GUEST: Why Every Company Needs an Event! w/Tahira Endean Head of Program IMEX | Ep. 418

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, and I'm excited because we're going to be talking about why your company, big, small, medium, doesn't matter, why you should have an event and how to stand up doing an event, and I have the person, like the actual perfect human being. So who's here? We have Tahira and Dean. Now, maybe you know Tahira if you're in the event world because she is the head of programming at IMEX, which is the global heartbeat of the entire event industry.

0:42But besides for that, she's incredible. She co-founded a company called Strategy Table. But even beyond that, she was named one of the top five women in event technology. She's been inducted into the Meeting Hall of Fame in Canada. She's been named like top 20 most fascinating women in events. She's won a lot of stuff. She basically has an EGOT, you know, the Tony Oscar Grammy thing. And her latest book, Our KPI is Joy, is so great because basically she's teaching us how to infuse happiness and all these things that you can't just measure like in a boring attribution meeting and she crushes it.

1:19So we're going to talk about events. Tahira, welcome to the show. Thank you, Jay. I, you know, have admired your work and listened to the podcast for a long time. So I'm excited to be here. Well, I'm so sorry to have wasted so much of your precious time. It's all right. It is what it is. All right. So did I, before we get into how and why any size business should think about staying an event and the value of it, what do you actually do? What I actually do is I've spent about three decades working across the entire spectrum of live events from taking, you know, the fancy things like taking 140 people to a glacier for lunch, to now what I focus on is creating education for the event industry.

2:02So personal and professional development twice a year, a couple hundred sessions that happen at both of the IMEX shows. You're going to be there this year. So excited about that. And really just making sure that our event industry stays current, relevant, that we're bringing what is needed for business through live events. I love it. I love it. And by the way, the best part about what you just said is you glossed over, yeah, I program a couple hundred sessions. I'm like, dude, if I have to program like two sessions, I'll have a breakdown. You're like, yeah, just a couple hundred. No big deal. It's a walk in the park.

2:40I can only imagine your inbox. It's got to be a disaster. We have processes. We have a team. It's busy, but honestly, I love it. The only part I don't like about my job is having to say no to people. That's the hardest part because there's many people who come with really great ideas, but we can only fit things in and our job is to curate. So every year we have to curate and keep it fresh. So that's what we're doing. Yeah. I basically say no every time somebody invites me out for dinner. So I don't feel bad saying that though, but back to all of this. Okay. So now somebody is out there listening, they're walking, they're driving.

3:20They're like, well, I don't have an event. This episode is not for me, But no, it is because it doesn't matter if you're a five person company, you're a solopreneur, you have a thousand person company. You don't have an event at your company and you should. And Tahir is going to tell us why you should, what is the value and then how do you win over stakeholders? So hit me up with it. Why do I need to have an event if I don't have an event? Well, so here's a little fun statistic that I heard a few years ago was that you can accomplish more in 10 minutes of a live meeting than in 64 emails. Wow.

3:54Now, I've tried to find the attribution for that, but I think even without attribution, we can easily say that we can get more done meeting people face-to-face at any time about any subject than we can in any amount of emails. It doesn't matter how big or small your company is. We do business with and we buy from people we trust and brands we trust. Why do we trust brands? Because they had a pretty ad. Not so much. We trust brands because we've had a positive experience with them. And that positive experience could be with the actual product or service itself. But it's usually, especially when you're making large buying decisions, is going to be because you trust the people that you're doing business with.

4:41And it's very difficult to build trust in emails, phone calls, virtual meetings. It's not impossible. It just takes a lot longer than it is when you sit down with somebody, look them in the eye even this you know we're doing a podcast and we can see each other um and but there's still a microsecond delay and you can't see my body language you can see my head you have no idea what I'm doing with my hands or my legs or what's going on down there um so I might have my fingers crossed behind my back while I'm telling you these stories but I don't um but it's that's why um you know and whether that you have a small you have a small event that is uh well curated dinner or a 15 ,000 person conference, like going to IMAX.

5:28So much business is done on that show floor, you know, 83 ,000 one-to-one meetings last year. Wow. So, but why do people do that? Because you build trust when you sit down and look somebody in the eye and it works. so i i couldn't agree with you more with this idea and i'm i'm really thinking right now let's say on the small side of an event whether it's a dinner or maybe you do some sort of you know thing at like a ping pong place i don't know why i'm thinking about that but anything like that and you're like i want to do this and i agree with you by the way i've never uh participated in an event where after the event you don't feel more connected to the people that you just spent never i mean well i may not want to feel more connected to them.

6:13They're horrendous people. And I like to block them not only on social media, but, and I think they're very sketchy and weird, but I feel more connected to them. I try to sometimes get unconnected from them, but that's a whole, that's a, that's a me problem, but in general. So now you're like, okay, I'm buying into Tahir and Jay. I want to win the day. I want to put on a 20 person event, a hundred person event for my company, whatever. How do you go about, you know, everyone's fighting for budget dollars these days. How do you say, listen, let's take dollars from here and put it here or find new money for this thing, what is, how do you justify that cost out of the gate?

