The Evolution Of The Event Team: How To Thrive On Tighter Budgets in 2025 with Dr. David Burkus

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There's a way you can give it a seat at the table that actually helps you understand understand everyone else on the team way better. Welcome to Production Value Matters, the Business Event podcast brought to you by Burn Production Services. Here we explore different ways business events can bring value to your organization, the latest technological advancements in the event space, as well as providing you with actionable strategies to make a business event a success. Let's create an exceptional event experience. In today's rapidly changing business world, leadership and teamwork are more critical than ever and that extends to the events and meetings. Industry organizations are under pressure to create meaningful, engaging experiences for attendees while balancing costs and logistics. Yet despite these challenges, in person events offer something virtual experience can't genuine human connection. So how do we create events that are not only memorable but also strategically valuable? That's why I'm really excited to welcome Dr. David Berkus, world leading business thinker whose research and ideas are helping leaders build their teams better than ever. David is a best selling author, speaker and advisor whose work on leadership, teamwork and organizational structure has earned international recognition. He's written four award winning books, translated into dozens of languages and has been ranked multiple times as one of the world's world's top business thought leaders since 2017. A former business school professor, David now works with organizations across industries including PepsiCo, Fidelity, Adobe and NASA, helping leaders and teams unlock their full potential. His insights have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Bloomberg businessweek, cnn, BBC, npr, cbs. It's been a lot and I had the privilege of seeing him speak at the Corporate Events Marketing association recently in Austin, which I hope we can get a little bit of insight into that talk during this conversation. So we'll dive into creating engaging event experiences, overcoming challenges in the meetings industry, and why connection is at the heart of every great event. So welcome. David, thank you very much for being on the podcast with us today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. Yeah, absolutely. So you said your passion in the events industry is creating entertaining and enlightening experiences. Tell me a little bit of how you approach designing events to achieve those kind of things. Yeah, I mean, I would say I sort of stumbled into it by trying to just, you know, not suck on stage. I came at this entire world. I was, I'm an academic by training or you heard it in the bio, organizational psychologist. I taught the OB and other teams and team dynamic classes inside of business school for 10 years. And you know, when you're, when you're lecturing, your focus is on hitting learning objectives and you're focused on delivering as much content into a lecture as possible and what have you. And when you first started speaking in companies, companies and in, you know, live event association events and things like that, you kind of just try and replicate that, like, what's my best stuff from an enlightenment standpoint? And the thing I started to realize is, first of all, it wasn't working that well in the classroom, but it definitely wasn't working outside of the classroom. If you can add a little bit of levity, a little bit of excitement. My thing I learned with teaching with students is if I can get them to laugh every five minutes or so, the ones that weren't paying attention are like, what was so funny? And now they're paying attention again. That translates over into the event space as well. So for me, the things I really tried to lean into, the pairing entertainment with the enlightenment that comes from having an evidence based approach to leadership and teamwork is twofold. So one is still that kind of comedy element. My goal is to kind of get you to laugh. Sometimes that's with a planned type of thing and sometimes that's with a little bit of answer between me and maybe some people on the front row or something like that. And also storytelling. I've spent an awful lot of time trying to refine how stories get told because in the, in the business school world, we refer to them as case studies and they're the most dry, boring thing ever. Yeah. And that's not necessarily what audience want. They want a simple three act structure. They want a protagonist, they want an antagonist, they want all of that. And so reworking a lot of that. And I Think what I stumbled into there and the reason it works so well and I say this entertaining enlightenment thing is I think there's a surprise and delight element to a great keynote talk, at least at an event. Right. You have to come on and you know, you might not know the person anyway, but you read their bio and then they surprise you in positive ways, obviously, not negative ways. Surprise and delight, Right. So for me, like people read the bio and you heard Matthew read the same bio we read a lot of times and it positions as like, okay, this is an academic type, this is, this is a professor, this is a researcher. This is going to be evidence based. And then we get into the levity and the storytelling and people like, oh, that was way better than I expected. That's my goal. Right. That's my single goal, to make it memorable is to add that delightful surprise into what they