Welcome to the GuiltTrips podcast. I'm your host, Kendra Lockhart. As a goldsmith and
gemologist, I'll be speaking 24 carat on all things jewelry, metals, and gems. Join
me plus a few friends to demystify both materials and designs as your private jeweler. Let's
tune in on these topics and get golden. As we enter spring here in Chicago, there is naturally
going to be an uptick of social opportunities, both within the industry and ones that are
adjacent to it. Having been the artist, the salesperson, the director, and either the
producer or co-producer when it comes to events, this is a topic I'm looking forward to discussing
and sharing my wisdom because there are more ways to do this wrong than there are to do
it correctly. While this may be specific to my trade, it's not too far off to borrow the
ten steps that I've created for myself and apply it to whatever opportunity that you
need to put on as a function, whether that's an art show, an in-store sales event, a networking
opportunity, or simply a big open house that may even be off-site, somewhere like the country
club you belong to, a fundraiser for the local firefighting department. So let's jump in.
The place to start is timing. I highly recommend subtracting three months from your ideal date
that you want to put on the calendar. You're going to have to realize that it's not just
your schedule, it's like an airport coordinating quote unquote the flights of your attendees,
your potential VIP list, any sort of catering opportunities that may already be booked at
this time, picking where it's going to be located, and seeing if it falls near or on
top of personal or cultural holidays. The three months out rule gives you grace and slack
around any errors that are going to show up, any dropouts, any plan Bs, any last minute
restitutions, any staffing emergencies, any blindsides, you know, the classic plot twists
where you hear that Murphy's Law of if anything can go wrong, it will. On the flip side of
that, to argue for luck and fortune, wouldn't it be great to know that it's all buttoned
up and that it was smooth sailing and gives you time to decompress and internally prepare
instead of cramming the night before the exam. Next comes picking a theme or having a vision.
Why are you putting on an event? And let's say it's for a cause, or you're introducing
a new collection. Great. Answer the next question at least three other times. So that what?
So that it raises money for the local firefighters union. So that what? Perhaps you can cultivate
new clientele. So that what? Here's my big one for my business. So I have a template
and a portfolio to approach other non for profits for future collaborations and community
intersections. So do you see that what you're trying to do by picking a theme and having
a vision is stretching potential to fall into the short sightedness of any type of event
or styling for your business, for your clientele, for your new product, for your community,
and so on. Next is making a budget. And the reason we want to make a budget is to take
this from an open loop and having the bills stack up without your attention on it. You're
creating a closed loop and a parameter, which also gives you a baseline for how successful
this event was monetarily. If I'm throwing a $5,000 event is my goal to have $10,000
return on investment $15,000. Am I okay with breaking even? And simply having the assets
from it, the pictures, the news feature, the social media responses that I can turn into
testimonials or reviews. So you have to come up with a budget because immediately your
mind will start figuring out how to allocate it. Is this enough money to have full appetizers?
Is this enough to have drinks, sir? What would I need to do as far as staffing extra security?
How about if I'm paying my employees time and a half to work after store hours? Does
anybody need to have a stipend for any sort of uniform or depending on the type of theme,
a costume? It gives you room to have what I call a crash pad just in case you're running
too close and it might show up in the quality of what you're attempting to produce or that
you're short changing your ability to choose contractors and vendors. Without a budget,
it's pretty challenging to stay grounded and make clear decisions on your creation. From
there, you're going to move on to choosing the location. If you're doing this in-house
and under the roof of your showroom, what is the maximum capacity as far as attendees?
Will that dictate your invitation list? Or does it make more sense to do this offsite
and have amenities such as I doubt anybody has a full kitchen, the way that a different
venue might or multiple bathrooms and it's not so much of a security risk to take people
into the back of house if your bathroom happens to be private and for employees only? The
reason why you might want an offsite location is your store might be located in an area
with terrible parking and now you're going to congest that with 300 more attendees, you're
going to cause a shared frustration between yourselves and them. It's important to discern
and you've heard it a million times in real estate, location, location, location. You're
going to need to draft your marketing plan or campaign or sprint. It's going to be congruent
with any sort of theme or vision you have and it's going to anchor your why. It's your
potential to sell this, to PR this, to market this, to circulate this, to get it visible
and possibly shared and discussed. Are you going to reach out to publications? They have
publishing calendars, which is why again, you want to be 90 days back. We had a window
and a cutoff of six to eight weeks of submission for being published in what to do in Chicago
if we were having an event and that was critical to stay within those parameters because they
were non-negotiable. I couldn't be eight and a half weeks. Eight means eight because I'm
on somebody else's timeline as well as deadlines. Is the marketing going to be your email list?
Are you going to vet your VIPs and incentivize them coming because you know that they're
more likely to show appreciation in a potential purchase? Would you like to use the party
angle of it to personally thank them for their past patronage? Or is this more democratic?
