We’re excited to welcome Gary McCreary, our Executive VP at GoGather, to today’s Gathering Gurus podcast episode. With nearly 30 years of experience in hospitality, food and beverage management, and event planning, Gary brings a wealth of expertise to the table.
In this episode, Gary shares his unique journey from growing up on a cattle ranch in northwest Arkansas to spending nearly 25 years as the VP of Catering and Convention Operations at the largest meetings and convention hotel in Las Vegas. His commitment to crafting unforgettable experiences for attendees has shaped his people-driven event management style.
Join us as Gary reflects on his early ambitions, career highlights, and the lessons he’s learned along the way.
About the Expert: Gary McCreary
Gary McCreary, cmp fellow, cpce, csep, is the Executive VP of GoGather where he helps the GoGather team drive operational efficiencies and enhance the client experience.
Gary has received numerous awards and accolades, including 10 Gala Awards and 31 Gala Award Nominations from Special Events Magazine. He is also the recipient of Six ONE Awards from the National Association of Catering & Events and was named the 2009 Caterer of the Year by the National Association of Catering & Events (Las Vegas Chapter). Additionally, Gary has been featured on the Food Network Program "Behind the Bash."
Transcript
Brian Kellerman: Welcome back to the Gathering Gurus podcast. We're thrilled to be here with our newest guru, Gary McCreary. Excited to have you here and have you join us at GoGather, bringing that sort of wealth of knowledge that we know and love so well. So actually want to give our viewers, our listeners a chance to kind of get to know you and a little bit of your background.
Brian Kellerman: We met a long, long time ago. Hard to believe. In fact, I had to use a little beard dye to, you know, maybe transport back a few years.
Gary McCreary: You have to use the whole bottle.
Brian Kellerman: Exactly. But I love the history. Love that. So tell us a little bit just about yourself, and how you originally got involved in the industry. And who is Gary McCreary?
Gary McCreary: Who am I? Well, I am the oldest of five kids. I've got two brothers and twin sisters. We all get along amazingly well. We all grew up on a cattle ranch in northwest Arkansas. So PBS was pretty much my window to the world. I learned to cook from Julia Child and Jacques Buffin on channel 13.
And that was, I think, how all this started I wanted to become a professional chef. My grandmother, my father's mother, was just an amazing cook. Hospitality just exuded from her, and I think she was the one and was my example, my mentor in a way, of, this is what you want to do.
So I apprenticed as her chef, all this kind of stuff. The kitchen was very hot. I think the air conditioner was broken. Decided, okay, maybe this is not the side of this I want to be on. I'll cook for friends, but not professionally. And I flipped to the other side and the front of the housework.
And then you got going into, like, looking at all these other avenues of, like, bringing people in and welcoming them and creating something special and creating a memory and feeding them. And that just all resonated with everything that was within me. And so I struck out, went to the University of North Texas, where I got my degree in hotel and restaurant management.
But at the same time, I was like, my ideal job back then was I want to work for the state department in protocol. Well, it didn't work out that way, but that was kind of the emphasis. I think that was the part that started getting me into meetings and scheduling and logistics because that's my other real love.
I love cooking. I love food and wine, but I also love all those details. You're like a cog maker in a way, putting all the cogs in. You get to pull the pendulum back, and you get to watch everything run, and you have to be there with another cog in case one messes up.
And I think a lot of that is the logistics of actually putting on an event kind of speaks to me that way. Then in college, I did a year at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. Was an amazing experience.
Brian Kellerman: Your English is excellent.
Gary McCreary: I don't think anybody said that at the time, nor today. But, um, and while I was there, I was able to just experience some amazing things. The Duke and Duchess of Kent were the chancellors of the university, so there were some interesting opportunities there. I was going to hopefully go and work for the Ritz in London due to some connections that I had made there.
But then the Gulf War broke out.
Brian Kellerman: Oh wow.
Gary McCreary: Occupancies in London plummeted to, like, 7%. I ended up like, well, my visa is running out. I don't have a job. I'm going to go back. So I came back to the US and did my last internship in Dallas, and now I'm like, okay, I've got to find a job.
And so I went out and just interviewed, interviewed, interviewed everywhere, and I'm like, nothing's turning up. I was like, I must interview horribly. Then I came across the Anatole Hotel in Dallas. I always had an incredible interest in art and art history. I'll never forget when I walked into the Miro ballroom, and the Miro ballroom at Anatole, at the time, had five original Miro paintings in it.
And I was just thunderstruck. And, like, this is the hotel I'm going to work for. I mean, the art throughout the hotel, and even to this day, as the Hilton Anatole. It's unrivaled. It's a museum. And so I kept on going back. I think I interviewed five times at this hotel.
Brian Kellerman: Persistence. There we go.
Gary McCreary: And the last time I came in, I'll never forget, I walked into the HR office because I got another little interview with HR, and her name was April Walsh, and she was, um, the human resource manager. And she looked at me and she's like, you look familiar.
And I was like, yeah, I've been here. And she reaches down, she pulls out this file cabinet and pulls out this Manila folder that has, like, all of my applications in it. She's like, you know, I'll say this for you, you're persistent I'm gonna find you a job today.
Brian Kellerman: Wow.