experience. Yeah. I love that angle of storytelling that you're talking about. And especially with a theatrical background, that three act structure. Actually, you know, a protagonist in the story, an antagonist in the story. That's what I grew up on. And you know, it's something that every single event professional wants. Engagement. Right. They want that surprise and delight. And what they. I love how you're personifying that in a story structure because you can have somebody come in think, hey, this is a, this is going to be a. Forgive this, this, this way of personifying. This could be a very dry presentation of numbers and facts and data. It's framed in a story. Then that's where you get people having that memorable experience of I, I didn't expect that. I didn't expect to be drawn into the numbers that way. So kudos for you for phrasing it that way. I'd go further and say, I think it applies to events as a whole. Like when you think about what people say they loved about a two or three day event, it's almost always things they weren't expecting. Right. Even so far, I've been in some events where some of the keynote speakers aren't announced and then they're the surprise keynote speaker. And it was like, oh my gosh, I had no idea you've been planning it. Because you don't just get a speaker to show up. Yeah. But those little surprise moments go beyond just the stage. I think there's a myriad of different things you can do inside of events to surprise and delight. Yeah. And you know, to that point, sometimes I feel that event professionals sort of leverage that idea of the surprise and delight is a thing, is you know, you know, a cool photo booth or having a surprise keynote speaker, but. And they rely on that a little too much. Whereas perhaps this is a question to you. What. What are the common mistakes that event organizers make when trying to capture that type of attention? Are they relying too much on the, hey, we brought in a Barack Obama, right. And we didn't really expect him to be here. I mean, that's a very cool thing and a very memorable experience. But when you don't have the budget to bring in a Barack Obama, do you, like, what are these other mistakes that people are trying to rely a little bit too heavily on, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think. I think it's a mistake to. I mean, I feel weird saying this because certainly I hope anybody listening hires me as your surprise and delight solution. But I think you have to think beyond just who you could put on stage into kind of what are the things that are irresistibly shareable? A photo booth is not really a surprise and delight type of thing anymore. Right. But like, we were at. We were at SEMA together, and the idea of, like, we're gonna have, instead of normal networking breakouts, we're gonna have a variety of stuff. Do you want to do goat yoga? We've got it in this room here. Do you want to do mescal days? And we've got it in this room over here. And so those unexpected. Like, this is a business conference. Why am I doing necessarily that Right? Or. Or maybe it's, you know, a lot of times people will do. Will organize with celebrities to do. Like, I'm thinking, I'm looking at an event. I'm talking with them. And Carlos Senna, the F1 driver, is one of their big name celebrities. Now you're going to announce a celebrity like that ahead of time. You have Barack Obama. Like, you're going to announce it because people are going to register based on the name. But if there's something else you can do, like, I'm thinking in the Carlos Senate, I. A different group. I spoke for a different group. And the following year, they didn't have Carlos. But this is where. This is how my mind works, by the way. Lots of weird linkages, but the company itself was a minor sponsor for a different F1 team. And one of the things they arranged to do was, can we get one of the cars here or a mockup of the car? Obviously not the car you're going to send to the track, but is there a way instead of just taking a picture with the driver who Spoke at the event. Can we get people to take pictures of them sitting in the car? That's totally different. People line up for miles to do that. Right. And then what do they do? They also share it on socials and what have you. Like I, I, I remember a day where every conference was trying to get people to use the hashtag for the event. Like, no, create something that makes people want to post about what you did. I, I 100 agree with that. And, and that's where I'm trying to sort of get with that question is a lot of people hear this, this kind of stuff. It's like, oh, okay, so I have to get a car in the room and I have to get people to sit in the car. No, that's not, it's like perfect example to me about immersing somebody in that story where those stories intersect. The story of the celebrity guest who's got a cool, who's, you know, from F1 and all that. But also you're a chapter in that story. Like this is now a chapter in your story. And that's what motivates, I think, people to be compelled, as you said, to hashtag, oh my God, I need to share this experience with you rather than, you know, a slide on the, on the deck that says hey, don't forget to use this hashtag. And if you're posting don't forget us kind of thing. Yeah. And I think it's a simple as, as asking what's the, what's the plus? Right. Like I have been lucky in my life to have several different conversations with Ed Catmull from Pixar. And Pixar is famous for this concept of plussing. We're always trying to add something. You come to me with an idea and it's my job to try and add a plus to it, et cetera. So I think it's as simple as looking at what your kind of standard agenda is and then really thinking like, hey, is there a, is there a plus for that? Is there a way I can add to that? And by the way, this is where again, and it's part of what you saw at sema, this is where generative AI can come in really, really well. Right? Like upload your agenda and then go, what are for each, for each line item on the agenda, give me two non obvious things that would just elevate the experience. And I'll be candid with you, 50% of it's probably going to be garbage, but like the other 50% is going to be something you Never thought of before. And then you're like, I wonder how much that would cost. Not as much as you think a lot of times. