Kimberly Chung

I feel like it's a combination of God, and I'm just willing to jump into things and take chances. I think I'm just willing to do the nitty-gritty hard work. I very much believe that success is, you know, what's that quote? 99% preparation and 1% opportunity or luck. I do believe that I am where I am today because I really put in the work to learn things from the ground up and make sure I understand how things work, so that by the time opportunities came my way, I was ready.

One of the best career advice probably came from my dad. I got into management at a really young age, and my dad had a pretty cool career in Shell. He told me two rules of management that I have lived by for pretty much my entire life. He said, rule number one, don't do anything that your staff can do. And then he goes, rule number two, make sure your staff can do everything. I think because I have remembered that all my life, it's made me really good at delegating and trusting people with responsibility, and as a result, I am not a micromanager. I do think that a lot of my success is the fact that I'm able to build really great teams. A lot of what we do, it's not just because of me, it's because I just have really great people that work with me, and they know I trust them. I think because they feel like they have ownership and responsibility, we're able to serve our clients really well.

I would say for anyone that wants to get into luxury event production, the first thing I would say is see if you can get with a company whose events you admire or love, and see if you can kind of be around that space, because the event world is very wide. When you say events, it could be a party, it could be a massive music festival like ACL, could be a trade show, so you really need to know what type of event you like. And then figuring out also, do you prefer working with a venue, or do you actually like something similar to what we do, where it's really project to project? The second thing I would also say is start paying attention to all the vendors that go into making an event work really well, and forming those relationships. In the industry that I'm in, especially in luxury event production, the typical marketing tactics like social media and stuff like that don't always work, because at the end of the day, when you're dealing with high-end events, what people really care about is, do you have a good reputation? Have they possibly either attended an event that you've already produced, or do they know somebody who has? We're 95% referral, and all of it is really relationships from existing clients, from vendors, or people who just showed up and was like, wow, this is really well run, I need to go talk to the producer. So I'd say the more experience you can get, whether it's just from being a production assistant or getting to shadow an event producer, and do it in a variety of different types of events, that's where I would probably tell them to start.

I would say the bar actually is not super high in event production, at least the type of events that we do. A third to half of our clients come to us because they had a bad experience with somebody else, usually somebody who wasn't as detail-oriented or just couldn't understand their vision. So for us, the opportunity we've seen is we're not just pure logistics, we are creative. I do think that now that we're out of the pandemic, people actually really like going to events. We're one of the industries that hasn't been hit by AI as hard as other industries, just because I think AI is a good tool for certain logistical tasks, but in our world, a lot of it is very human-to-human touch. I can't really think of a day where I'm gonna trust a robot to put together a really nice swag bag or put the finishing touches on a floral arrangement. I think there's opportunity also for a lot of people. Besides just wanting good schedules that are on time, I think people now are gearing towards experiences where they can feel like they're really connecting with people. I think we live in a world where everything's so digital that the draw for in-person events has become people liking being in the same room with other people, getting to have authentic conversations, just have a moment together. So I think there's a lot of opportunity in the industry to put those kind of connection points into an event, and that's what makes things memorable.

As a company, we really prize excellence. We want to be excellent in everything that we do. We value transparency and honesty and integrity. At our company, we make sure that clients know where every dollar is going into their event, which is not always the case with event companies. There are some event companies that don't always show all the final quotes and bills to clients, and our philosophy is, hey, it's your event, you need to know how your money's being spent. We prize agility in the roles that we have. We have to be resourceful, we have to be able to pivot on a dime, and then we just want to have fun. So creativity and fun is a big value for us. I would say those values are very similar to how I live my life. The added one would be that I am a person of faith. I am Christian, and I do very much feel like, for me, it's very important that whatever I do, that I'm praying and I'm being thoughtful about how I serve people and how I interact with them. I don't feel like I would be the person that I am if it weren't for my faith.