Case studies, signature moments, and operational philosophy from a decade of running B2B events for technology companies and entertainment brands. Explore blog posts and articles that share insights from my life and experience as a writer publishing content for this niche.
Hire an agency for the one-off that has to be enormous, like a Super Bowl activation. Hire a freelance producer when someone inside already owns the follow-up. If most of your events repeat every year, hire the in-house marketer, because the agency hands back the radio at load-out and Year Two gets built by whoever is still in the building.
The events budget always comes back smaller than the plan, and then somebody has to pick which rows come off the calendar. The strategy guides cover goals, formats and follow-up. None of them say what to cut. I label every event with its year, cut the new thing first, and keep the small rooms longest.
After a few years producing San Francisco's New Year's Eve party, the guests stopped buying tickets and started keeping an appointment. The client holiday party guides are right about the date, the invitations and keeping it light. They plan one December night. I'd plan the second one, starting with a date you can hold for years.
During Super Bowl build week at Pier 39, a damaged panel's replacement sat in a truck on I-80, and no budget had a line for it. The guides are right about buckets, contingency and ROI. They budget one activation as if it never happens again. I budget Year One as the first of three, and I give the contingency a first name.
For three years at RSA Conference, Arxan's booth sat between two neighbors who outspent us every year. The booth design guides are right about the three-second rule, a short message and an open front. They design one booth for one show, though. I design for the neighbors I drew, for the staff on the front edge, and for Year Three.
At the Tostitos Fiesta Zone on Pier 39, the calls that mattered most during Super Bowl LX week were made by people with radios, deciding which family to wave forward next. The brand activation guides are right about goals, audience and a space worth photographing. I plan those floor calls too, because they're what the client actually buys.
During Super Bowl build week a damaged panel's replacement was stuck on I-80, and what mattered was the fabricator's lead carpenter. The vendor management guides are right about scope, contracts and backup plans. They manage companies, though. I manage the person on the dock, and I work hard at being the client they pick up for.
Tostitos had six hours to give Pier 39 back after Super Bowl LX. The teardown guides cover freight, rental returns and leaving the venue clean, and they're right. They stop at the dock door, though, and for a B2B event marketer the leads and next year's goodwill leave the building that same night.
Illumio had white papers and MDF budgets for Latin America before it had a single partner there. What it didn't have was a reason for anyone in São Paulo to believe we'd still be around in a year. The partner event guides are good on goals and lead sharing. In a new region, I think the event's first job is to keep coming back.
The keynote gets a handler. The breakout speaker on at 2 p.m. gets a calendar invite and an upload link. The speaker management guides cover the paperwork well, and they skip the forty minutes before someone walks on, which is where I learned, backstage at the Latin Billboard Awards and on one fast drive to Target, that a speaker needs a rider and a person.
Eight Januarys in a row, I wrote the post-mortem for San Francisco's New Year's Eve party while the bruises were still visible. The debrief guides cover the meeting. I write the document for whoever runs the event next, which is usually me eleven months later, and I give the near misses their own section.
Going into our second year at RSA Conference, Arxan's leadership asked me to prove the booth produced revenue. The ROI guides cover the formula, the costs and the CRM tags. They all measure one show at a time, and I think a big annual show deserves three years before anyone calls it.
The guides for conference customer dinners cover the invite list, the private room and the seating chart. They skip the forty minutes between the expo hall closing and the first course, which is where I've watched these dinners go sideways. So every guest gets an escort, and the notes go out before breakfast.
I've written run-of-show documents for golf tournaments, eight New Year's Eves and a live awards broadcast. The guides cover fixed times, owners and buffers. They skip what happens when the buffer is gone, so I add one more column on the far right and decide what gets cut while everyone is still calm.
Three years running Arxan's booth at RSA Conference, between Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike, taught me what to say in the briefing before doors open. The usual training guides cover body language and pitches. They skip the twenty seconds after the badge scan, which is where the follow-up lives or dies.
I produced 300+ tournaments at Presidio Golf Course, and I've worked the sponsor table at B2B outings too. The planning guides cover format and budget well. They skip the stretch between the last putt and the awards, which is the only time all day your clients are standing still with nothing on their schedule.
Every interview guide for event marketing managers is written for the person doing the hiring. This one is written from the other chair: the questions I'd want a hiring manager to ask me, what a real answer sounds like, and the one question none of the guides include. What happened ninety days after your last event?
My homepage promises white-glove care from the first walkthrough to load-out, and people mostly ask about load-out. The walkthrough is where I earn it. Here's what I'm doing when I wander a venue with a coffee and my phone camera, and why the loading dock gets more of my attention than the ballroom.
The word next to my name on this site confuses people, and I kept it on purpose. In B2B events, concierge work is the part nobody puts in the recap deck: the VP who landed late and hasn't eaten, the partner who flew in to meet one person. It's also where a lot of pipeline quietly moves.
Freelance event work ends on load-out night, and you never learn what the badge scans turned into. After agency work at Plan Experiential and the long runs I'm proudest of (Presidio Golf, eight years of New Year's Eve), here's why I want to join one events team and stay long enough to compound.
Before the Super Bowl and RSA, I founded a sunglasses venture and grew it to two San Francisco locations, and I still practice bodywork alongside event work. What a storefront and a treatment table taught me about foot traffic, scaling past the founder, and noticing trouble ten minutes before it arrives.
Eight consecutive years producing San Francisco's New Year's Eve party. Midnight is the one deadline in this business that never moves, and a recurring event teaches you things a one-off never can: compounding vendor trust, the January post-mortem as the real deliverable, and hospitality that turns a ticketed night into an appointment people keep.
Running artist relations for three performing artists at the Latin Billboard Awards — riders as trust contracts, run-of-show timing against a broadcast clock that doesn't bend, and why hospitality is risk management with warmer lighting.
Day-1 of standing up Illumio's Latin America channel program — Brazil, São Paulo, Mexico — from zero. Partner recruiting, market strategy, and what actually moved the targets in a region with no prior footprint.
A breakout speaker walked on stage with no screen. The sales rep had forgotten the TV. I drove to Target. The session went on. A short essay on calm-under-pressure as a craft, not a personality trait.
Three consecutive years running Arxan Technologies' presence at RSA Conference — booth fabrication, ROI tracking, and pipeline attribution in the most over-budgeted, hyper-competitive trade show in cybersecurity. What worked, what we cut, and why showing up the same way three years in a row is the strategy.
I founded the women's club at the West Coast's second-oldest golf course and produced 300+ tournaments over seven years. The lessons aren't about golf — they're about what operations actually means when nothing can fail and every detail compounds.
On-the-ground production for PepsiCo Tostitos at Super Bowl 2026, Pier 39 Fiesta Zone. A massive-scale brand activation in a city that had never hosted the Super Bowl. Build week, show week, load-out — what flawless execution under that kind of pressure actually requires.