Adapting to Change: Michelle Manire’s Experience with Virtual and Hybrid Events

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Michelle Manire, and she is the Founder and President of Coast to Coast Conferences and Events. Welcome.

Michelle Manire: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Coast to Coast Conferences and Events.

Michelle Manire: Wow. Where do I start? It’s a 30 year old company. I’ve been at the helm for the entire time. I’m obviously a woman-owned business. It’s gone through several reiterations from being just exclusively working with Catalina Island, and then our clients really wanted us to work on the mainland with them, and it has grown from there.

Michelle Manire: And we are now on our fourth iteration, and we are Coast to Coast Conferences and Events because we produce conferences and trade shows nationwide. Seventy percent of our clients have been with us multiple years. We are truly strategic partners and game changers for our clients. We’re not, as I say, just event planners, we do the logistics flawlessly, but it really is being a strategic partner and caring about the ROI and enhancing their programs.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your backstory? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Michelle Manire: You know, I was just thinking about that because I think it started when I was social chair of my sorority, so I was planning events way back then. But I actually never thought of the hotel industry, which was where I started my career. I was taking a year off school and working on Capitol Hill – not school, when I graduated, but taking a year off then I was going to go to law school.

Michelle Manire: And, you know, started working on Capitol Hill and somebody said I would be really great in the hotel business. And I couldn’t think of anything worse because one of my sorority sisters worked at a front desk at a hotel, and I thought, “Oh, that is just so cacky,” and I don’t know why I thought that. But I ended up, you know, what’s the worst case scenario? I gave it a try, and I was in a training program with the Westin Hotels at the Mayflower in Washington, D.C., with eight grads from Cornell, and just really fell in love with it. And I became the first woman general manager for two major hotel chains, Stoker Hotels and Resorts and DoubleTree, and absolutely loved it.

Michelle Manire: How I made that transition was I didn’t want to move anymore. My niche was opening hotel properties so I wouldn’t stay anywhere longer than a year or two. And then, once I landed in California, I went, “You know, I think I want to stick around for a while,” and that’s how Coast to Coast started.

Lee Kantor: Now, when did you start getting involved in event planning and conference planning for other people? Like when you left the hotel then did you just immediately just jump right into that with your own firm?

Michelle Manire: Yes. I wanted to do something, I love the hotel industry, but when you’re a general manager, it’s really where they want to send you. And I turned down five moves, and I said that’s not fair to the company, and I was wanting to stay put for a while. So, I wanted to do something compatible with the hotel industry, because I still work with all the same people that I worked with just on the other side. So, that’s how Coast to Coast was born.

Lee Kantor: So then, you started, I guess, where you were at and you just started doing conferences and events at hotels nearby?

Michelle Manire: No. I mean, we always were national. It really depended on where our clients wanted to go because we had so many repeat clients, they don’t want to go to the same place over and over again, and they usually have rotations, you know, east to west or south to north. So, we decided to, obviously, really develop the nationwide conference and event management side of our business.

Lee Kantor: So, at first you were getting clients just from the existing relationships that you had just accumulated over the years?

Michelle Manire: Yeah. And a lot of our business is referrals, so we’re not stuck in one particular industry. So, we service all industries, and it’s predominantly initially because a lot of our business was referral. But, obviously, we have a marketing agency and we do lead generation, so we do pick up leads and prospects through other sources as well.

Lee Kantor: So, different organizations and groups will come to you and say, “Hey, we’d like to plan an event,” and then you can help them kind of plan location to what’s going to happen and the activities and things like that?

Michelle Manire: So, we do everything related to an event A to Z. I mean, there isn’t anything. We write scripts, we do stage production, we do all the logistics, we source for the venues, everything. The only thing we don’t do is sponsorship sales, because that’s not what we’re good at. But we will help them develop their sponsorship decks. We will manage the sponsors after they have signed. We manage speakers. Like I said, there really isn’t anything that we can’t do in our space.