Gary McCreary: So I started in the business center, worked through that, went through meeting services, got into catering, and that was kind of the story of the Anatole. And then I think it was back in 97 or 96 I was your and Dave's conference manager.
Brian Kellerman: That's right. That's where we first met.
Gary McCreary: Yeah.
Brian Kellerman: What an amazing sort of background. We've already talked in another episode sort of about your history in Vegas, so. Yeah, from the Anatole to Vegas, and thankfully, just through these amazing relationships that you were able to make there, and here we are, 20-some-odd years later, almost 30 years later, and continuing.
What I liked a lot about what you said, or I think is a very unique perspective that I'd like to talk about a little bit more, are you are involved in this industry in general because of your love of hospitality. I mean, sort of that was a motivator for you.
Gary McCreary: Right.
Brian Kellerman: I think there are different motivators for people to initially get involved. A lot of people, when they think about meeting planning, event planning, they think about logistics and checklists, and I have this list of operational items and things that we need to get through, and procurement and contracts and those sorts of things.
And maybe hospitality isn't sort of at the forefront of what their thinking is around events. How do you sort of rectify that? You mentioned that a little bit. But is there a place for hospitality in meetings and events?
Gary McCreary: It's at the very core of it. I would say that if you're going at it the other way around, you've got it all wrong. We are all human beings, and I think we are all innately programmed to seek out connections. And hospitality is that magic that helps all of that come together.
I mean, just be hospitable, to create a safe space for people to come together, to let down the walls that kind of come up, or at least a little bit to create connections between people. And to me, that's what, meetings, that's what meetings are all about. It's creating a connection between human beings, to exchange information, exchange ideas, to align.
And that, to me, is, it's critical for any meeting out there because that's what you want to accomplish. I think any meeting that any organization puts on, look, uh, at the amount of resources you're putting into it. Meetings are expensive. They're hard to put together. But if you put together a meeting and all you're focusing on is, okay, I get everybody there, everybody goes to the general session, then they go to the welcome reception, and then the next day they wake up and they have breakfast, then they have general sessions, and then they have concurrent breakouts, and that's all you're focused on.
What at the end of the day, have you accomplished? And have you used those dollars from your company wisely, if you haven't created them? You created a great box, but what's in the box? And what's in the box is the important part.
It's the part that when you take and create memories for people, or you create special experiences for people, they take those and they become memories.
That's what the magic in doing a meeting well is. You're creating something that changes someone's perspective. And if you're doing a national launch, or if you're doing just a national sales meeting or anything, that's your real goal. Your real goal is to take this group of people and change their opinions on things, or to align their opinions on things or something to that effect.
Your goal isn't just, oh, that everybody got there on time and everybody sat in their seat and all of that. That's just the mechanism.
Brian Kellerman: Right? I love it. Yeah, I think we see that a lot, right? We see companies that sort of get stuck in the rut of, this is what we've done in the past. This is the way we've sort of always done things. You know, we need to check these boxes, or perhaps even as organizations grow, teams grow, sort of the…
I don't want to call it bureaucracy. But maybe a little bit to a certain extent, there are forms, there are procedures or things that we need to follow, and sometimes it can feel like those things are limiting maybe the creativity or even specifically the hospitality of an event. We tend to look at our attendees as almost a commodity or a product that needs to be moved through a system.
Gary McCreary: And they're far from that. They're human beings. They're individuals. Um, I was at an amazing event the last couple of days called the collective, where it's a group, it's a think tank group of some of the most creative minds out there in the meetings world. One of our very interactive sessions was literally about belonging and the importance of creating an environment where people belong, and all kinds of statistics about how much more productive teams are when they have a feeling of belonging.
Um, the effects that Covid did, the effects of remote work, and there's a lot of work out there based on the statistics of what companies need to look at, of creating events and I think that's where the power of events comes in. Here you have the opportunity to look at that and create that and look at creating a section for your millennial workforce.
One of the statistics they said was, I think it's for the first time, we have five generations all working.
Brian Kellerman: Oh, my goodness.
Gary McCreary: And so that's five and eight different views. You have the millennial segment that they have theirs. You have Xers who need these. You still have boomers that are out there or one thing that kind of resonated with me is workers that have been in the workplace for a long time, typically have this, just get the work done. I don't need to belong to this kind of thing. That's because they've been at the place for a while. Well, what about the worker that's been displaced, that comes back now into the workforce?
They're older. They're going to have a different set of needs. And I think that's one thing in your planning for a meeting. Look at your population. If that's an avenue you want to go down, or if that's, like, one of your main goals, you need to analyze the population that you're bringing in and think about that, because, again, it's not about building the box.
You need what's in the box because what's in the box is what's going to stay with your company.
Brian Kellerman: Right, right. You mentioned something that is sort of looking at your goals, sort of being able to analyze and understand why we are hosting this program in the first place. And then, of course, who are our attendees, and how do we accomplish that specific set of goals with this specific group of individuals?
And so often, again I think you start to lose sight of one or both of those things to just make sure that things are run efficiently and quickly.
Gary McCreary: And look, running things efficiently is incredibly important, too. And I think that's where that does have its place. You do have to have the box. You do have to have the right box, and that's a process, too. But at least in my experience, a lot of times, it's what's in the box. That's the goal.
Brian Kellerman: Absolutely.
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