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's divert a little bit from, from our lovely script because I do want to talk about the presentation that you gave at sema. And one of the biggest sort of things that I took away from it was in your framing of teamwork and leadership and team building. You started to personify AI as a potential team member. And I think that that shifted a thought process in the audience. So can you go a little bit into how you frame that? Yeah, yeah. I mean, for starters, let me, let me set up entirely. My experience working with a lot of different companies on a lot of different teams is that everybody's responding to this moment of, of, oh, generative AI is here. It' it's smarter than a lot of us, but it also needs a lot of supervision. It's the world's smartest intern. Right? Yeah. Because you still need to tell it very specific instructions. But when it gets back, people respond to this moment in one of three ways. Many people view it as a threat still. Either they're like, oh, this is going to take all our jobs and we can't have that, or there, there's security concerns. What if it's trading on our data? Which we could, if you wanted to go down that road, we could get into it. I think a lot of those fears are overblown because a lot of the AI companies putting out tools have addressed them. Right. So threat is one tool I use. I just used that word is the second one. And this one's okay. People are rolling out copilot inside of Microsoft Teams or they're trained on asking ChatGPT to do some research questions for them and what have you or simplify workflows. Right. Help me. Anyone who ever uses an AI note taker has experienced this reaction of using it as a tool. But I think it's at the point as a technology where the real opportunity here is to see it as another member of the team. One that has an infinite amount of information to draw from, but also one that can, that can help you understand your teammates in surprising ways. Right. Because we all have certain knowledge, skills and abilities. And nowadays, especially in a world like event planning, there are so many different cross functional partners here that don't think like us. Right. If I am the head of programming for a company and my job is to create the event, the annual event every year for our users or our customers, I'm trained one Way and thinking through one way. In event planning, the production people are trained in a different way to think through. The hotel representatives or the property managers are trained to think through in a different way. We're all trained in different ways. And guess what? That tool you've been thinking of as a tool knows an awful lot about each of those dimensions. And so you can go to it with those ideas. Hey, here's my agenda flow. How is the property going to respond to this idea and give me what their pushbacks are or hey, I just got these notes from the production crew and I don't really understand what, what the hang up is here. Can you help me translate that? Right, there's an. There's a huge opportunity to use this tool to actually help build what in the talk we called common understanding or sometimes shared understanding, to start building an understanding or an empathy for other people's positions to enhance the collaboration you already have to do. Right. So there's collaborating with it, which is great. That's the tool. Right. But then there's a way you can add it, give it a seat at the table and add it as a member of the team that actually helps you understand everyone else on the team way better. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I love that personification. I love the ideas of integrating it into your teamwork flow to find those areas of connection and collaboration. And it just really resonated with me. So can I go back to your focus on leadership, teamwork and human connection in business? How does that perspective influence the way you view events? Yeah, well, I mean, I'll tell you, I've always loved being a bit of a contrarian, but I had a contrarian insight for a while when in the world of COVID Right. So I in. In 2015, I wrote it published in 2016. In 2015, I wrote a book on kind of the future of work, workplace trends, et cetera. So that was 10 years ago. But even then there were companies like Automatic and several others that were. We have no home office, we're a fully remote company, we're fully geographically dispersed. And here's the thing, I never met a single one of those that didn't take the time to bring their people together every six months or so. The standard, it seemed like, is these fully remote companies would have an annual meeting to get everyone together and then would give managers budget about six to six months, seven months after the annual meeting, get their specific team together for a week to work together because they recognize