Careers With a View

Shari Pietsch, CMP, went from hotel event manager to
company meeting planner and back to hotels, now with the Sheraton Chicago
Hotel & Towers. “I really value the experience I’ve had,” she says.

Ever since she took a job as a “generic front-desk associate” for a Marriott hotel, Shari Pietsch, now a CMP, was drawn to the concept of “party planning.” That drive led her to something a bit more intense: planning product launches and events for a pharmaceutical company. Several years and many airline miles later, she’s happily returned to the hotel side as director of convention services for the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

It’s not hard to find similar stories. Consider Julie Blanton who, after 17 years as a meeting and event planner for the furniture industry, was laid off in 2002. “I planned on doing this forever,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to be done.” Given the dearth of planning jobs in western Michigan, she worked as a realtor for a few years. Then she heard that a JW Marriott, to open in fall 2007 in Grand Rapids, was hiring. Being a convention services manager wasn’t the same thing as being a meeting planner, but she figured it was close enough. Blanton went ahead and applied; in March, she was hired as a senior event manager. “I think I’m uniquely qualified to work on both sides,” she notes. “I can walk in their shoes. I’ve probably already had that issue, that problem, that challenge, that special guest, that unique situation.”

Some meeting planners, like Blanton, end up on the supplier side by chance. Others make the jump -- either from planner to supplier or vice versa -- because they’ve wondered if the other side might just be a better fit.

“It’s happening probably a little more frequently as time goes on,” says Deborah Sexton, president and CEO of the Chicago-based Professional Con-vention Management Association, who has worked on nearly all sides of the industry, from hotelier to convention and visitor bureau executive to association executive. “If you understand the skill sets needed for both sides, you become, frankly, more qualified.”

M&C asked 10 current and former meeting planners why and how they made the switch. Here are their stories, as told in their own words.

The die-hard planner

In 2005, Jody Brandes, CMP, switched jobs from events coordinator at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, an exhibition and event space in San Francisco, to marketing coordinator/meeting planner at Novartis Vaccines & Diagnostics in Emeryville, Calif.

I used to say that I wanted to be a corporate planner because of the stability. When I made the change, though, it wasn’t a stable time. I was hired by Chiron Corp. when it was being acquired by Novartis. I didn’t know what the possibility of staying was, but it was a foot in the door. One reason I got the job was because someone who was really seasoned wasn’t going to take the risk.

I moved because I liked the logistics part of my job better than the sales. On the supplier side it was 80 percent sales and 20 percent logistics. I like the logistics, all the details, keeping track of everything that’s going on. I like to travel, and I like knowing the details of hotels and facilities all over the country. There’s only so much challenge in knowing one facility.

If you don’t want to travel or you don’t like logistics, you shouldn’t be a meeting planner. The most important thing about switching from supplier to planner is being detail-oriented and loving logistics and changes, because that’s what you deal with on a daily basis. Everything you just planned gets changed. If you can roll with it and not get stressed out about it, you’ll be successful.

My best piece of advice is to get involved in Meeting Professionals International. The last three jobs I’ve had I got through networking at MPI. Currently, I’m the director of special events for the Northern California chapter; next year, I’ll be the director of education.

The traveler

Shari Pietsch, CMP, began in the hotel sector, then switched to meeting planning before returning to hotels. Now she’s associate director of convention services at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

I started with Marriott in 1992, as a generic front-desk associate. It wasn’t anything fancy. I wanted to get into “party planning.” In 1993, I went to the Marriott World Center Orlando. I was the schedule coordinator, then I went to space management, then the catering department. I worked at a couple more Marriotts as an event manager until December 2000, when I
had a great opportunity from a customer. A pharmaceutical company was doing a drug launch in three weeks and wanted me to be part of their meeting planning team.

At the time, there was a lot going on in my personal life. I had just gotten separated from my husband, and my mother passed away. I was throwing myself into my job, but I needed to take time for me. I did some thinking about it and realized it was a good time in my life to make a change. The first thing that attracted me was the travel. The second was the opportunity to meet customers in a different capacity.

