting space, but it was cool. We were right on the beach. I'm like, 'Okay, let's go out and let's do a couple of circles out on the beach and let's pass the ball around and talk,' and that kind of thing. We've got, I think, 35 people in this meeting. And we had like seven people staying in the house, the other people staying at a neighboring property, but we're using the place and the environment to create something that's meaningful and memorable, right? Designed around producing a particular outcome and pulling all the levers, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the music, the way we interact with people, right? That's not just a windowless conference room in the basement of a hotel somewhere, right? You could go to a Marriott conference room and no complaint on Marriott. Like I just randomly, it's the biggest brand, right? But like anywhere around the world and you could do that kind of thing. And you really have to do a lot to create a memorable thing in a windowless ballroom.

The seven-step Why First Blueprint

47:59Eric Rozenberg: For every industry, for every profession, for every company, you will have bad examples, which unfortunately is at some time most of the time what people insist on. But if you look, you're talking about the trade show and the bad experience you have, I would offer that it's also depending on the organizer, the way they structure it. But if you, I remember an interview from Gary Shapiro, who's the president of CES in Las Vegas. And he was sharing a story of the president of, I don't know which tech company, a huge tech company, who was thanking him for organizing CES because he said, 'In three days or four days in a week, I actually met all my clients. So you're saving me six months of trouble.' So it depends on how you organize that. It depends on how you structure and design everything. And it depends before anything else to go back on why is it that you're investing in that.

49:02Bill Gallagher: Create some joy, create some excitement. So much to think about here. Look, if you want to talk to Eric or learn more about his work, Eric Rozenberg, thank you for joining us. Eventbusinessformula.com.

49:14Eric Rozenberg: I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. Also on LinkedIn, eventbusinessformula.com.

49:19Bill Gallagher: That's where you can find him. We'll put that in the show notes. It's there on the screen if you're watching in video. Such a great conversation, stimulating. Think about making more powerful, better, memorable events with great return, whether it be for customers, employees, the market in general. A lot to learn there. Let me also remind everyone about our website. If you want to join us for a workshop in person or online, we do them every month, right? And sometimes more often than that in one month. So you'll find all those and more at scalingcoach.com.

49:56Bill Gallagher: Where we have, of course, all the back catalogue and a bunch of other groovy stuff. More than 630 episodes. Let me give a big shout out and thanks to my friend and my mentor, Verne Harnish, who created the whole Scaling Up framework that we use. It's the core of our work. And a big thanks to Anna Codina and others and Wanda for producing our show, getting it out every week. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, for listening. Until next time, keep scaling.

50:26Bill Gallagher: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.