that kind of power of human connection. And so then, you know, the world, the great work from home experiment began. The great in events world, the great, hey, let's do 18 months of virtual only events and what have you. And then, and then the really painful experiment of can we do hybrid events where, where we're going to double our production costs but have the same number of attendees who are paying less because, because half of them are virtual, we don't have to relive that time. But I was one of the people who was saying, wait, wait a minute, I noticed something here. Way back when people were working remotely more often, they recognized that we needed to create opportunities for in person connection. And I started advocating to a lot of companies. Either have a plan to bring all your people together or pick a conference your team can go to, like take some of the money that you're saving on a geographic footprint and reallocate it towards a training and development budget to give to a manager to pick an event for her whole team to go to together. Because there's an awful lot from a psychology standpoint that happens in the downtime time in the times where we're talking about like we're in between sessions and we're talking about life and we're getting to know each other, but also when we're in person, we're asking each other questions way more often about how we work and what I should do in this scenario. We're talking about work more often too. And so just, just working alongside someone can have a powerful effect of helping you grow that shared understanding we were talking about earlier. And I don't think that can be replaced. So Even in like 2022, 2023, when people were saying, oh, you know, virtual is the future, why wouldn't we do this? We have so much cost savings. I was like, like no, events are going to come back hard because people are going to want to gather and companies are going to recognize there's a power to getting their people to gather. So I've been, I've been bullish on events for a long time and truthfully, now that you add the AI angle to it, I'm actually even more bullish on it because let's face it, we're not, we're, we're only a few months, maybe a year away from never being able to trust anything we see on a screen. I didn't know if we're a month away. I think that was maybe two years ago go, I, I would, I'm, I'm prone to agree with you. However, I have this 13 year old who watches a Lot of different content on YouTube. And I show him something, and he's like, that's AI. Like, almost immediately, like, we. We talk about I'm a millennial. So we always talked about us as being digitally native. He's like, AI generated content native. Like, he can spot it. Right. But it'll get better, and it'll trick even him one day. And that's when we'll go, wow, I guess I need to see it in person. I guess I need to connect with that person in person. Right. So we'll prize in person interactions even more. In an age where people are using their AI doppelganger to attend meetings for them and things like that. Right. So I'm still very, very bullish on events for all of those reasons. Absolutely. So how do you maintain that excitement and curiosity when working across so many industries and organizations? I want to put that in the context of events because it's an event podcast, but as you said, so you're working with leadership, you're working with teams. You've got this idea of how do we bring them together every six months to a year. And that is such a foreign. Not a foreign thing to a lot of organizations because they're used to this gigantic geographical footprint. We see each other every day. How are we generating a little bit of excitement for those in the moment, at the moment experiences in those kind of organizations? I think the big thing is we need to do a better job capturing the value that comes from it. Right. Like, okay, so we. We paid out somebody's budget to go attend this event that's, you know, part of the association, they're part of, et cetera. And then we go, hey, how was the event? Oh, it was good, you know. Oh, Kyle. Sheila was there, and he's really funny and really, really has some crazy events. He's a great speaker. Like, okay, I think we probably need to do a better job capturing, like, who did you meet for the first time? Who did you reconnect with? I think it's possible to see a much more clear ROI on events if we do a better job asking. And I don't. I don't. I want to be really careful here because I don't. I don't think we should mandate ahead of time. Like, I need you to meet five new people after. Like, I literally, when we were at SEMA together, and I had someone. This is. I. This is still funny to me. I had someone come up to me right after I spoke during the break, right. And asked me who I worked for, because she did wasn't actually in the room during the session. Right. But her boss had paid for her to go there and her job was to make new connections. And so she was running around during the breaks trying to like collect as many names as possible. And I was like, I work for myself, I was just the speaker. Did you see like she hadn't seen me. Right. So I don't want to give people like assignments but I think we can do a better job capturing those stories. I think too like if you're a manager and you're fighting for that budget to, to get people to events, I think do a better job in the months afterwards really capturing what happened, what was instigated at set events so that you can point to that clear roi. I think we could probably do that better to then senior leaders sort of justify that expense. