Twenty Years In, and No One Taught Me This

I planned events for almost two decades before anyone ever asked me to prove one worked.

Leadership retreats. Corporate conferences. Holiday parties that took months to build. I had an MBA in marketing. I came up learning events from the marketing side. And still, nobody ever taught me how to track or measure whether any of it actually did anything for the business.

So I didn't. I just made things beautiful, fun and memorable.

Every event I ran had the perfect flow. The branding was sharp. The logistics were airtight. People walked away saying it was the best event they'd ever been to. And I believed that was the job. I believed that was success.

Here's the part that still gets me. Nobody ever sat me down and said, "Jenny, you're missing a piece." Nobody said, "This is where you connect the room you just built to a number someone in the C-suite actually cares about." I wasn't failing at something I knew I was supposed to do. I genuinely did not know the thing existed.

That's the trap. You don't know what you don't know, and nobody tells you, because the people above you either don't know it either, or they assumed you already did.

The wake-up call came when I hit a wall in my own career. I could not get to the next level planning events the way I'd always planned them. Not because the events weren't good. They were great. But great wasn't the language leadership was speaking. Leadership was speaking pipeline. Leadership was speaking revenue. Leadership was speaking proof. And I had none of that in my back pocket.

So I stopped everything and went and learned it. All of it. How to track. How to measure. How to build a framework that could take an event from "everyone had a great time" to "here's what changed because of it." That's where the Experiential Edge Blueprint came from. Not from a textbook. From standing in a room full of people who loved what I built and realizing I couldn't tell anyone why it mattered to the business.

I had a conversation with Liz Lathan from Club Ichi last week that brought this whole thing back around. Liz spent twenty years in corporate events at companies like Dell and IBM before building her own community. And she told me something that stopped me cold. Inside plenty of Fortune 500 companies, there is no real communication line between sales, marketing, and the events team. Three departments in the same building, all working toward the same goals, and often speaking three different languages.

Liz took it upon herself to fix that for her own team. She taught the planners under her the language of sales and marketing, on purpose, because she knew that was the only way they'd ever get past entry level. Some companies do this. Most don't. And if you're not lucky enough to land somewhere that does, you're on your own to figure it out. The hard way. Like I did.

If you're an event planner right now with under ten years in, you're probably doing exactly what I did. Progressing. Getting better. Planning bigger and better events every year. And at some point, without any warning, you're going to hit a wall. You're going to realize you can't make more money and you can't move up, and it won't be because your events aren't good enough. It'll be because you never learned to speak the language the people above you are speaking.

Nobody is going to walk up and tell you that's the problem. That's exactly what happened to me.

So consider this me telling you.

This is also exactly why the CPES exists, and why it's not just for people who've been doing this for fifteen years. It's for the planner who wants to get ahead and finally learn how to measure and prove what they build. It's for the person who wants to make the leap from planning into experiential strategy, the kind of work agencies get hired to do because companies can't connect those dots internally. If that's not taught inside your company, you go find it somewhere else. That's what I did. That's what this whole certification was built to shortcut for you.

You don't have to spend two decades finding this out the hard way.

Check out the CPES.