Event Planning Companies

If you hope to find a full-time job as an event planner or meeting planner, your focus should be on learning about event planning companies (also called meeting planning companies, meeting and event planners, etc). It is also possible, if you prefer to work as a freelancer or independent contractor, to find short term work (from a few weeks to 3-4 months or so) in-house at planning companies, perhaps during busy times or for a particular client.

As mentioned before, event planning companies are businesses whose sole service is to plan meetings and events for other companies.

As in the example used before, let's say XYC Pharmaceutical Company decides to hold a meeting for its employees from across the country. A common reason to hold a nationwide meeting, as mentioned in "Corporate Event Planning," is to train the sales force on a new product. So XYZ Pharmaceutical assigns an employee of XYZ, Mary the Meeting Planner, to organize this meeting.

However, Mary the Meeting Planner is either inexperienced or overworked. The XYZ sales force consists of 3,000 people across the country, and it takes a lot of work to organize a meeting of that size. So she decides to outsource the project to an event planning company; because planning events is all that they do, and therefore are much more thorough and can be relied upon to do a great job.

So Mary hires ABC Event Planning Company to handle her meeting. She will work closely with her assigned account executive and program manager in creating the entire event, from concept to the final billing.

How is an event planning company structured?

Like most other businesses, event planning companies are structured with some sort of hierarchy. Of course, every company is different, based upon the size of the company and its own internal philosophy; but overall, the following is a typical structure:

• President/CEO
• Vice President or some kind of Staff Manager

• Account Executives: AEs are usually the liason between the client and the rest of the event planning staff

• Program Managers or Event and Meeting Planners: These are the people who actually plan the events. The sales team secures the piece of business, the AE manages the client, and the program managers do the planning.
  • PM Assistants: Some companies have support staff that help the program managers. This is an excellent place to start if you have no experience in event planning!

• Sales Director
  • Sales Team

• Executive Assistant or Administrative Assistant: Although this might seem like a great way to "break in" to an event planning company, use caution with this approach (and only if you don't qualify as a program manager assistant). If you are a good admin, they will want to keep you as their admin. If you're not good, you might not last long enough to work your way into the planning department.

How do event planning companies charge for their services?

While every business has their own tactics, most planning companies make their profit in one of the following three ways:

• They charge hourly for their work.
• They charge a flat fee for the entire project, based upon an estimated number of hours.
• They charge a percentage of the final cost of the meeting.

However, there is another way to learn the "ins and outs" of event planning. If you are more of a free spirit, would rather work for yourself, and love to travel the world, you would be a perfect fit to be a freelance On-Site Event Manager.

To learn more about other jobs related to event planning and the event planning industry, click here!


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