I was delighted to be a guest speaker in Alison Fryer’s class yesterday morning. Alison teaches in the Event Management Program at Centennial College. These students are poised to graduate in April and were naturally curious about the possibilities of owning and operating an event planning business. I spoke to them about the advantages of being an entrepreneur and how I started Health Care Event Planning over 20 years ago. I encouraged them to find a niche within the industry such as incentive travel, corporate events or weddings and demonstrated that by having a specific focus, it resulted in being seen as a specialist or expert in the field which yielded a competitive advantage.

I went on to discuss the importance of balancing servicing clients and continuing to prospect former and new clients so as to ensure a continuous sales funnel. Allocating time to prospecting is essential to continued growth of the business. This is relevant even if you do not have your own business as many event planners working in hotels or convention bureaus are on the sales side of the business.

I urged the students to seek industry connections via LinkedIn or Facebook groups, to practice their elevator speech and to join event planning associations such as CanSPEP, PCMA or MPAHT.