Lee Kantor: Now, how did you handle the pandemic? Were you doing virtual events?

Michelle Manire: Yeah, so that was really kind of quite surprising when that happened. I mean, you know, we have recessions, 9/11, et cetera. And I’ll never forget, I was in Saint Louis managing a conference the weekend before everything kind of hit. And we heard kind of rumblings that there was something coming down, but it really didn’t affect that conference. I flew back Sunday night, and then we had a conference starting Monday at the L.A. Convention Center for the Mayor of Los Angeles, and it was their investor’s conference.

Michelle Manire: And everything got set up, everybody was checking in, and all of a sudden a lot of the attendees, the bankers and investors, were dropping their badges off at the registration desk and saying we’re leaving. I’m like, “The Mayor’s just about ready to speak, what are you talking about?” And they said they just got an edict from their corporate office to get home, that everything’s being frozen. And that’s when it started.

Michelle Manire: And we thought, “Well, okay. This will be a month, maybe, or two months.” And we start contacting all of our clients and moving them to Q3 and Q4. And it didn’t change. I mean, it just got worse. So, we went, “Okay. How can we be of value to our clients?” And how we could be of value was to learn everything we could related to virtual events. And that was a really big task, a really big learning process. But my team, we all agreed that’s what we needed to do.

Michelle Manire: Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything out there that could walk us through A to Z on virtual events until Event Leadership Institute came up with a certification program, which was about a month after all of this happened, and we just jumped right in both feet and produced trade shows, fundraisers, conferences, you name it through the virtual platform that we had. So, that’s how we survived, and we actually grew over that time because a lot of people just left the industry.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. I mean, it was so disruptive.

Michelle Manire: Yeah, and it still is to this day to be perfectly honest.

Lee Kantor: There’s still ramifications from it.

Michelle Manire: Oh, yeah. I mean, I speak on trends and different things in our industry, and the costs have soared, and 40 percent of the labor force didn’t come back. So, we’re still dealing with shortages of labor all across the board, and that takes twice as long to plan an event now, because it just takes time to get answers from the partners that we need answers from.

Lee Kantor: Now, is one of the unintended consequences of having to go virtual is that now people are also including virtual as part of their kind of conference plans or is it something that’s just gone away?

Michelle Manire: No. Actually, what happened, which is kind of interesting, a couple of things I really had thought that did not materialize. One, that there would be smaller regional meetings rather than national meetings. And that hybrid, which is where you have a virtual component and in-person component would be very big when we came back. Well, regional didn’t happen. All the in-person are still national. I mean, there are regionals as well, and our attendance has skyrocketed. But also because of the expense, because you really need two separate teams to do an in-person and you need a team for the virtual, so because of that expense, most clients did not want to do that.

Michelle Manire: But how we conquer that, we either live stream but they are not integrated with the in-person side of it or we record on-demand and then they can sell that product. So, that’s another revenue stream for our clients. But we do, do virtual. In fact, next Tuesday we have a virtual conference for L.A. County for their community meeting.

Lee Kantor: Now, when the pandemic broke, did you find that just people are hungry for this kind of in-person face-to-face, you know, shake someone’s hand, look them in the eye experience that it’s been a while, and now they’re just kind of looking for opportunities to do that kind of interaction?

Michelle Manire: You know, initially there was a lot of safety concern that we had to address. Some people were fine hugging, some were fine fist bumping, some didn’t want to be touched at all. So, we had to take all those considerations into account. And we had to just make sure that all the safety protocols were in place so that the attendees felt comfortable coming out to an in-person event. And then, slowly, that faded away, and now it’s just gangbusters. Like I said, I think all of our conferences that we have done since COVID have probably grown 20 to 50 percent in attendance.

Lee Kantor: Is the attendance for any given one higher, or is it just more people are doing more events, or both?

