Embark on a comical journey through the highs and lows of event planning as we chuckle over a camel ride in Dubai that was every bit as begrudgingly amusing as you'd imagine. But it's not just about the laughs; we peel back the curtain to reveal the real chaos that ensues behind the scenes, sharing true stories of unexpected blunders and hard-learned lessons from seasoned event pros who've braved the storm.
Strap in for an episode filled with candid confessions and last-minute saves, like the nail-biting tale of a CEO's allergic reaction aboard a yacht that put our emergency response skills to the ultimate test. Then, we'll recount the tale of a trade show booth fiasco that almost faced disaster, if not for some swift problem-solving. Join us and our guest experts as we celebrate the unsung art of bouncing back with grace, proving that a sense of humor might just be the most critical tool in any event planner's arsenal.
Embark on a comical journey through the highs and lows of event planning as we chuckle over a camel ride in Dubai that was every bit as begrudgingly amusing as you'd imagine. But it's not just about the laughs; we peel back the curtain to reveal the real chaos that ensues behind the scenes, sharing true stories of unexpected blunders and hard-learned lessons from seasoned event pros who've braved the storm.
Strap in for an episode filled with candid confessions and last-minute saves, like the nail-biting tale of a CEO's allergic reaction aboard a yacht that put our emergency response skills to the ultimate test. Then, we'll recount the tale of a trade show booth fiasco that almost faced disaster, if not for some swift problem-solving. Join us and our guest experts as we celebrate the unsung art of bouncing back with grace, proving that a sense of humor might just be the most critical tool in any event planner's arsenal.
Speaker 1:
Incredible and you're going to make me cry, and we still have like six more hours and you can't cry until the end. I know Okay, but we're going to. We're about to cry, laughing.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Because in 2021, we did a site visit to Dubai. We had to do many of the things that one does when you go to Dubai, and I personally am not a fan of camels, don't want to ride a camel, don't want to be on camels.
Speaker 2:
And I had to go on a camel. It's like I need to get on one. I have to take the picture.
Speaker 1:
And I was happy to take a picture on a camel, but I did not want to ride the camel, so the session that we have coming up next is event. Can I?
Speaker 2:
I don't know, yeah, you just say it it's our show, that's true Event fuckups.
Speaker 1:
I asked Julius Salaries he would take a segment on the show and he said only if we can talk about event fuckups, there's too much rosy glasses everywhere, of the beautiful things that happen and we don't talk enough about that. So little research, and there's the difference between a fuckup, a failure and a faux pas. So in the definitions I came up with, a failure is actually not terrible. A failure is when you're experimenting, trying something new, something outside of your boundaries. Today we had a couple of failures here with things that we hadn't tried before. And that's good, we were trying it. Now we know how to do it Next time. It was incredible.
Speaker 1:
A fuckup is when you weren't prepared, you didn't plan, you cut corners, you got lazy. We tend to take those as a little shameful and we don't really talk about them. And then a faux pas is just kind of an accident, generally an embarrassing accident, but an accident nonetheless. I would like to say that we can learn from all three of those things and our group of incredible event professionals coming up we're going to share with us their failure, fuckup or faux pas and tell us what they learned from it.
Speaker 2:
But first, first let me just tell you that I'm so proud of Liz for getting to this point because she literally has made me keep this secret video on lock between myself, her and Nicole Matthews, who went with us on this site visit. For years we haven't been able to show it, we can't talk about it. I've peed my pants watching it 45,000 times and now we get to the point where we can talk about it because it's funny.
Speaker 1:
I'm still going to cry.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but big step forward for Liz, and just enjoy this video of one of our moments.
Speaker 1:
Roll that beautiful footage.
Speaker 2:
Oh my god, oh my god, I didn't know they were attached.
Speaker 3:
All right, let's go. Thank you so much. What's up? I'm so excited to be with you all. Oh my god, this is beautiful. Liz, thank you so much for the opportunity and congratulations to both you and Nicole. Oh my god, what are you doing today? What are you? This is unbelievable. This is an incredible community moment and you know the holidays are coming and we're relaxing a little bit. We can get off of social media and showing our pictures with Alpera and whatever, and talk real a little bit because, honestly, we fuck up all the time. Otherwise we're not in events. If we don't fuck up, that's our life, that's what we do.