Also, on the corporate side, there is a little bit more freedom with your schedule. You don’t have as many conventions as a hotel does. You can dive into the meat and potatoes, and really feel the impact of your meeting.

So I worked for the pharmaceutical company. They had this great program where they had meeting planners stationed all over the United States. I worked out of my house in Tampa [Fla.] but traveled a lot.

It met and exceeded my expectations. It’s a great feeling from a different point of view to say you were responsible for this meeting. It is kind of an ego boost. But after three years, I started to get tired of who I was seeing every day, the people at the airport or the UPS guy. I was becoming too much of an introvert.

The opportunity was presented to me to stay with the same company and move to New Jersey, but I thought about it and realized I was ready to get back to a more stable job, one that didn’t necessarily take me out of town every weekend.

I did some soul-searching. I had been away from the Midwest for 15 years, and I went back, from Tampa to Chicago. My parents are from Chicago.

I really value the experience I’ve had. I can’t tell you how useful it is to be able to walk in the shoes of the other person and know what they’re going through. You’re leading them and guiding them, and you have a clearer picture of how to make that meeting a success for them.

Every now and then I do miss the travel. I collected magnets from all the cities I went to. It’s a fabulous reminder of all the places I’ve been.

Settling down

Laurie Flynn, now director of event management at Marco Island Marriott Beach Resort, began in the hotel industry but moved to a meeting planning position at GTI Carlson Wagonlit Travel.

I was working with a resort in Florida that did a lot of business with Carlson Marketing Group. I got to talking with them and heard how much the staff was traveling. I was young then, and it sounded like a really good job. I left Florida for Carlson in Dayton, Ohio, and I traveled for pretty much four years straight. I had automotive accounts, and I would do the site tours, locations, planning, costing out the programs and then going to the programs themselves. I was looking for an action-packed job, and that definitely was it.

I thought it was great. But just because you travel to Paris doesn’t mean you get to see Paris. It’s not as glamorous as people might think, and it’s a lot of hard work. After that I decided to go back to the hotel business, where I was not traveling, for family reasons. Also, I’m a Florida child and I didn’t want to live in Dayton, so I came back to Florida to work in resorts. Having been a meeting planner, you know what people are looking for. You know what the expectations are, and you can meet them because you’ve been there. You’ve been in their position.

I miss the travel now. I miss all of the new resorts that are out there and the chance to see them. Now if I want to see a new property, I’m not going on business, I’m going on vacation.

Sampling everything

Marilyn McIver is an account manager at meeting planning firm Creative Group Inc. in Buffalo Grove, Ill. Formerly, she worked a number of jobs in convention services and destination management.

I got into hotels kind of by accident, because I had an office job and it made me nuts. I helped open a new hotel in Maui for Marriott and ended up working in catering and convention services. I went to the Marriott in Desert Springs, California, then to the reopening of the El Conquistador in Puerto Rico. Creative Group was always my client at all of these places. I ended up managing their programs on site and gradually developed a relationship with the company.

Eventually I got out of the business and for a while was doing some freelance trip directing, mainly because of some family issues. I did a stint as a sales executive at a DMC in Phoenix for not quite two years.

I had a hotel background, a DMC background, I had done event design, I had done operations, convention services and catering. The only thing missing was I had not actually done a full-time planning job.

At long last, I took the plunge in December 2005. I was actually very surprised at what a challenge it turned out to be, and it took about a year to really get my arms around it. When you’re in convention services, you’re king of your castle. You know how your property works, you know what your weak link is, you know where your strong suit is. But when every week or every other week you’re going into a different location with a different cast of characters -- sometimes without the luxury of a site inspection -- you don’t have a lot of recovery time.

You do see a lot of different hotels. I’ve seen a lot of wonderful things I never would have seen if I hadn’t been traveling. The travel can be very interesting, though people ask how the weather was, and the old joke is it was 72 and fluorescent!

