Her Story
About Shari
I've been doing event planning for about 16 years, since 2007. After graduating from college, I worked for a PR firm for 2 years, then moved to a non-profit event company. My friend at JP Morgan told me about an event position there, and I took it right away. I worked in corporate events, meetings, and conferences at JP Morgan from 2007 to 2013. When my son was born, I didn't go back to work. While I was home taking care of him, I really enjoyed planning his birthday parties. After his second birthday party, I was sitting with a bunch of mom friends at coffee, and they said 'you should just do it,' so I did. It took a while to take off with just a party here and there, but the past two years it really started taking traction. Now I'm doing events every month, and it's only me, so I've had to get help from family. I have an intern starting in May and an assistant. My most notable achievement was doing my own son's bar mitzvah this past January from top to bottom with zero help, all from scratch. It was my biggest accomplishment because it was personal as well as professional at the same time.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Shari
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would like to say I think it's the way that I am with the clients. My business is so word of mouth that if the clients didn't like me, I wouldn't be getting my next job. Me personally, I'm very organized, and I'm very good under pressure, and I don't stress. I think that emanates through the events that I do, and it really shows, and then the next person feels confident to hire me because of the experience the last person had.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think that, especially this newer generation, a lot of things are different, and a lot of people focus on different things in event planning, like a lot of it's now about the social media aspect of it, your likes, or your posts, things like that. I wanted to tell them that to me, that comes second. I think that if they do a really great job, the photos will show that no matter when or how much they're posting them. It's really about the work that you do, not about the showing of it.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
Because it's my own business, I feel like the biggest challenge is securing a party. Nothing is always guaranteed since I don't work for a company. A lot of it is word of mouth, so as long as I'm doing well on one, someone else will tell them about it, and then I'll get a call, but I don't always get a call. The biggest challenge is just not knowing when the next one is coming. Besides that, I would say because I work by myself, that also becomes challenging, because if I have multiple events, I have to juggle, and that becomes difficult too.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Definitely organization is a great value for work and personal. I think it keeps all of our schedules where they're supposed to be, and not everybody is rushing or stressed. I also think being genuine is good for my business and my personal. I don't like to make people think something that's not happening. I always want to tell them the truth and give them the possibilities that are realistic when we're doing an event, or even for my kids. I don't like to make them think something could happen that can't.
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