Brittany Staniszewski

Both my sister and I are first-generation college graduates, and a lot of my love for Hospitality comes from my mom, because I grew up watching her in the Hospitality Industry. But we weren't handed a beautiful life - we worked very hard for it. I would honestly say my sister and I have the ability to see things that maybe didn't go right, and make our paths better off for ourselves. It's my dedication and drive to being successful based on seeing people in my family maybe not be successful. That really pushes me to work hard and achieve more.

Every day is a new day. There's always going to be problems to solve, and you just have to use your expertise to navigate those problems every day. That's kind of what keeps us in the industry - there's always something to solve. But we have a great team, I have a great team who always is there for support. You're not ever going to do it alone. You're always going to have people to back you and really lean on each other when you're doing these crazy events.

Patience. Patience with yourself, patience with your client, and just remembering that you are human, and so are your attendees. They're not planners. I think as a planner, it's very easy to wonder why they don't know this, or why aren't they reading our emails. But that's because we're in the brain of a planner, and sometimes you have to step outside of your expertise and just remember that we're all humans, and things happen. Our job is literally about problem solving, so you're always going to have a problem to solve, even if you think you've solved them all. It's all about taking ownership and feeling confident. The client loves someone who feels confident in what they're talking about and what they're doing, and the more confident that you are, the more confidence your client will have in you.

Technology advancing right now is a big opportunity that I've really been focusing on. I'm looking at new ways to do the same tasks but make them easier, really focusing on giving the client the same performance and outcomes but making them take less time for our team. We're utilizing AI and different online platforms to streamline processes that have typically been really manual in the past. There's a lot of manual things that come with our job, and we're really trying to hone those in and just make the overall job not as stressful and time-consuming as it can be and has been. As for challenges, being a young female in kind of a salesy industry is not the easiest. Even with event planning, people think it's florals and party planning, and they don't actually understand the time commitment, the family commitment, the travel commitment that goes with all of the planning. That's definitely been a hurdle to overcome - just trying to make yourself known as an expert in the industry as someone who's a lot younger than the people that they work with. So just really making a name for myself and building relationships and connections where people can respect me, even if I maybe don't have as much experience as everyone else.