I love my job and I love the company I work for, but I had such a passion for convention services, just the deal of watching the whole thing come together. Hindsight being 20/20, I never should have jumped to anything else. I personally think it’s the best job in the industry. Always have, always will.

GIA ZARROUK

“Sometimes I miss the travel...I miss the airline reward mileage.”

Raising a family

Gia Zarrouk, senior event manager at Harbor Beach Marriott Resort & Spa in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., worked for almost nine years with several meeting planning companies.

I started in 1996 with McGettigan Partners, based in Philadelphia. It was acquired a few years later by Maritz Travel Co. They handed me an airline ticket, and I went to a different city every week. After eight and a half years, it gets kind of tiring. I made the switch for family. I attempted to make a couple of trips to Maui while pregnant, and that was a little hard.

I was working on site at the Renaissance in Plantation [Fla.] and became friends with my event manager there. They sent my resume to the general manager of the Harbor Beach Marriott, and I started at the hotel two weeks later.

It was more learning, which is great; you can always stand to learn more about your industry. It was learning the flip side of things. As a meeting planner, you just come in and say, “I need this, this, this and this.” Now I’m delegating it out. The end result is the same, but now you’re having to make all the wish lists come true.

Sometimes I miss the travel. I see friends I used to work with who come through the hotel for a week. “Yeah, I’m off to Paris,” they say, or, “I have a meeting in the south of France.” I miss the airline reward mileage, and I miss room service and stuff like that. But right now I don’t think I could go anywhere. My daughter’s still quite young, and I’m happy here. You can’t put a price tag on being home with your newborn child.

The third-party enthusiast

Brad Ruebel, a hotel sales veteran, recently formed Conference Resource Center, a site-selection company based in Benicia, Calif., 45 minutes east of San Francisco.

I was in hotel sales for about 15 years; about a third of that was as the director of sales and marketing. I then made a switch to Marriott’s new field sales program. I worked from home, and that’s what I loved. I’d get up in the morning, and at 6 a.m. I’d be checking e-mails while grabbing a cup of coffee.

Marriott had some kinks to work out, and the program lost some funding. My choice was to go back on property or to do something else. I chose to do something else. I had two kids, and I wasn’t willing to do the commute and long hours. I thought long and hard about being able to use my skills and expertise to help clients, beyond trying to sell them one particular hotel. I joined a third-party firm working from home, and after seven years, I broke off from them and started my own business.

I was told the first three years were going to be the most difficult. You’re ramping up; you’re trying to build a clientele, and you don’t get paid until the event has actualized and they’ve paid their bill.

If you talk to a lot of third-party planners, they had a spouse who carried them financially through the first three years, or they worked part-time jobs. I was a school bus driver, I cleaned houses, I mowed lawns. You just did whatever it took to keep food on the table and a roof over your head.

Now I don’t think I ever could switch back. Hotel salespeople are incentivized to sell their box. I’m trying to guide the client to the right location that meets all of their meeting needs.

It’s not for everybody. In the hotel industry, they used to give tests to folks to find out if they were more sales- or service-oriented. I really believe you’ve got to have a good combination of both to be doing what we do. You’ve got to have a lot of drive, too. It can be much too easy to be at your house and decide to mow the lawn or do the laundry rather than sit at your desk and try to find another account that you can work with.

The variety seeker

Christine Flowers, sales manager at Hyatt Regency O’Hare in Rosemont, Ill., used to work at Minding Your Business, a meeting management firm in downtown Chicago.

I’ve been working for a total of four years. First I did two years in meeting management. We did registration, on-site management of events, some traveling. I knew someone who was working for Hyatt, and I decided to make the switch to the hotel side of things. I started as a convention service manager here at the Hyatt O’Hare. I did that for about nine months, and then I made the switch over to sales.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint what exactly it was that made me change. But I do know that I wanted to expand my knowledge and explore a whole different side of meeting planning. When you’re a meeting planner, you don’t tend to see the other side of hotels as much. When I got into hotels, it really expanded my view on things. When meeting planners are in a pre-con, they say, “I want this, I want this, I want this.” When you’re on the hotel side of things, you get to realize truly what a huge task you’re in for.

