Stolen Thoughts

In 2005, Global Events Partners, Philadelphia, a leading destination management company in the city, put together a detailed proposal for a four-day event being planned by a local company. They submitted the bid and it went out into the ether; the recipient didn’t return phone calls or e-mails. Not long after, the DMC happened to be putting on a program at the very hotel the local company was at. Mike Lyons, president and CEO of Global Events, popped his head in, and “lo and behold, the theme [we proposed] was being executed. We were shocked and amazed,” he says.

Idea theft -- which occurs when a company uses a proposal to plan an event without compensating the third party that submitted the concept -- is hardly new. In fact, it happens to most DMCs a few times a year, explains Susan Henderson, CMP, DMCP, president and CEO of Atlanta Arrangements and president of the Dayton, Ohio-based Association of Destination Management Executives. “A client will tell you how much they love your idea and how creative you are, and suddenly they won’t return your calls anymore,” she says. “Later on, you find out they awarded the business to somebody else.”

It’s a problem that affects not just DMCs, but also meeting and event planners. Take the case of Mark Addison, director of experience design and chief financial officer at EventStyle/The Maverick Group, an event planning and branding company with offices in Atlanta, New York City and San Francisco. A well-known men’s clothier asked him to draft a proposal for an event to launch a new line of shirts. He sent in a concept, including renderings of how the shirts should be displayed, and got no response. One day, he walked past the store in New York City. “There, in the front window, was my exact design for the event,” he recalls.

Kelly Nelson, the Atlanta-based director, creative, for EventStyle/The Maverick Group, has been on the flip side of idea theft. Customers have approached her with proposals taken from other event planners, asking her to execute the event. Explains Nelson, “We put up the white flag and say, ‘Tell us what aspects you like, and we’ll see if we can come up with a solution.’?” Generally, the parts clients like are not whole concepts but rather elements, such as spandex tablecloths and branded trays. Nelson will start from scratch and create an event that uses those elements. “Frankly, we haven’t been handed anything we might want to steal,” she points out.

Rhonda Marko, CMP, CMM, DMCP, and president and CEO of Destination Nashville, thinks procurement’s entree into meetings has worsened the problem. “It used to be about your relationship with the client,” she says. “Now it comes down to the bottom line, the dollar. You get procurement people who think they can do it on their own because they planned their daughter’s sweet 16.”

“A lot of it is based on ignorance,” Susan Henderson adds. “What’s so bothersome is it appears to be so casual. We need to do some education in our industry to explain that this is not kosher.”

The perfect crime?

After idea theft occurs, there isn’t much to be done about it. When Mark Addison’s idea for the shirt launch was stolen, for example, he called the agency through which he had submitted the concept and got no response. “What’s the recourse there?” he says. “I could have sued, but it’s really difficult to prove.” (See sidebar, right.)

Mike Lyons was in the same boat. Instead of suing, he sent out an e-mail to his colleagues, warning them about the company’s unethical actions, and moved on to the next job.

“Unfortunately, if someone wants to steal your creative [ideas], they’re going to do it,” says Kelly Nelson. But sometimes, if the company is good to its word, there can be a happy ending. For example, a longtime client of Nelson’s asked her to put together ideas informally for a brand identity project. The client’s company took on a new comptroller, who required that execution of Nelson’s ideas be bid out, and another marketing company won the bid. “They thought they were doing us a favor by shopping our creative out to the letter,” says Nelson, “but it allowed other people to underbid us.”

Nelson called her client and wrote a letter, asking to be reimbursed for her creative work. In the end, her company was paid a fee for the ideas.

Fighting back

It’s almost always too late to act once the theft has occurred. The following steps can strike a preemptive blow against such swiping.

Sign an agreement of intent. If the client wants extensive work done but isn’t ready to sign a contract, ask for a letter stating an intent to hire the planner or DMC. It’s not binding, but companies generally will honor it, says Rhonda Marko. “Big DMCs, if they’re going to put on a big dog-and-pony show, at least will want a letter of intent,” she says.

Ask about competition. How many other companies are bidding on the project? Any more than two or three and it’s probably not worth your time, says Kelly Nelson. More than five or six and they’re more likely to steal ideas from proposals they like.

Ask around. As part of researching the most effective proposal, Marko calls the customer to find out what firms they worked with in previous years. Then her team calls those DMCs, not only to learn what the customer particularly enjoyed, but also to ensure that this potential client is upstanding. “We do our homework, not just to protect us, but to do a better job for the client,” notes Marko.

Nail down a budget. A common excuse companies use for shopping a proposal to a different event firm is that the creator of the concept is charging too much money. Or, if the company doesn’t have a budget for an event, they might just be looking to drum up ideas without intending to award the business to an outside firm.

Mike Lyons, therefore, insists companies give him some sort of price range when requesting the proposal. “They’re afraid that if they say the budget is $50,000, the proposal is going to come in at $49,500,” he says. “What happens is, they say they don’t have a budget, but when the proposal comes in at $100,000, they say, ‘That’s way over our budget.’ Give us a ballpark! You know in your head how much you have to spend.”