Is this going to go out on the socials and come one, come all, which obviously doesn't
need a whole lot of budget, but because the social media is just that and a little less
formal and a little less professional and even a little less transactional, is it harder
work? Is it more labor to get those RSVPs? Unlike a fundraising event where I usually
receive an invitation in the mail with an RSVP card that I have to mail back. I already
have made the commitment of going down to my post office and putting my hat in the ring.
Congratulations, you're halfway there. Now it starts to go from that invisible to the visible
and the conceptual into the tangible. Your next step is to invite the talent. Are you
going to be showing the work that you make yourselves, such as a new collection? Are
you an authorized dealer and can get on memo, have a rep, bring in some special pieces so
that there's a flavor of urgency? You snooze, you lose. If you don't come to the event,
it's no longer available, which you'll see in some of the branded designers. Is this
more collaborative where your address is hosting a variety of local artists and talent? So
once you decide the type of creations that you'd like to feature, consider how you want
to highlight it and also consider which pieces or artists have work that's easier to obtain.
Remember, even though you're booking this 90 days back, time flies. The next step is
to onboard the participants. Is it going to take significant money, time, labor, or contracting
to get them here? If they are local talents, how have you juried them to participate? Are
you taking a deposit? Are you creating a contract where they are obligated to participate
or give you X amount of days or weeks notice if they bail or fall through? How I ended
up meeting my co-producer, Liz, from Artopia Chicago, is that an artist who pulled out
of a show down in the Pilsen neighborhood was responsible for replacing himself. She
wasn't going to do that. She was busy doing things that only she could do. So my photographer
friend called me and said, I've already paid for my spot and my table. The invitations
have already gone out. I have a wedding conflict. I need to go shoot. Would you like to take
my place? Absolutely. It was that easy. So make sure you have that kind of insurance
in place as far as who is occupying your available spots. And now you're going to want to stage
the event and the collections. If you have a one of a kind piece next to all the other
one of a kind pieces, all at one case, you're going to create gridlock or bottlenecking
as far as the attendees footprints in your showroom. So this is where people who are
really good at planograms and maybe even somebody who is that genius at doing the seating arrangement
at a wedding can be your secret weapon. You're going to want to make sure that people migrate
in groups with a threshold to them. Otherwise, it's going to become comical as well as uncomfortable.
There's nothing worse than trying to squeeze through people or wait too long to see what
they're all trying to look at. Or if you're a salesperson, the ratio of instead of one
to four, one to six, it's one to 20, all asking you the same thing. And it also becomes a
security risk, especially if the items that you've got are extremely high value. Good
luck keeping track of absolutely everything if you're just plain outnumbered as well
as having to function through some situational claustrophobia. In addition to staging your
collections, now you're going to plan the layout. Are you going to need extra furniture
in? If you have people who are part of the ADA, if there are people who are compromised as
far as their ability to stand too long, or require any sort of assistance to come to
your event, do you have rest areas for them? Are you considering accessibility? Now, obviously,
you can't accommodate absolutely everything, and that probably should be disclosed in any
sort of invitation or instructions that you're sending out. But consider it because you really
don't know who will show up. Not everyone is full disclosure and transparent about any
sort of special needs. So make sure that if this is the case, that you're putting it
in areas that are the shortest distance between A to B for them, it will alleviate some of
your regular flow as far as walking the showroom, the floor, the collections, the stations,
however you plan this. And it's also a convenience and a courtesy to them. And you never know
sometimes the tiniest bit of compassion comes back threefold to you. And last, but certainly
not least, where is your POS station? That stands for point of sale. Will you have employees
walking the floor with remote checkout abilities, such as they have a square reader, they have
wireless credit card adapters, they're using their phone, they're using an iPad for the
inventory, they've got software that allows them to be mobile checkout units, or is there
going to be a table with multiple salespeople, or is it just one man or woman show at the
quote unquote cash register? This is important because if you are going to go with that many
more people than usual in a room, and you are working either with an end time to the
event, and having to figure out how many people are going to buy, and when you plan to end
and close your doors, is their alcohol our people under the influence? Do they need to
get home is this running late in their impatient? Do they have babysitters? You have to make
it a smooth wrap it up as it was to enter the event. I hope this decoded the mystique
and magic of planning an event or a sales show. Of course, I wish you the best of luck.
And more importantly, I wish you the best of plans. And I'll leave you with a bonus.
There are five C's to event planning concept, context, content, coordination, and communication.
The mirror of that is the five P's of event planning, product, price, place, promotion,
and people. Wishing you a lot of success. Go get them.
Thank you for listening and learning with me. I would love you to share this project
with people finding rare beauty in today's world and throughout our times. Until the
next episode, keep your own stories sparkling.