3-Minute Interview With Duo Behind Leadercast Live

Leadercast Live is a one-day leadership summit hosted by Bill and Giuliana Rancic. They join world-renowned leaders and speakers like Malala Yousafzai, Rudy Giuliani, Aja Brown, Seth Godin, Andy Stanley and Peyton Manning in Atlanta for the 16th annual live event and live stream around the world. A few days before the conference, Leadercast’s Director of Events Luke Dooley and Executive Director Jayson Teagle let us eavesdrop as they sat down for a quick chat about last-minute plans: JT: Luke, what are the top things left on your to-do list before the event? LD: One of the big things at this point that we have to think about are backup plans and the redundancies to mitigate chaos or disaster. What if a speaker’s plane doesn’t arrive? What if someone gets sick? What if a video feed fails? There are so many what-ifs. You can’t really have a firm plan in place to circumvent every little thing that could go wrong. You just have to have that spirit about you of being flexible and understanding if something happens, what pieces can we move around? Or, what options do we have to make the day work really well for the attendees? That’s one of the things. LD: Jayson, what else are you thinking about? JT: For me, there are so many things the audience never sees—or components of the event that seemingly look easy to pull off but aren’t. If you look at my inbox, it’s many of those things. For example, there was an email chain over the weekend with Andy Stanley and his legal team about a news clip he wants to show as part of his talk. So we were working through fair-use and content rights. For us, there’s a constant flow of things that are difficult to pull off, yet no one sees. I could say, ‘We need to get this shot list done, confirm this run of show for this ancillary event. We need large-bucket or bigger-project things,' but the reality is that all the bigger stuff is in play. Now, it’s firefighting week. LD: What’s that saying you have about balls in the air? JT: Oh. For us [at Leadercast], we like to say that the balls in the air are [categorized as] either plastic, rubber or glass. If you and I are dealing with the ball, it should only be glass right now because the plastic ball could fall and it won’t break. Someone else will kind of pick it up or it won’t be noticed. If it’s glass it shatters, and if it’s rubber it will keep bouncing and we won’t worry about it. If it’s one of those glass things and they fall, there will be ramification on the end for us. So we put everything in those three categories. LD: We like to say our events are epic and elegant, right? JT: From a content perspective, epic because of leaders who have done significant things or started significant companies or made an impact on the world, then elegant being the way we do things, the way we focus on details.