In this episode of the Gathering Gurus podcast, GoGather President, Dave Wagner talks about what really matters when planning an event—building strong relationships.
He shares his philosophies that drive how our team creates and maintains trust-based partnerships across the industry.
Dave is the President and Co-Founder of GoGather, a full service corporate meeting and event agency. His passion is creating high touch, high impact events that promote your brand message, business goals and values. With over 20 years of experience in the event management industry, Dave is knowledgeable about how to deliver exceptional results for you, your audience and your organization. Dave will serve as an executive sponsor for your team, and support the execution of your event where needed.
Dave Wagner: Welcome to the Gathering Gurus podcast.
We wanted to share some of the tips and tricks and some of the things that we do to really establish strong relationships in the industry, whether that be hoteliers, audiovisual production companies, DMCs, or all of our partners that we work with.
Can you tell us some of your philosophy on relationships and partnerships?
Gary: I think they're the most important thing that you need to look at the beginning. I mean, a meeting is about a gathering. It's about a group effort, and that translates all the way through. It's incredibly important. It takes a village to pull off a meeting, and you can't do it by yourself.
You have to rely on partners. You know, at one point, if you've got really good partners that you're working with, we're all human. Everybody makes a mistake every now and again. But with a good partner and a great working relationship, you can work together to soften that problem, maybe even make it go away.
Or the best thing of all is when you can take a problem that you have on your side and turn it into something better than what you even plan to begin with, and that you can only do if you have a great partnership with the people you're working with and a trust level.
Dave Wagner: Yeah, I love that. So how do those partnerships play into the partnership with the client? So we have the client that we're working with, and then we have hotels, all these other partners that we're working with. At what point do you bring the client into that relationship?
Talk a little bit about the client partnership that we have and the vendor partnership and bringing all those together and ensuring that they're the right fit.
Gary: At times, there are two different avenues, and it depends on the individual. And what does your partner or client have on their plate and knowing, you know, okay, this X, Y, and Z, I need to bring to the partner. A, B, and C, I need to focus on this and fix this myself with my partners so that my client is able to focus on what they need to get done and accomplish.
And really, everybody is there to support the client. So, to me, it's important, as the person who's out planning and putting together all the logistics, it's my job to establish incredibly strong partnerships with all our suppliers so that everyone, in a way, is a cheerleader for our ultimate client to accomplish their goals.
And that's, I think that's the real thing, a partnership. You're establishing it for your own working relationship. But you really have to keep in mind that your ultimate goal is your client. What are their goals and what do they want to accomplish?
Dave Wagner: Yeah, I love what you said there about bringing the partners together to rally for the client. So, starting with your long history in hotels specifically in Las Vegas, and knowing that we met you in this role, we were planning an event, and you were at the hotel.
Talk a little bit about how, as a third party now, as GoGather, you go into hotels, and when you're working with Gary at the Venetian establish that relationship and that partnership from day one, when you come in with a site to make sure that everybody, all the hotel staff, all the vendors, everyone is rallying for the client.
Gary: I think that it's incredibly important. I'll have to say that my first official call with GoGather, with a hotel, was a little bit surreal because I've spent 25 years on the other side of it. Before I made the call, I really sat and thought about, okay, what are my main goals on this initial call? And really, I structured it to, I want to know how the hotel operates. What kind of meetings does your catering manager, CSM conference manager, or whatever the hotel deems that person? What are their set meetings?
What do they have on their calendar so that you can start working with them really, you need to be able to respect their time and then establish this rhythm of, here's information, I need information back, but being respectful, because I've always found that you get so much more if you take the time to listen to a hotel, it's critical, and not listening to a hotel will cause so many problems down the line that may not become apparent, that they'll be under the surface for sure.
But if you take the time and really learn how the hotel works, what are set things? How do they set up bars? How do they inventory beverages and work with them on that? I'm not saying that you change your standards to whatever the hotel is.
You still have to keep the standards of the client to accomplish their goal, because that's the end of it. But there are so many avenues that you can go to accomplish the goal, and working with a supplier rather than against a supplier, it's just critical.
Dave Wagner: Yeah, yeah, I love that. So, establishing respect and trust through the process, and helping them understand that we're there to support them and to help them do things the way that they need to internally, to help create efficiencies and make this an easier program than might otherwise.
Gary: Exactly.