Living Our Values—
Have a Kickass Attitude

Event production is perhaps one of the most exciting services Kinetic offers. Whether we are helping our clients with trade shows, training events or sales incentive trips, we pour our hearts and souls into making sure that each and every detail is covered. One of the most anticipated events is a yearly reward and recognition trip that is 5 days long and can take up to ten months to plan. Between coordinating travel for more than 120 attendees and working with multiple vendors, there are aspects beyond even the most experienced event planner’s control. So, how do we ensure our events are successful? Aside from meticulous planning, we tap into our second core value: having a kickass attitude.

Here are five (of many) reasons why being positive, flexible and easy to work with ensures the success of reward and recognition events:

1. Having a kickass attitude ensures a better experience for our guests.
   Ensuring our guests walk away with a memorable experience is one of our top priorities at events. In order to accomplish this, we know our guests need to feel that we—the event team—are both approachable and accessible. In an effort to accomplish this, our event website and mobile app introduces our attendees to each member of our team and provides multiple ways to get in touch with us if they need our assistance. Furthermore, our event team is present to personally welcome each guest upon arrival at the event, complete with a smile, goodies to relax from their day of travel, and a friendly reminder of the ways they can get in touch with us if there is anything we can help them with throughout the event. Need to ship your souvenirs home because there isn’t any room in your suitcase? We can do that! Forgot sunscreen or your phone charger? We have you covered. By making ourselves available to our guests and always exhibiting a kickass attitude, we can ensure that if there’s absolutely anything we can do to make their experience better, it’s being taken care of.
2. A kickass attitude is the best way to prepare for the unplannable.
   If the event planner is the protagonist in this story, weather is the antagonist; it’s the one thing we cannot guarantee. Even though we always have a backup plan, it’s still easy to become frazzled when you hear that the beautiful outdoor function you planned four months in advance is going to be wiped out by a rainstorm. A kickass attitude calls for flexibility and confidence. Having a backup plan and positive, reliable team members gives us the confidence that we, as event planners, need to adjust our plans and pull off an exceptional evening that keeps our guests dry. Bonus tip: dry guests are happy guests!
   
   “At our last rewards event, we had a beautiful dinner planned on the beach,” recalls our client, a training and events manager. “Unfortunately, high winds kicked up that morning and threatened to crash our party. Without missing a beat, the Kinetic team worked with resort staff to find an area on the pool deck that was sheltered from the wind, where our guests could enjoy dinner while still hearing the waves crashing in the background. In just a few hours, they had the surrounding palm trees wrapped in ambient lighting and brought in cozy fire pits that our guests raved about all week. The team could have panicked. But they stayed positive, focused on solutions, and ended up creating our guests’ most memorable dinner of the trip.”
3. A kickass event team needs a kickass leader.
   The number one guarantee in event planning is that something, at some point, will deviate from the plan. If the event team leader panics, the team will panic. Our event team leaders are calm, cool and collected under pressure. Their positive thinking gives everyone on the event team the confidence they need to stay focused on the end goal: creating positive guest experiences.
4. A kickass attitude has helped us cultivate lasting relationships with our vendors.
   Vendors are such an important part of our events, and we have had the pleasure of working with some of the best in the business. As the stress of event planning and onsite execution builds, we know that we can trust our vendors to deliver. We build this trust by simply being easy and pleasant to work with. We communicate our needs and expectations clearly, we touch base with them regularly throughout the planning process, and we allow them to be experts at what they do. This is why we continue to work with many of the same vendors year over year. And best of all, when something comes up, or we’re in a pinch, they always come through for us, just like we would for them.
5. Having a kickass attitude allows us to experience the joy in our work.
   When you have an event that is full of meaningful interactions with your guests, vendors, and event team members, you can’t help but enjoy yourself, despite the inevitable changes and near-chaos. Nothing brings our event leaders more joy than taking a moment at an event to pause and soak in how all the hard work came together to bring such impactful experiences to our attendees—and later reading the words of gratitude they drop us after the event is over—all of which also reflect positively on our client.

Looking for a kickass team to plan and manage your events? Kinetic’s event team is experienced with a variety of meetings and events, and we have a reputation for creating unique and rewarding experiences that will raise the bar for future events.