6:47Well, you have to have a why. So if you don't know why you're holding that meeting or event, then don't do it. You know, so there's, I mean, there's lots of processes. You know, we, there's, you know, I wrote our KPIs, Joy. Before that, I wrote intentional event design. In both cases, I talk about, you know, things like the event design canvas or other tools that help you get through that process of why that are, you know, you're very trying to do really intentional event design and really think about what you're doing and really design for it. That's great. If that's your, your role is event designer, then please dig into the tools that are going to support your job.

7:24But if you are, you know, an event marketer, a field marketer, somebody who is just trying to get budget for your event, just think about why you want to do it. And you don't want to do it because you want to go out and spend money on dinner. That is not what it's all about. It's thinking about who are my stakeholders? What do they want? Every stakeholder wants better business, more growth, more better connections, has really good mobeta. But we want to have, we want to work with clients that are good clients. We want to work with clients that we trust and that trust us. And we want them to do their business with us and not with somebody else.

8:08The best way to get them to do that is to have a relationship with them. The best way to build a relationship with them is to do something live with them. And so when you're trying to think about what that event is going to be, here's what happens at so many events. You know, you say you go to events, you always have a good time. It's great. You leave. So here's what happens. We go to an event as a human and two people attend the event. One is the experiencing self. So the experiencing self is the one who is anticipating the event, enters the event, experiences the one to five days of the event, and then goes home.

8:45How much does the remembering self remember of that? Not a lot. Not a lot. No. So if you are doing a brand act at an event, if you are doing a event of your own, you need to think about what are going to be those five touch points for those three minutes of memories that are going to make somebody want to do business with me. If you can't figure out what your stakeholders want, how you're going to deliver that, who the audience is that's going to be part of your event, and how how you're solving a problem for them by having them come to this event and then creating something that's going to deliver to both of those things.

9:26Don't do an event. But if you know that what you want to do is help your stakeholders with their growth and trust building, you want to have an audience that is going to appreciate the content, the connections, the environment, all of the things that are going to give them those memories that are going to build happiness, productivity, trust, connection, all of those things that are going to bring people together to the remembering self can go away and think, wow, that was a great experience. And I want to work with that company again, then you should definitely be investing in events. Because it's going to be the thing that's going to give you the most forward momentum, the fastest?

10:16When I think about an in-person event of some kind, the thing that gets me excited now is that it's the opposite of AI, right? In the world of AI, which is great, I'm all in on AI, there's this massive regurgitation of everything. And we're just getting this like endless amount of sameness and hit from every angle, social email, whatever. But in-person events are like the opposite of that. It's the ultimate break of AI. Do you feel like we're heading in a direction where small in-person events, big in-person events, doesn't matter what you call them, is the future almost of marketing because of AI?

10:55It's the future of marketing because it's been the whole reason across history that we have existed and continue to grow as human beings. So yes, AI is just a tool. Let's be real. AI is something that supports us in the work that we do. We might write session descriptions faster. We might be able to spew out reports faster. We might be able to connect some dots between themes that might take us longer to scroll through and find than AI can find for us in a stack of paper. we saw it with COVID. What happened? We stayed home. We hated it. First, we loved it. And then we hated it. And then we couldn't wait to get back to events and see people.

11:41AI is just the digital layer of that. Because AI is pulling everything and homogenizing it, of course, it's homogenous. Yuck. Who wants homogenous? What we want as humans is to have rich emotional experiences that feel safe, that bring a sense of challenge, that bring a sense of we've overcome, that bring a sense of joy. And we can't do that with AI, but we sure can do that with other humans. And humans for the win. Humans for the win every time. All right. Now I'm putting you on the spot right now because you're the ultimate person that I could ask this to, and this is terrible, but I don't care.

12:27So we talked earlier about you basically plan hundreds of sessions at IMAX. IMAX is like the ultimate event for the event world. So you're the person like, okay, that's, this session's a good one. We should do it. This session we're going to pass on. Okay. So everybody out there, whether they are saying it or not, they would love to speak at events, or maybe they would love to get more sessions accepted at events that they're applying to, to speak. So I want to know from you if you're willing to share. I didn't ask you this before and so I'm a horrible person. What is it that you're looking for?

13:01And I want to ask you like very specifically, like, does this matter? So I'm going to hit you up first. If someone submits a session, okay, and the title of the session is like a listicle, the five things that you avoid in 2026, the three most blah, blah, blah. Do listicle format titles of sessions, do they resonate more with you, the person who's deciding than those that are not listicle? Because I always tend to do these listicle ones. So I think that lists are great for, they're great for two things. They're great for blog posts and they're great for short directed sessions. People are going to walk away with very specific information.

13:45You know, I think it's, we plan two events a year and we design them year round. And, you know, the one in Frankfurt is very different from an education perspective. It's not very different, but it's different than America. And it should be because it's different audiences with different needs on different continents with different priorities. There's a lot of similar priorities, of course, but big topics, inclusion, sustainability, those kinds of things have different imperatives and different needs. And so, So and then we have a lot of so I'll use AI as the example. Everybody's like, we're going to talk about AI.

