Founder Fridays Part Four: transparency, humanity and trust

During the month of July, Alex Rogers is sitting down with our founder, Meg Alexander, to chat about her life, career and how Grae came to be. Check back here at the end of each week as we share her insights on Founder Fridays.

Alex Rogers is an experience designer and community builder based in Oakland, California.

This week, we will hear from Meg on her decision to launch Grae and how she plans to create value for her employees, partners and vendors based on the organization’s core values.

A: Favorite event that you have produced? 

M: Airbnb Open 

A: We’ll get right to it then! You're starting off a new venture, founding a new agency, can you share a little bit more on why you decided to do that, what led you to that place and what made you press the green button and make it happen?

M: I am going to rewind a little bit. I know I mentioned Airbnb Open in 2014, from that point on I worked in agencies producing events for Airbnb and other clients such as StubHub, The City of Beverly Hills and La Liga. I had the opportunity to see what it really meant to do something at scale, to work on a 20,000 person event with dozens of venues. 

Working in a variety of environments, with different kinds of partners and vendors, helped me find what I valued in each of them and to begin to develop a sense of what my ideal workplace would be. 

I found that I really value people. At the center of events are humans and human experiences and I think that they need to come first, in the context of an event but also in the context of a work environment. I needed to build a workspace around this notion, founded on transparency, humanity and trust. 

I think that events in particular rely on trust. Things happen very quickly and to walk away from an event feeling proud, happy and excited to do it again, is to have worked with a team that you trust - trust to make decisions, to fix problems, to interact with your clients, and frankly to get shit done. 

So I jumped in, started out on my own, and have been working to build that world and to find clients that are excited to embrace that mentality with us.

A: You talk about teams a lot, but there are lots of different teams in your work. I want to break out some of those relationships a little bit. Let's start internally, how do you approach developing your internal team?

M: Our internal team is built to serve clients, to have relationships with clients to understand their needs and priorities and to embed themselves in the client experience. It is fundamentally important to us that we have an intuitive understanding of our client’s vision so that we can provide the experience that they are looking for. 

Our internal team then contracts people who are experts in more technical fields in order to ensure that the most skilled people are utilized where they are most valuable. Our vendor team is essential and something we spend time investing in.

A: Shifting a little more toward clients, you've talked about core values, things that are important - community, connection, trust, transparency, all those good things, how does that show up in your work with clients? 

M: There are a couple things we do to make sure these values stay in our workflow. As we work with clients our first step is to obviously get to know them and to learn what they are thinking, how they work, even what platforms they work on. We take the time to workshop and define the client vision from the get go. This gives us an event framework, and KPIs to filter all of our decisions through. This mutual understanding helps us build that initial trust.

Once we have that vision, we begin working on the event details. We find that having lots of ideas at the table, including an agency and client perspective, is really important in the development process. We know some of our ideas wont be THE ones, they won't stick, and that's okay! It is the beginning of our promised transparency.

Once we have a general consensus on the flow and the plan, our team gets into the nitty gritty details of how to execute. This is the point where we stop ideating, and start integrating. Sometimes that's building out tech, sometimes that's production design of a physical build. We plan. We take the time to think about all the scenarios. What happens when the venue is loading out and we only have 30 minutes to load in? What happens if there is a power outage? 

A: So you get to know each other, and you create, and plan. You establish relationships. How does that serve you and your clients during the events themselves? What does your team do onsite that differs from others?

M: We know that when we get on site something unpredictable will happen. We are humans just as much as anyone else and so there may be a hole that we missed, or something out of our control will occur. That means we have to do our absolute best work on site.

Making sure we have well rested, fed folks doing their jobs day in and day out is essential. From there, we commit to communication. While we are on site we have team meetings internally and with our clients, and we hold ourselves accountable to transparency by expecting our team members to come with the three things that went wrong each day so that our clients know they’re getting the whole truth even in those moments when things are potentially the most tense. Most importantly that means our clients know what we are doing to fix issues. 

Ultimately, we promise to filter every tough decision through that framework we built in the beginning to be able to tell you why we made the decisions we made and how that best served the vision each time. 

A: You wrap up an event, and you load out. But where does the project actually end for you and your team?

M: A lot of people who attend events have the sense that the event ends as soon as the curtain comes down or they have had their last bite of food and they go home. For us, we are only maybe three quarters of the way through at that point. We still have load-out and reconciliation of budgets and most importantly for our client, reviewing the metrics. How did we do? Did we succeed? For us it is just as important to handle the end of the event with as much care as we did the planning process and execution. 

You will see that care as we reconcile budgets and provide clients with all the receipts so they know exactly where their dollars were spent. We follow the same policies in regards to KPIs. We tell our clients what the numbers were and how we calculated them. This process is so important to us because we want our clients to walk away from the event feeling proud of the work we did together and excited and ready to tackle the next one.

Interested in scheduling some time to chat with Meg about her experiences and expertise? Drop us a line.