[This article originally appeared in the June/July 2006 issue of BizBash magazine.]
No matter how much you plan for perfection, sometimes things go wrong. Here’s how to smooth it over with V.I.P.s.
1. Stay in Control
Whether the car service doesn’t show up or the site catches on fire, remember that your guests—even V.I.P.s—will look to you to set the tone of the event. “Take a deep breath, don’t get hysterical, think logically, and fix it,” says Judy Levy, co-owner of Los Angeles-based event coordinating and fund-raising firm Levy, Pazanti & Associates, which regularly works with celebrities and top executives at entertainment industry events.
Early in her career, Levy was working on a dinner for politicos in another city. Another person was handling all the reservations, so she informed Levy about the 800-plus prepaid guests to put on the seating plan—but forgot to tell her about the additional 130 guests due at the door. Levy defused a potential disaster with her important guests by never losing her cool. “As they came in to the cocktail area we were doing seating and had waiters and hotel staff moving tables and adding chairs behind the scenes in the dining room,” she says. “No one ever knew there was a problem.”
2. Present Alternatives
Sometimes what big clients request is just not possible—but they don’t want to hear that. “If something can’t be done, I never go to anybody unless I also present viable solutions,” says Marilouise Berdow, a meeting manager at American Express Corporate Meeting Solutions, where she plans conferences and incentive programs for major companies and their top-level executives. “You say, ‘The production company didn’t show up so we have this one,’ or offer them a menu of solutions if time allows.”
Berdow recalls a situation in Europe where senior managers wanted a museum opened especially for them, but the museum wouldn’t open. “We had to tell them it can’t be done on Tuesday, but it can be done on Thursday, or we could go to this other museum. Hopefully they will think the alternative is just as good as the request.”
3. Find the Right Messenger
Knowing how to communicate best with the top dogs is key to breaking bad news or smoothing over conflict. Take your key from their personalities. When regularly working with high-level execs as global head of event marketing at Merrill Lynch, Danielle Jennings, now vice president of strategic planning and business development, event marketing, at New York- and Toronto-based Micro Target Media, which provides alternative outdoor advertising, planned a luncheon at a top restaurant in France. Unfortunately, the executive guests were upset about the pace of the meal and asked her to make the chef hurry it up. Outraged by the request, the chef cursed at her in French and would not comply. “Luckily the people I worked with, you could joke with them, so I could smooth it over with them later by making a joke of it, like, ‘Oh it was France, what do you expect?’” Jennings says.
Sometimes it’s better to have someone else do the dirty work. “In Spain they don’t eat dinner until late, but a V.I.P. wanted dinner at 7,” Jennings says. “[If ] you try to tell him but he doesn’t want to hear it, call the business’s head of the Spain office and ask him to send an email to the V.I.P. explaining that this is the custom. You have to look at each circumstance and see who the right messenger is.”
4. Apologize and Move On
The last thing you want an important guest to remember is a mistake, so don’t focus on the negative for any longer than you have to. Be honest and take responsibility, but then help the guest get back into the spirit of the event. “I once moved a press line three feet to accommodate more press and Madonna and [her publicist] Liz Rosenberg were not happy,” says Howard Bragman, founder of Los Angeles-based strategic media and PR firm Fifteen Minutes, who has worked with celebrities for several decades. “I apologized and moved on. Don’t dwell on the one little thing that went wrong.”
5. Make It Up to Them Next Time
If a V.I.P. was disappointed with something, try to mend fences after the event is over. Promise to put up the person’s staff in hotel suites at the next conference, offer discounted admission or sponsorship rates for a future event, or just make a conciliatory phone call.
At a recent fund-raising dinner for 400, Karen Newman, administrative director for the Committee for UN Delegations in New York, where she interacts with dignitaries and ambassadors while working on events like the Ambassadors’ ball and annual luncheons and fund-raisers, had a notable guest complain that it was too cold at his table. “It was out of our hands,” she says. “The event was sold out and there was no place else to put them—and the other components of the event [took precedence over] their needs. So we followed up after the event with a phone call and correspondence. He was very pleased we took the time to smooth things over.”