14:23Great. I don't plan any AI sessions because of those 200 sessions, I curate specifically about half and about half come from partners. All those partners want to have their stake in the ground on AI. They are doing we had 14 or 16 sessions last year on AI. I did one. So it's also for me, it's also about balancing out knowing what all of our amazing partners with very specific audiences because they're, you know, associations and media and, you know, they know their audiences and they're bringing us good content, great content. But I don't want to bring the same content. So what I'm looking for is content that's going to balance out the program and give us a lot of personal and professional development.

15:06You know, for America this year, the U.S. Surgeon General just wrote the prescription for America at the beginning of the year that said you have a huge problem with loneliness, isolation and divisiveness. And so you need to build community. And he was he's right. And so we have a lot of sessions this year that are for people to spend a lot of, to have the opportunity to have personal and group reflection and activities and action that are around how do you build community. so that when they're working within their own organizations and their or their own associations or in their own selves and communities, you know, how do we give grace to ourselves and to others?

15:56How do we show people that they matter? We have some amazing speakers coming that are covering really that whole gamut. Would we have done that in Europe? Not in the same way, because again, it's just a different, it's different culturally. So while we have global audiences at both, there's still a balance of those global audiences. So, you know, I think it's sometimes it's about, I like the CES approach actually, which is to say, we are not looking for your topics. We are looking for the best speakers and the deepest experts across all realms of technology. Please submit them, please nominate people or please nominate yourself.

16:36And then we as the program committee will decide what our program is going to be. And I think that that's a great approach. So, okay. I love that. And it makes a lot of sense with the timely of remaining. I need you to tell me rapid fire the, with the session submissions, what are in general, what are must do's and what are never do's what are when to here's like zero, they're out or,

17:12So be a thought leader, be an authentic thought leader. So in you don't have to know about everything. You have to know the most about your one thing. And don't just be a thought leader when you submit the session, because nobody, nobody decides on just what on one session. We all go out and hunt you down and make sure that you're going to be a thought leader. sure that you are the person you say you are. So anybody who's doing this kind of a role. Be curious and interested, like show some interest in what the audience is going to get out of it. Don't just say what you're going to say. Tell us how the audience is going to benefit.

17:55it. Understand what you're applying for. So I will give you my IMAX example is I get, we get a lot of submissions from people who want to talk to hotels and resorts or want to talk to salespeople. And that's what their session is about. That's great. Except that at IMAX, all of those people are busy selling. We have 10 ,000 people that are selling on the show floor. Some of them, and particularly some of the more senior leaders, are dropping by our education. Our education is focused on the meeting and event planner and organizer, association, agency, corporate, independent, doesn't matter. And that's 71 % of our audience at any time in any of our theaters.

18:44So that's who we build for. Now, if you want to sell to resorts, there's other things that are really, really good for you. Other events that are really, really good for you. I'm happy to even recommend those other events because I go to a lot of events. So know the audience that you are submitting for. That's really, really important. And then work, you know, to get to know the other people that are the some of the best speaker recommendations I get are from other speakers. And, and guess what, because I've seen them live, and I know them, I trust them. So if they say, I just saw somebody that I think would be a great fit for IMAX, can I introduce you?

19:28Yes, and I'm still going to have them submit. But now I'm submitting now when I'm looking at them, I'm looking at them in context. So use your relationships, build your networks, Thanks and submit smart. I love it. And it's so true. Building your network is so important to me that it's everything. All right. Before we wrap up here, everybody needs to go out there and get our KPI is Joy. This book is fantastic. It comes from this happy perspective. So here, how do we get the book? How do we follow you? How do we consume it all? Let everybody know how to get involved with your world. So the book's on Amazon.

20:09on. So that's the easiest way to get it in a bunch of countries around the world. So it's easy to find. You know what, it's a really easy read. I'm gonna end what's really fun for me is that anybody who is in event marketing, who's picking it up and reading it, sometimes you pick up and you're like, Oh, I'll get to that. They start reading it. And then they're, they're texting me like hours later. Not only did they start the book, they finished the book. And now they're adding joy metrics into their event design. I love it. I mean, yes, thank you. That's amazing. And that has happened multiple times where people start texting me in the morning and, you know, oh, I just let my two kids play on the couch all day and I finished your book.

20:50Great. So it's, it's, it's useful information. And LinkedIn honestly is the easiest way I'm Tahira and Dean. It's like, there's, you're not going to find 17 of me, just like you're not gonna find 17 jay swettleson's right you let me just connect yes all right we're gonna put it all in the show notes and just so everyone could spell tahira it's t-a-h-i-h-r-a and then it's n-d-e-n-o no it's not i spelled it wrong no it's t-a-h-i-r-a i'm a moron um i mean that's not even debatable i i'm an idiot t-a-h-i-r-a we're leaving this in a hundred percent n-d-e-n And that's who you've been talking to for the last 20 months.

21:31An absolute idiot. I'm so sorry. But thank you for being here. This was fun. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You can find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we can stay connected. You can find my newsletter and everything else I got going on.

22:08Thanks for being here and hope you subscribe.