I wouldn’t mind going back to meeting planning again one day, having learned what I know. It’s not something I’ve completely ruled out. I would definitely recommend that people have experience with both sides.

BRAD REUBEL

“I thought about being able to use my expertise to help clients beyond trying to sell them one particular hotel.”

The newbie

Rachael Bouthot, a former StarMeeting Concierge at the Westin New York at Times Square, is now a meeting planner at The Conference Board, a New York City-based business research and networking firm.

I got the position at the Westin in the spring of 2005. I was trying to concentrate on a career in sales, and I met the catering manager at the Westin, who thought my personality was a good fit for hotels. I got to learn the hotel industry inside and out, and I got to work with so many different walks of life. I was there for almost a year when one of my clients offered me a position.

It’s a great experience as a meeting planner to get that hotel background. Basically, you have more appreciation for the hotel industry. You know how hard it is to get those easels, how you can lose a box. The biggest surprise for me was the whole sales process. At the hotel I didn’t work with sales as much, and I didn’t get to know all the ins and outs of the process, and how much goes into it.

I find that you work more hours and more weekends at hotels than you do on the other side. The hotel never sleeps, but this position is Monday to Friday.

The hybrid

Cary Bradley, CMP, CMM, corporate director, event services, for Hilton Hotels Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., began as a hotelier, transitioned to become a meeting planner and then found a job that straddled the two.

I got a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Houston, Hilton Hotel College, 25 years ago. I worked for various hotel companies, then went into special events. From there I became a meeting planner at a third-party planning company. In 2004, through a posting from MPI, I got a job at the corporate level at Hilton. It was an opportunity to effect change and mentor meetings managers on a broad scale. By supporting the meetings and conventions discipline, I’m an advocate for our customers. I also spend a lot of my time supporting our hotels.

Working in hotels is a heck of a lot of fun. Meeting planners going from hotel to hotel become very compartmentalized, whereas when you’re in one property and it really starts to hum, it feels really good. The upside of meeting planning is, it’s so much fun to see different destinations, and to see how different teams work together. I enjoy the complement of the two, taking a great idea from one hotel and sharing it with another.

Planners are very similar to convention services managers in that they often represent greater constituencies. A hotel person so often thinks the meeting planner has all the controls. They don’t realize the planning contact has to report back to an executive committee, a group of planners or the attendees.

I’ve learned to be empathetic with planners, but good planners need to be empathetic with hotels. Ultimately, we both want good value, we both want to deliver a great customer experience and we both want to achieve expectations.

A planner’s planner

After 12 years in hotel sales, Allyson Wagner was hired last December as the executive director of the Meeting Professionals Network, a membership-based website for independent meeting planners.

I worked in sales for a couple of independent hotels here in Atlanta, then took a position with Marriott, where I worked on property for a number of years, then made the jump into national sales, working on large regional accounts. I took a little hiatus of eight years to stay home and raise my family. In the interim I was doing project work for Marriott, and on the volunteer side, I got into the whole event-planning thing. It’s very natural, when people find out what your profession is, they want to capitalize on that. I would be the one person doing everything: planning the program, getting the speakers, arranging the meals. I’ve done a lot of events for the PTA.

Then at some point I was approached by Meeting Consultants, a full-service meeting and event management company, to do some project work. When I came in to talk to them, we changed our focus a little bit. They were getting ready to launch a new business venture, and they hired me to be the executive director. It’s allowed me to use my experience in the hotel business, formulating things that would be valuable to help support independents and those interested in growing their business. If you’re a corporate planner, you are definitely seen as the customer. If you’re third party, you’re kind of viewed a little bit differently. You’re the customer, but you’re not the end customer. It’s a little bit of a unique position to be in.

Why didn’t I go back to the hotel side? I thought about that, and honestly, this side of the business was more appealing to me. And it offered more flexibility with my family. Also, I don’t miss hotel sales. You have to knock on doors. I wouldn’t trade it in, though. I think that it is invaluable experience.