Speaker 3:
And, starting with me, I wanted to provide you with a case study of my event two days ago, when my connection went down 15 minutes before the event and, honestly, I was lazy. You know, I knew it was going to happen at some stage, but we're by the mountains here in Vegas and there's no reception. So you know, I don't know by what chance the Lord looked at me and said, okay, you can connect with one bar reception and just the audio. Thank God I had, like a backup production person that was taking care of the zoom, otherwise it would have been lost, like completely lost, and I was so lazy, or I can tell you, when I was selling my business and I forgot to print the slides for the investors and I went in a print shop in New York and they got me the wrong size of print, so essentially it was this big. So during the meeting all the investors had to flip the page like this and it was like, essentially every time I was skipping the slide it was like noise, it was like one of the worst moments of my life and eventually they didn't know about my business. I don't know if it was because of the slides, but it was a major fuck up.
Speaker 3:
Anyway, enough about me. I want to welcome and commend the bravery of these amazing ladies with me today Because, like you know, sharing these, these I've been trying to do fuck up nights, you know, because this is a format that was born a while ago. For a long time in the events industry, nobody had the courage to come to me, or maybe I didn't ask. So it's fantastic that we have these incredible ladies. I'm going to start with you, randall. Take it away. Share your fuck up story.
Speaker 5:
All right, my story has everything bad planning, bad vendor partners, understaffing and health and safety issues. So I was the lead on a Fortune 500 company's annual conference. It was a 40-conference and as a part of it, we were doing an event on yacht. This was a yacht that had been transformed from some loaded person's pleasure cruise thing into an actual event venue. They had hosted weddings, art galleries they've done all these incredible things. So we had our welcome reception there.
Speaker 5:
I was the lead on this particular piece of the event and I was the only person prepping the yacht, meeting the vendors, making sure the catering was up and running, getting the DJ hooked up all of that. I was also working on doing a silent disco and having a lot of issues without event tech. I ended up usually like to have a good 30 minutes in between finalizing all your pre-event stuff into opening the doors and getting guests in. Well, because I was messing with the silent disco tech, I did not have that time space. I went right from playing with that into we opened doors, we're scanning people in, we're giving them their swag and getting them on the boat.
Speaker 5:
So we get them all on the boat, get the door shut, get the overall, kind of like you've been on a cruise, you know what they do, like if you have an issue. Here's where you find the life vest and all that. Get that, we take off. I finally get to that point where I'm like okay, it's up and running, I can relax, it's time for a glass of wine. Need the adrenaline to settle. I want to enjoy the view, I want to enjoy this yacht a little bit. Then my colleague and the in-house director of security walk up to me and say we have something to tell you. Immediately my stomach drops.
Speaker 5:
I know this isn't going to be good, because if the head of security and my colleague come up and say that to me in that tone nothing that's coming out of their mouth is going to be great. They say the CEO has eaten a shrimp dumpling. Now, the CEO was well-known for having this allergy and well-known for never carrying his EpiPen. The year before this event his wife had chewed him out in the middle of the event for not having his EpiPen. So I immediately go what? Yeah, the CEO ate a shrimp dumpling. I'm like okay, is he okay? What's going on? Do we need to call? What do we do? They're like no, no, no, it's fine.
Speaker 5:
Unfortunately, my colleague had just had an allergic reaction and then they didn't know what to, so she'd been carrying one. So she gave him her EpiPen, had the brain in the bathroom and stabbed him in the thigh with an EpiPen. So then my brain starts to calm down just a little bit. Okay, didn't kill the CEO, he's going to be fine. Whoo, great. I go. How did he eat a shrimp dumpling? He knows he's allergic to shrimp. What the hell? The next five words out of my colleague's mouth I will never forget. They go. They didn't label the food. Excuse me, what do you mean? They didn't label the food. They didn't put that there was a shrimp allergy. She goes no, you have all these dumplings on the buffet. She's like haven't you eaten yet? I'm like no, I'm just having a drink. So like everything is on the buffet and there's not even a tech card to tell you what it is Like.