Copyright the proposal. Put a copyright statement on the front cover, and then the copyright symbol and the creator’s name on every page. The visual reminder of ownership gives the customer a heads-up not to steal the ideas.

On the flip side, beware of the sometimes unfair terms written into RFPs. Addison read one recently that specified the client company owns all the creative material submitted, whether or not the planner is selected for the job. “My jaw hit the floor,” he says. Addison decided not to submit his ideas.

Beware red flags. If Lyons hears from a customer who says, “I called the venue myself,” it probably means the customer is trying to cut the DMC out. “They say it’ll be a lot cheaper to do this on their own than use the DMC. Of course it’s going to cost extra money to use the DMC! You don’t say to H&R Block, ‘Hey, thanks for all that work you did, but I’m going to take it from here.’ ”

Some events firms find that the more difficult a client acts, the less likely the business is legitimate. “One client said recently that if we did the work for free, they’d use us in the future,” recounts Vince Steffan, president of the Steffan Group, a New York City-based special events and destination management company. “I said, ‘Why would I want you to come back to me if you don’t want to pay me?’ ”

Educate the client. Often, idea theft boils down to plain ignorance on the client’s part, says Nelson. “If they can grow an appreciation of what it is that you bring to the table, they’ll be less likely to take it for granted -- or take it,” she explains.

Lyons notes that venues sometimes need education, too, on how not to give space that’s been booked by a DMC directly to the end customer. “The vendor should say, ‘I’m sorry, Global Events Partners, Philadelphia, is holding the space. They are our client. You are not.’ ”

Limit information. “If I know a client takes ideas, I might not be as detailed as I would if they didn’t,” says Marko, who sometimes hears that another DMC’s ideas were stolen by one company or another. “But I’m not going to refuse to submit a proposal because there might have been something going on with the other DMC and the event planner.”

Charge for ideas?

Total Event Resources in Schaumburg, Ill., once was given 10 days to create a proposal for a 1,200-person event. The firm contacted 33 partners and pre-arranged seven sites for the event. When the client presented the bids to the executive with decision power, he decided to give everyone in the company $50 in cash instead of holding the program.

Kathy Miller, president of Total Event Resources, was flabbergasted. “I’m amazed at the lack of respect people have for our time and services.”

Vince Steffan agrees. “To be calling people to drop everything, to do proposals for them even if they have no intention of using them, is very damaging to a company, especially because most DMCs are small.”

Such actions would all be circumvented if DMCs charged for proposals, says Miller, who also is on the board of governors of the Chicago-based International Special Events Society. Her mission is to convince everyone in the industry to demand money for their precontractual work.

“If you call your attorney, the minute you ask one question, the clock ticks,” Miller says. “Why is it so different for us?” The reason, she posits, is that there’s always somebody willing to do it for free. “The reality is, if we say no, somebody else is going to say yes. Everyone is afraid to put their foot down.” (See “Leading the Charge,” above.)

Gloria Nelson, CSEP, president of Winneconne, Wis.-based Gloria Nelson Event Design, also has been frustrated with giving out her intellectual property for free. She had a client who, for two years in a row, asked for her ideas and implemented them without paying her a cent. The third year, she attempted to educate the client. She said, “You know that we’re more than capable of providing these services. I will bill you on the creative process at ‘x’ fee per hour.” The upshot: They never called her back.

“I wasn’t going to get the business anyhow, but I prevented myself from having to go through the gymnastics,” Nelson says.

Susan Henderson’s wish is to figure out how to veer the industry away from bidding wars and have clients choose a DMC based more on prior work and capabilities. “I’d be surprised if you chose a DMC that way and weren’t happy with their work,” says Henderson. “I don’t think you need to know the color and price of every tablecloth before you decide this is a company you want to work with.”

Henderson hopes the Sarbanes-Oxley Act will support this goal. “In order to be price-transparent, clients are going to have to look at us the way they look at other professionals. Once we start working for you, we’re charging either on an hourly rate or on a fee basis.”

In the meantime, says Kathy Miller, it is incumbent upon planners to qualify the leads they find. If just anyone can collect proposals gratis, some work must be done to figure out if the business is real -- and not just an executive assistant looking for free advice.

Rhonda Marko doesn’t mind bidding on business, she says, because she has sped up the way her company drafts proposals. “I decided the problem is in our system. If it’s taking us that long to do a proposal, we need to streamline that process a little bit.” To speed up proposal-writing, she created a few templates, one for each type of event. Even though every event is customized for the client, the basics are often the same. Now, no time is wasted on administration, and Marko doesn’t mind bidding for free if it means keeping her business thriving.

As with most meetings industry issues, the best solution is one of dialogue. Says Gloria Nelson, “Now that you’ve created the monster, how do you deal with changing the monster? It’s a constant matter of educating your prospective clientele.”