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so in mentioning that one of the challenges in events is justifying that added expense compared to some kind of virtual or online content. Can you expand on why this, why you feel this is such a short term view? Yeah, I mean, why? Why? Well, unfortunately for if, if you're a publicly traded company, we just live in a very short term world. Right. And we live in a needing to make the, the numbers work and we live in a, I mean you've seen it in the, in the event events world. Everything, when everything gets inflated by you know, 15 over a couple years, suddenly the entire cost of the event is more, which means the cost of registration is more. Meanwhile, we're a company who's trying to also fight that inflation and keep profits margins the same and get. So it's, it's really, really easy to just think, oh well, here's an easy kind of thing to cut. And that's why I think it's much more vital for if I got the budget to go to one myself or if I'm a manager, that could bring my whole team, what have you, to capture the, the after effect. Because we could talk about it hypothetically, say, oh, I think people are going to want to connect in person. And all of that is true and I think leaders know all of that is true. You know, what would happen at these remote companies who would bring people together. The, the all hands meeting sort of felt great and it was a lot of like social time too. Like a little bit of content, lot of interactions, what have you. It was the times where the team was doing their own event. Hey, we rented this space over here by, you know, we, we got this Airbnb or this breather during the day and we'll stay at this hotel at night. And we all worked alongside each other that managers could really capture. We finally fixed this problem. We finally crushed that thing. And that made it easier for these remote companies to justify that expense. Right. I think we just need to roll that out even, even inside of companies. Right. I think there's a mistake. I'm going to regret saying this because my job is to deliver content. I think there's a mistake to think that a conference is about content. Right. The conference comes from. We really. We actually say the word conference wrong. Right. It's conferring. It comes from the confer. And the idea is that it's a time for us to confer together. And so we ought to be talking about the insights we had from connecting with people just as much as we're talking from the insights we have. Figures. Now that said, since my job is to be a speaker at said events, please share all of the insights you get from the stage, like with your boss and on social media. Please talk me up. Please do that. Yeah. But also take the time to talk about the conferring that happened as well and the insights you got from other people and what you learned from that because it's going to help you sell the ROI on why you have to physically be there instead of typing into a chat. When it's not just another meeting. When it's the event that matters, you need a production partner who delivers. Burn Production Services specializes in multi day meetings, conferences and large scale events that demand flawless, flawless execution. From cutting edge audio and video to stunning lighting and staging, we're built for your largest events. Take your production to the next level. Visit burn productionservices.com and request your proposal today. Enjoying the show? Don't miss a single episode. Follow Production Value Matters wherever you get your podcasts. And for bonus content, tools and event insights, head over to productionvaluematters.com and subscribe. Stay sharp, stay inspired. Production Value Matters. So how do you think that organizers can demonstrate that long term value of that in person event to leadership and stakeholders? Well, so now, now we have the question of how do you capture those stories as the event planner? Right. I think it's on. If you're trying to fight for the budget from your organization to go attend these events, it's that. But also what are we doing? We send out a post event survey, I don't know what a week, week later and edit stuff like did you like the food? How cold did you think the Room was. And it's always cold. Right. Did you like the snacks? How are the speakers? It's all very focused on like sort of the things we did. What if there's another survey that went out three months later, hey, what have been the long term effects of conference? Who did you meet? Like, there are different questions we can ask that can make it easier to capture those stories and sell those stories next year just as much as we sell who's speaking at it. You know, if you think about a lot of like I have spent, geez, I don't even know how much at this point on different speaking coaches, on comedian coaches, to try and be funnier, storytelling coaches, et cetera. And when you talk to them, they don't tell me about the curriculum. I tell them about a problem and they tell me about a former student who had the same problem. So what if we did that? What if we did a better job post event capturing the wins that came out of being at our event? And we use that in our event marketing moving forward. And I think, by the way, some of this is how we set the container and where production. Right. Comes into setting that container, not just the fancy lights, and it's how well we stage for interactions, how well we do the totality of the event experience. Right. And then how well we capture that and use that in our marketing next time around. Yeah, absolutely. I, I cannot tell you how many times I've