Happy Friday Event and Venue Management Professionals!
The end of the year is always a time of introspection. This year, has been truly incredible for me and my family. Stylehawk Event Services today is not the company I envisioned when I started this project in 2014 and it is not the company I thought I was leading when I shifted my focus full time to it… And that is a good thing.
The roots are there. Stylehawk was borne from my experiences as a Southern California venue operator. I saw too many talented event promoters get sideways on amazing event concepts because of subjective, laissez faire venue booking philosophies, limited resources and constrained production capacity.
I believed I could solve these issues.
Now, I know we can solve them and we have a growing list of event promoters who agree.
I am working on better ways of communicating our value proposition and better addressing the pain points our event promoter clients are struggling with. I am excited about the plans for 2019.
Our venue- based event coordination system eliminates stress so sport event promoters can enjoy the events of their imagination.
#Take Flight
🏟🦅
And now for the suggested readings…
Grab our Free E-Book!
Borrowed Experience: How Working as a Loan Officer Made Me a Better Event Services Professional
Excerpt:
It was the dawn of a new millennium, and my rock n’ roll fantasy was fading away… After giving it a go as a drummer with a touring band, I put my sticks down and got myself a real “gig” as a commissioned loan officer with a busy San Diego mortgage company. I came from a family of real estate agents, but had little real estate experience myself. Nevertheless, the early 2000s were a great time to be in the mortgage business. Housing was booming and home loan lenders were aggressive on rates, terms, and qualification standards. It was a feeding frenzy and Californians were desperate to get into the housing market for fear of it leaving them behind…
Safety:
How Situational Awareness Could Save Your Life
I often write about situational awareness. As we become more and more distracted by the digital and the mundane in our daily lives, we become less attentive to our physical environment and the threats around us. This careless state of being is made worse when we consider how paralyzed most of us are by social anxieties.
Will someone be offended if I behave this way?
What if I’m wrong?
Will I look silly if I am the only one? *
*See the reading below in Entrepreneurship for more insight
Regardless of who we are or what we do, we need to pay more attention to our surroundings. We must think about potential challenges and how we will react to them; and then take swift, decisive action. It is easy to take the current state of being for granted. We must challenge ourselves to remember that we live in a dynamic world and effort must be made to thrive in it.
Courtesy:
8 Companies with Exceptional Customer Service
Event venues and sports organizations have recognized that guest services is a key component to their value proposition.
Millennials have keyed in on this and industry is following. Experiences are valued over possession; but key to that experience is the ability to share or display the experience with others. The experience therefore demonstrates status. In the world of sports, there are rare occasions where the action on the field is buzz- worthy enough to create status. There are also instances where the venue or the event have enough social weight to create value. More often than not though, the experience creates status for guests because of the way the guest feels about the experience. Experiences that make people feel good will get more attention. When people feel good, they are more likely to re-engage in that experience.
This transforms the concept of service from functional to marketable. The experience is the product and the purveyors of that product are the front- line staff. Guest services is not complicated. We work hard to train our staff the golden rule. “Treat others the way you wish to be treated.” The mechanics and the specifics vary (slightly) between industries but conceptually guest services and customer services are the same. In this article, the author looks at anecdotal customer service stories and establishes a big picture take- aways from each of these examples.
Efficiency:
Why Do Event Promoters Call Stylehawk for San Diego Venue Sourcing and More?
Stylehawk Event Services was created to be a turnkey solution that systematically eliminates event coordination pain points for sports event promoters. The concept was borne from my strong belief in Paretto’s Law or the 80/20 principle. This theory says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort. In application then, we should all focus on the 20% of things we do really well to multiply results and delegate the remaining activities to people who do those things really well. When speaking about venue management and event operations… we do those things really.
Entrepreneurship:
The Wilt Chamberlain Effect: Why We Make Bad Decisions, Even When We Know Better.
Back in the 60s, Wilt Chamberlain was an other- worldly basketball player. He had size and grace nobody had ever seen on a basketball floor and it translated into massive results. One night in 1962 Wilt did something amazing. He scored 100 points in a single game. A dominant performance that has never been duplicated. One of the keys to the scoring record was that Wilt scored 28 points (from 32 attempts) at the free throw line. This was an 87.5% free throw percentage for the game and represented a drastic improvement over his 40% career free throw percentage.
This marked improvement was a result of Wilt’s choice to shoot his free throws granny style. Following this game, Wilt made a baffling decision to abandon his granny style free throws in favor of the more traditional overhand shot. Predictably, his shooting percentage tumbled back down. In Chamberlain’s autobiography, he revisited his choice to abandon the granny style shot and wrote, “I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded. I know I was wrong. I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. Even now, the best one in the NBA, Rick Barry shoots underhanded. I just couldn’t do it.”
This choice to deny the right choice, even when we know it to be right can be explained by the Threshold Model of Collective Behavior which argues that humans make decisions based on the social reaction to the behavior of the people in their environment. We all have a threshold and when our personal threshold number of people is met to do an activity, our behavior will change. This choice is called the Social Courage Decision. Wilt Chamberlain needed a high threshold of people to grant permission for him to shoot granny style. Rick Barry on the other hand, had a low threshold of people. In his case, Barry “put mastery of a task at hand, ahead of social approval.”
Featured Venue:
Veterans Memorial Stadium in Long Beach: A Versatile Outdoor Venue in a Great Location – Long Beach, Ca
Veteran’s Memorial Stadium at Long Beach City College in Long Beach is an iconic sports event venue with a distinguished history and a noble origin. This dynamic Southern California stadium features an artificial sprint turf playing surface surrounded by a 9 lane all- weather track. It has seating for 11,600 fans, a 2- level press box, scoreboard, ticket booths, locker rooms, practice field and concession stand. Veteran’s Stadium also has a massive parking lot which is a great support feature or stand- alone event space.
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