Michelle Manire: I think both. I think costs are now becoming a really big issue because it’s so expensive. A gallon of coffee, $185. I mean, it’s it’s just really, really tough. And that’s one of our differentiators. We have a track record of saving our clients 15 to 40 percent on the bottom line. And that’s part of our strategic partnership, is that we care about that ROI, so we really work with them on improving that.

Lee Kantor: Now, is your clientele like organizations that are doing events for themselves, or is it like associations or organizations that are doing conferences, or could it even be a trade show where you’re helping, you know, 100 vendors set up in a trade center?

Michelle Manire: So, it’s all of the above. It really is. And a lot of our conferences have an exhibit or trade show connected with it. We have a medical group in June that we’ve had for several years, where they have 200 exhibitors as part of their conference. So that, you tend to see and it’s a really good revenue stream as well, so it’s really across the board.

Lee Kantor: So, you talk a lot about you’re not shying away from the revenue and ROI side of the business, can you talk about is that a point of differentiation for you? Like you’re not just trying to have an event just, hey, we all had a great time, high five. You’re trying to have an event that is strategic and is helping them achieve some sort of an ROI.

Michelle Manire: Absolutely. So, let me just touch base on our process. So, we have the same process for every project, whether it’s a repeat or not. And one of the things I really got tired of hearing when a client would come to us and I go, “Okay. Well, what are your measurable goals for your event?” And they kind of give me a glassy starry eye look and say, “Well, we do it every year.” And I’m like, “But that’s not really a measurable goal. How do you know you’re successful at the end if you don’t have measurable goals?”

Michelle Manire: So, I wrote a proprietary strategic planning guide that we give to our clients prior to coming to the onboarding strategic planning meeting that we have with them and they work with their team on the guide. And ultimately it starts with the why, but where I’m getting them to is their measurable goals. And then, when we do our onboarding strategic planning meeting, we talk about those goals because that truly helps us to know what their goals are so that we stay focused on that. And we’re not going off in different tangents that aren’t going to have the result of them being successful with their goals. So, that happens at every single project that we start, and obviously, we do agendas, we have meetings with them.

Michelle Manire: And I would say another differentiator is our post event report. I really have not seen another event management company do an extensive as we do with the post-event reports. So, we collect all the analytics, the data. Obviously, we do debriefs internally, we do it with the client, we do it with sponsors, we do it with speakers. We really want to get an overall comprehension of what happened in that conference and how we can improve on that year after year. And that saves our clients a lot of time. They’re not going back and going, “Okay. Who did we use? What vendor did we use here? Oh, how did we do here?” I mean, everything is succinct and in one location.

Lee Kantor: So, how do you help your client kind of educate themselves, because they’re obviously not in the conference and event business, but they have an idea that they would like to do one? How do you help them understand certain things are measurable and we can achieve certain outcomes? I would imagine there’s an education portion to this where they don’t know what they don’t know. And you can really help them exceed their expectations if it’s done the right way.

Michelle Manire: Yeah, and we love education. So, we have clients that don’t have a clue, like what you’re saying, don’t know what they don’t know. Or, we have clients, a lot of clients – just one that comes to mind, a film company came to us and was overwhelmed. She was new in her job. And seven weeks prior to their conference, she was over budget. She didn’t have the staff to manage it. So, we took over her conference and we were able to save them 35 percent, even though the contracts were signed, and really saved the day for her. And that’s kind of why we’re game changers.

Michelle Manire: But we really like to educate our clients. Some clients just say just do it and I don’t want to be bothered. We’ll have them approve, obviously, things they need to approve. And then, some want to be in the thick of things. And we’re happy to have either, because it’s fun to educate our clients on what they need to look for, how are we saving them money. And we can walk them through our secrets, if you will, of how we do that. And they have fun too.