told anybody. Production is never about the gear. It's never about, as you said, the lights. It's, it's a tool that is used to frame a message. And so, you know, thanks for leading into that tagline. So, looking ahead, what trends or innovation in live events excite you most particularly when it comes to audience engagement? Yeah, I am, I'll level with you. I'm excited, but also a little frustrated as a speaker. Probably the most, and this is probably the most controversial thing I'll say besides the time where I said the speaker doesn't matter and get people to connect. So second most controversial. There are more and more of us who act as, as speakers have taken the time to really level up our video game, get it, get our own camera people there, et cetera, and even share about the event much faster. And there's a lot of resistance there when folks come in. And I, I get that, I do, because people are like, whoa, we need releases and we don't attend these faces, et cetera. But there's a collaborative approach there. One of my favorite humans in the world, my favorite speakers to watch right now is a gentleman named Sean Kanugo. And Sean, I'm sure you've seen his clips. Sean is famous for having that goes with him captures. There's always something new and fresh, a response to current events that he does. And his team knows when it is in the speech and where it is, and they capture it. And within a day, like most of the time before the conference he spoke at is over, he is posting a clip at that conference. That's a collaborative opportunity. And his. The smart clients of him have really seen that. Hey, how can we actually work together to get you that, to spit it out there, right? And I think a lot of event planners that I work with are a couple steps behind on that. They might say, like, we want you to record a video shout out for a month before the event, et cetera. No, what can I do at the event to promote the event for next year? And so more and more of us, I think, are trying to think about how we can, at this event, elevate our own personal brand market for future speaking events. But there's such an amazing collaborative opportunity there that involves the speaker, the event planner, the production people, all collaborating together and planning ahead of time. What are we going to create at this event that can. That can plug next year's event or even just build, you know, generalized excitement for our association or what have you. And I just, I'm frustrated because I see the opportunity there, watching Sean, watching some of the things that I try and do. But we're met with resistance so often because we're not really thinking about speakers as collaborators in the event experience in that way yet. Maybe you and I change this after people listen to this podcast. There's a huge opportunity there, and I wish we could see it more. Yeah, I, you know, I think that also applies, to be frank, with everybody involved in the ecosystem of an event, right. That there is so much pressure on the organizer to pair, to. To use a flippant way of saying this, to just get through it, right? To get to the end of it. Like, you know, we talk in the event industry about the event hangover, right? That it's Wednesday night, I'm finally leaving the ballroom, and I'm like, I'm just going to collapse, right? Because there's a lot of energy that goes into that. And so everybody's super focused on that finish line. And to your point about that collaboration and thinking about, well, how does this lead into next year, right? There's enormous pressure on people to be able to have that Sort of mindset, but only when it's. It's only on you. Right? And so look, it's one of the things I always like to say whenever I start a production team on site. It's like, you guys are smarter than me. That's why you're here. I don't want me to dictate to you what we're doing, although here's a drawing and here's a production schedule. So I have sort of the parameters, but you guys are much smarter than me. You tell me what we should be doing that should be better here. And so to your point, and you know, I understand why some organizers have some kind of resistance to that. They go, oh, well, we're not sure if David's going to be react next year. And like that, that doesn't matter. David's here now, David is here and we can leverage that. And David has a perfectly good incentive even if you don't book him again for next year. Which to be honest, why would you? Because no offense David, but like we've heard like the audience heard the message, right? Like you're invested in their success no matter what form it takes, and they should be invested in your success no matter what form that takes. Whether or not that's going to work for the MPI next year instead of SEMA as an example. Right? So you know, if we all sort of come into that and say the. Because there's a phrase in the event world that you're only as good as your last show. Well, yeah, that last show. One of the successes that I always want to have is that that last show led to 15 other shows, not just this show or to even just grow the audience of people who are paying attention to next year's show. Like that's where I see this. It is. And I get it. I get the event Hangover, etc. This is really just a pre planning thing. This is just something we add into our checklist. You know, we always do pre event calls. We talk about, here's how much time you're going to have and we're going to do this, we're going to do Q and A, we're going to do what have you. And, and it can be as simple as going, hey, what we wanted. Like I'll give you an