Speaker 5:
So there's pork dumplings next to shrimp dumplings and it doesn't say which one it is. She goes no, and I'm like I've worked with Chipotle as caterers and Chipotle puts out 10 signs. Right, how is this possible? Like, I didn't ask for this but I shouldn't have to. Like this is food service 101. What do you mean? They didn't label the food. I was baffled. This is like this entire event was like a half a million dollar event in and of itself. How do we not label the food? So then, to top it off, I find my event manager. I'm like hey, we have a very large problem trying to not be as rageful as I am inside and talking to or trying to be professional. Like you didn't label the food. So my CEO ate a shrimp dumpling that he's like deathly allergic to. She goes well, you didn't ask us to label the food. Excuse me, but like do I have to ask the AV to plug in the TV and the monitors for AV? Or like what I was? Like I was so speechless and like I can't believe those words just came out of your mouth that I was, it was, it was horrible, but anyway, he ended up. It's baffling. He was fine, everything was good.
Speaker 5:
Big, big learning lesson massive, massive fuck up on my part. I didn't ask the right questions. I didn't ask for food labeling, which I do every place I go now. I didn't properly staff myself to make sure that I was prepared on that boat to have enough coverage to check all the things I needed to check, and I didn't check with them. You know I didn't have that conversation with them about what is your protocols for health and safety issues on the boat. If they didn't have to EpiPen, I have no idea what would have happened to that man. I probably would be in the news for the worst event fuck up ever, but worse, worse, like 45 minutes of my professional career, but definitely learning lesson and hopefully the largest fuck up I ever have in my career and nothing more.
Speaker 3:
I gotta say sorry, I hear noise. I don't know what it is, if it's me or something, someone else. But I'm going to move to Sarah, so I can mute myself.
Speaker 4:
Hi there. So I I'm a product marketer but I've worn many hats, especially we're working in small companies. So I was working for a small company and we were going super computing and we had this habit of getting 20 by 20 booths and because we were on a tight budget, pinching pennies, we would have our displays built very tall so that we wouldn't be trying to hang a ceiling sign. So everything was mapped out. Our brilliant graphic designer had done beautiful artwork through the booth. I show up for super computing and I always tried to get there early. But you know, the bosses are always saying you know, can't you just fly in the next day, because then you'll save a night on hotel, anyway. But by the time I got there they had already set up the booth and they had a facing the wrong way, and that wouldn't have been such a problem, except that they had the front of the booth facing the bathrooms of the convention center. Is there anything uglier than that hallway with the bathrooms on it? It's like, oh my God. And then you know you're going to like have to make eye contact everybody who's going like every hour you know to, to get a break from their booths. So it's like this is not going to work. So I get my graphic designer and my VP on the phone and I'm like am I crazy? But I don't think this is the booth orientation we gave them. Everybody said, nope, you're right.
Speaker 4:
So then we got the company on that had built the the booth and explained the problem, and so they were like Well, we don't think we can actually flip it the way it was supposed to go, but we think we can rotate it. You know one 90 degree angle and I'm like that's fine, I'm fine with the side of it being on that aisle, but I just don't want my front facing the bathrooms. So they, you know you've got this 20 by 20 foot structure that just spires up so that it's, you know, tall enough that people can see it from a distance. You know, a purple is our main mast color and they are turning that thing and it's like, ah, you know you're just kind of waiting for it to all come tumbling down. Anyway, but they did manage to get it turned. It didn't fall apart. I do think we had to maybe go back and put a little tape up on one of those spires, but generally people weren't looking up like that, but it was so scary.
Speaker 4:
But it kind of proved to me that by instinct I've always wanted to get there early to figure out what was wrong. This time was correct and what my boss said and he was just a cool cucumber. But he said, it doesn't matter what you do, when you do a show, there's always going to be something that goes wrong and you can always figure out how to fix it. And I've kind of carried that with me through my career, you know, and it's like there's always going to be something that's messed up, and sometimes it's your fuck up, sometimes it's somebody else's, but whatever you do, it's your fuck up. It's your fuck up.