Michelle Manire: And we try to get them involved with speaking at their conferences too. We did that a lot in the virtual world, and they were so afraid. And we had to train the speakers because the speakers were used to being in-person and feeding off an audience, and now they were just looking into a camera and that was quite different. But it was fun to take all of our clients through being speakers and being part of their conference. So, those are kind of the fun things that we do.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there some advice or tips you can share for the organization that maybe hasn’t done a conference yet but is considering it? Is there some advice you can share?

Michelle Manire: Yeah. Come see me. Don’t start until we have a conversation. And I just had this conversation at one of our investor’s conference we just did Friday. I spoke with a gal that wanted to do a conference, and, you know, there’s so many factors. I don’t want them to be unsuccessful their first time around. And they really need to develop a budget. They really need to think about do they have the influence that people will come to their conference in-person? There’s just a lot of factors that really need to be taken into consideration before you jump in.

Michelle Manire: It’s very expensive, and I just want to make sure that they know what the output is going to be. And to really work on a zero-based budget, meaning that everything that they take in for that conference has got to pay for that conference. So, if that doesn’t happen, then they’re not ready for a conference.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for you and your firm to become part of WBEC-West?

Michelle Manire: Well, we were woman-owned certified, which was great. I think when people join WBEC-West or get certified, they think immediately corporate contracts are coming. And that doesn’t happen most of the time because most of the corporations already have five-year contracts with other vendors. But to me, what I really enjoyed is mentoring other business owners.

Michelle Manire: I was past Orange County forum chair, and I really enjoyed that. It was bringing what we call WBEs, women-business owners together. And I knew one of my big aha moments as I went through my career is that I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. I didn’t have to do things myself. I know if I connected to the right person, they’ve already been through what I was struggling with. So, I really wanted to make sure that I was connecting WBEs with each other and making sure that they had the support that they needed to be successful, and that was one of the big things.

Michelle Manire: And I think the other thing is the education, the education is phenomenal both in WBENC and WBEC-West. I just finished a program at Tuck, the MBA school at Dartmouth College, that was a scholarship program. And it just was perfect timing because we were revising our five-year plan and succession plan. So, there’s so much that WBENC and WBEC-West can offer beyond the contracts.

Michelle Manire: The contracts are great, but I collaborate with other WBEs and we do business together. One of the WBEs that I did business with, we signed a $100,000 contract, and she did the marketing side and we did the logistics and the strategic side. So, there’s so much to offer and I love the organization.

Lee Kantor: Is there a story you can share about one of your clients? Obviously don’t name the client, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Michelle Manire: So, we have a medical client that came to us and they had 25 trade show booths and they had, I think it was 250 attendees, and it was just failing and they didn’t know why it was failing. And so, we sat down with them and we talked about what their process was, et cetera. Well, I go back to measurable goals. They didn’t have any measurable goals. Their attendee satisfaction was poor. They were just kind of shooting from the hip, and you really can’t do that when you’re planning a conference.

Michelle Manire: Your program is very, very important. Are there takeaway tools that the attendees are getting? Is there interaction? Or do you just have a bunch of talking heads, I call them, you know, presenters? And so, we really worked with them on developing the program. We work with them on their sponsorship deck and their exhibitor deck. And three years ago is when we started with them, now it’s a 1,500 person conference and 200 trade shows at trade show booths, and 94 percent satisfaction.

Michelle Manire: So, it’s really just a matter of getting them focused on what their goals are, and then taking the logistics and the things that they shouldn’t be worried about away from their plate and us doing it on their behalf.

Lee Kantor: Now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what is the website? What’s the best way to connect.

Michelle Manire: So, team@ctcconferences.com is a great way. If you want to talk to me personally, I’m happy to take your call as well, and that’s Michelle, M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E, @ctcconferences.com. We do have a website, it’s up but we are redoing it right now, but it’s www.ctcconferences.com. And our phone number is 562-980-7566.

Lee Kantor: Well, Michelle, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Michelle Manire: Great. Well, thank you, Lee. Thank you for your time.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.