example. Okay, so Shauna is doing a lot deliberately. One of the things I always do, you saw me do it in the AI talk that I give around AI as a teammate, I ask the people, the event planners, ahead of time, is there a job description that's like, like the norm for us. And so in this case, I went to SEMA's website. They're their job listings section because it's an association. So every association has one. I pulled one, I fed it in, I had it give me ideas. It's a really cool micro moment that's super specific to the industry. So it could be that. But you could also say, like, is there a current event that you could speak to? Talk to me about this just happening, right? If I'm a marketing, like, I don't know if you're seeing it on social right now. Like, if I'm a marketing speaker, Cracker Barrel is getting a lot of heat because they redesign. Like, okay, can you speak to that and talk about, about why it's actually good for a brand refresh, etc. Just all we're looking for is 60 seconds and the advance notice to the production teams that we need to make sure that gets captured because we're going to get it out before the conference is over. And now I'm tagged in it. The event's tagged in it. People are following and oh my gosh, that moment was so great. I can't believe you did that. The comments are strutting on LinkedIn and now even just the people who are aware of your event are larger because we kind of manufactured this moment that it's not always going to go viral, but it's probably going to be one of the biggest pieces of content that spreads in the days after your event, not two weeks later when somebody does the event recap. That's lots of people posing with red solo cups around the bar, right? Sure, yeah, 100%. First of all, I think everybody gets the term viral wrong, right? They assume that viral means like an event in the moment for a time, right? That Sydney Sweeney does a commercial, big viral moment. You know, the, you know, there's a video of a dog smacking its head into a door and it's kind of funny or like, you know, a little girl saying, I want to pet that dog. You know, all that. That, that is a type of hypervrality, right? What I think people get a little bit wrong about virality is that like all like it comes from a virus, something that sort of incubates and takes time. And it's those moments that you're talking about that I think actually create real virality. Because as you said, that will solidify it. That moment will be solidified in the back of somebody's mind and it will stay dormant until six months down the Road where the graphics for year two come out and they were like, hey, remember this? That happened last year? Hey, we're going to be back in San Francisco and it's going to be a cool event. And that's where that viral infection. This is such a bad metaphor. I feel so dirty. No, I get it, I get it. It sort of festers in their brain and then they go, oh my God. Yeah, that's it. I remember that. And I want to go to that event. And so I think you're absolutely right that if in the we can put a little bit of thought and strategy into how do we leverage this into that story driven moment, similar to sitting in the F1 car. Like you said at the beginning of this, that integrates the speaker story into the attendee story, creates this moment of intersection and then allows it to be something that is memorable enough that it'll endemic itself in the back of your brain. Then you've done 90% of the work of growing your event year over year. Yeah. So if someone listening feels unsure about how to design events that really resonate with people, what's one piece of advice that you'd give them right now? Yeah. One of the things I shared from stage at SEMA was the idea that every event is a new team. And I don't think we think that way. Like this actually speaks to what we were just talking about with trying to kind of find that moment. Every event is a new team, which means like my, my approach to most of the clients that I work with, we sign a contract to have company speak. We're a team now. Like I'm a member of the team now. I don't often feel that way. I feel like I'm trying to be that way. And actually I'm a vendor and if that's all you want from me, like, that's fine. I get it. Like a coffee break is more expensive than my keynote fee, speaking fee, and my fee is still pretty high. Right. It's just the, the world we live in. Right. Especially if you're in like Orlando or Vegas. Yeah, but so I get it. If that's all you want. But there's more potential there. I think every event is a new team and the roster of people who are coming together are part of that team. And obviously, like I make my living in teams, so I'm speaking out of my own bias here. Right. Because I'm always fascinated with team dynamics, but I don't think most people think that way. And I think that would be the one thing we could really level up is that when we sign a, when you sign a contract with any speaker, you are signing them onto your team for the event. Yeah, I think that applies to collaboration. That applies to like chair vendors and, and 10 vendors and AV and all that kind of stuff. Everybody, this is a collaborative, like I keep saying, this is a collaborative art form. And collaboration comes from teamwork. Right. That. And so, yeah, if you go out and you say, hey, I've got all these vendors, then you're right there. It's a small fiefdom that is reporting to you. And I don't know if you have a lot of growth and collaboration there. Right. But if you say, right, these are the people I invited to the team and now we're this team and we're moving forward. I have worked in those circumstances before and oh my God, it's night and day. It is a better experience, it's a better result. The client is always happier. So kudos to you for that. So what's keeping you inspired about events right now? Yeah, well, again, I think there's, I think we're still in, it's 2025, but I think we're still in the post pandemic buzz around events. I think this idea I kind of hinted at earlier that as AI makes it harder and harder to what's real, people are going to want to be real with each other more. So I think that is interesting. I think, okay, controversial thing number three. I think the fact that we're, we have tighter budgets and we're having to do more with less is actually exciting in a way because one of the things, one of my first book was around creativity and creativity loves constraints. Right. It turns out, no, it's more painful. I get it. Like, it's easier if you have an unlimited budget and you're just like, let's get Magic Johnson and then we're off to the races. Right. But when you've got a budget, like, you've got to be a bit more creative. You've got to think about, you've got to partner with your vendors more. You got to do everything we've talked about today. And so in a weird way, it actually excites me. It's a new problem. Not a new problem. It's an every eight to ten years problem. Right. But it's a problem that actually excites me because I think we're going to see people getting a little more creative with, with what they can do, what they ask from their, not vendors, teammates, et cetera. And I'm cur. I'm really curious to see what comes out of it. I think there's actually a huge opportunity here to create more surprises and delays, lights. And it doesn't actually just take more money, it just takes a little more creativity. Yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the episode, I always like to ask each of our guests, what do you think is actually valuable in event production and what do you see as a waste of time, money or effort? I mean, I kind of joked at it earlier with let's get Magic Johnson, but truthfully, and I said this in, in an interview I gave with PCMA magazine, I, I think celebrity speakers are the biggest waste of money on the circuit. I think you're much better finding a surprise and delight speaker. I think, think when I write a book or look for stories to tell in a speech, I look for stories you've never heard about household names so people you know of but haven't heard that story of. Or I look for stories that are so crazy you wonder why you haven't heard about that yet. We did this with the national, the park ranger, etc, who used AI to save thousands of hours a year. Right. It's just like a, it's a crazy story. How have I never heard that before? Right. And I think we ought to think the same thing for the speakers we put on stage, but instead we just go, oh, let's get Jason Sudeikis. And then Jacob Sidis tells the same story he told on Late Night with Conan six months ago. And what. Right. So if you're, if you've got the budget to hire a celebrity speaker and you want to spend that budget to get people to come to your event because they're in love with whatever celebrity it is, just make sure they're prepped enough to know we want to hear some real behind the scenes stuff. Yeah. And if they're not willing to do that, there are dozens and dozens of people that your audience has never heard of who will get there and tell you stuff that you're like. Like, I can't believe I've never heard of this story before. And that's what we ought to be looking for. I 100% agree with you. I have. There are a couple of speakers that I greatly admire and I have, you know, they admire as human beings just because of the things that they've accomplished. And every time I run into them is like, oh, I know this part of your speech, that's where that slide comes in. Because I've seen them. And, and to be Honest, there are countless examples of some of those same speakers who probably have that exact speech fully produced on YouTube or whatever it is. And I'll pick on Will Guidera, who. Oh God, what's the name of his book? Unreasonable Hospitality. Thank you very much. It's like a Bible. I bet you he tells the story of going out and finding the hot dog to surprise the couple hundred percent. You know what I mean? And I greatly his Will's not great. I greatly admire him and I loved his book, and so on and so on. But then I went to see his presentation. I went, I've heard this story. And so the one thought that I had was, why aren't we hearing something else? Why aren't we like, it's like, yes, I was interested in coming to this event to see Will because I greatly admire his story. I loved his book and I want to learn more about it. But I got to see his presentation, I went like, oh, that's when his slide comes in. I've seen this before, so 100% agree with you. David, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights on creating engaging events and building stronger teams. For those listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to like follow, subscribe to Production Value Matters and you can also find more episodes and insights at production value matters.com David, thank you so much for joining me today. It was an absolute pleasure to chat with you. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Okay, cheers. Production Value Matters, the business events podcast, is brought to you by Burn Production Services. To learn more about Burn Production Services and how we can achieve your business business goals, head over to burn productionservices.com thanks for listening.