I spent years building an events career that looked sooo very successful on paper. I got into the industry young. I rose quickly. I got more responsibility, more visibility, more pressure, more proof that I was good at what I did. I was the person people trusted. The one who could handle things. The one who could make it happen.

And because I was good at it, I kept going.

This is for paid subscribers only. The full story of the career that broke me, the moment I saw it clearly, and the decision that changed my entire life. I’d be so grateful for your support as part of my inner circle.

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It isn’t the game anymore.

The brands and founders doing the most interesting work right now are choosing rooms of 20 over conferences of 2000+, and they aren’t settling for less to do it. They’re reaching for something a huge room physically cannot give them.

I want to talk about why intimate events are having this moment, because it goes much deeper than a format preference, and I think it’s about to separate the operators who understand it from the ones still measuring success in headcount.

Look at where people actually are right now. More online and more protective of their time and energy than they’ve ever been. We have all stood in a 2,000-person event and felt more alone than we do at our own kitchen table. The appetite has changed. People are done with noise. They want a room where something real can happen.

Here is what a small room does that a big one never can.

Put someone in a room of 20 and their nervous system settles. They aren’t scanning a crowd, performing for a hall, or working out where the exits are. They can be present. And a present person opens up, says the true thing, and remembers exactly how the room made them feel.

Twenty people can be known. Two thousand can only be counted. In a small room everyone is seen, and being seen is one of the deepest things a person wants, especially the ones who spend their whole working life being the one everyone else looks to.

There’s something else working underneath it too. Being one of 20 in the room tells you something about yourself. You were chosen. Someone looked at the guest list and put your name on it, which means you belong at this level. That signal does more for how a person feels about your brand than any stage production ever could.

Trust moves faster in these rooms as well. One real conversation over dinner will do more for a business relationship than fifty business cards and a follow-up sequence ever will. People leave having actually met each other, and that is the whole point.

Priya Parker wrote a brilliant book on this, The Art of Gathering, and the idea that stays with me is that a gathering is made by who is in the room and why, long before anyone thinks about the venue or the canapés. We had it backwards in events for years. We led with the production, the staging, the seating plan redone by hand at midnight, and hoped the connection would happen by accident. An intimate room puts the priority back where it belongs. You decide who needs to be together and why, and everything else serves that.

Because belonging is the actual product now. Not the content or the stage or the goody bag, but the feeling of walking into a room and thinking, these are my people, I am meant to be here. That feeling is rare, and people will reorganise their whole year to get it.

I write The Debrief twice a week for the people building something real in this industry. If this is landing, the sharper thinking lives behind the paywall.

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And here is the part most people planning big events don’t want to hear. When you build for 2,000, you lose the exact people you most wanted there.

You lose the founder and the CEO first. Their time is the scarcest thing they own, and nobody at that level will fight through a sea of two thousand people on the off chance of finding three worth knowing. Put them in a considered room of 15 of the right people and you have their whole evening. Ask them to network in a stadium and you don’t get them at all.

You lose a huge group of brilliant people with neurodiverse needs, who don’t do their best thinking or their best connecting in a loud, crowded, overstimulating hall. A giant event sends them one message before they’ve even walked in: this wasn’t built for you. An intimate room is often the only one they can show up in fully as themselves.

And you lose everyone who is simply worn out by the barrier to entry. People are busier than they have ever been, and the easiest yes in the world is the small, clear, intentional room where they already know it will be worth their time.

This is also where the money is, even though it looks smaller on the page. A big event is a transaction. A room of 20, run well, is the beginning of a relationship, and relationships are what bring people back year after year, send their friends, and build a business that compounds instead of resetting to zero every January. One person who feels they belong with you is worth more over time than a thousand badges you’ll never see again.

And it works at every level. For the solopreneur, an intimate room is how you build a real community around yourself with barely a budget. For the world-class brand, it’s the realisation that 20 of the right guests will move the needle further than 2,000 of the wrong ones. For the influencer whose audience is craving access over scale, it’s the whole game. The size of your name doesn’t change the maths. Intimacy is the power move.

The era of biggest-wins is ending. What comes next belongs to whoever can build the most intentional room in the industry, the one people actually want to be inside. Some of the best operators I know are already building for it.

This is the exact work we do inside Events Elite. It’s the room I built for the most senior people in events, the founders and leaders everyone else comes to for answers, who’ve never had a room of their own where everyone is operating at their level. If this is the direction you’re building in, applications for the October cohort are open.

Apply for Events Elite →

Juliet x

I was running the biggest events of my life at the time. I was handling everything and holding everyone, and I was being praised, constantly, for how calm I was under pressure. Meanwhile my own body was trying to get a message through to me, and because I ignored every quiet version of that message, it found a louder one.

I’ve told the eye twitch story before. What I’ve never written properly is the thing underneath it. And after yesterday, I think it’s time.

Yesterday I posted a carousel on IG about the brains that run this industry. The tabs. The seating plan at 1am. The woman who has planned 400 flawless days for other people and cannot tell you what she’s doing this weekend. I posted it because it was true and a bit funny, and the comments turned into something else entirely. Hundreds of you saying this is me. Are you in my head. Did you write this about me specifically.

So this one is for you. The funny version travels further. But you deserve the true version, and the true version deserves more than a carousel.

Let me describe an evening you’ve lived a hundred times. The event went well. Better than well.. people used the word flawless, and for once nothing is on fire. You get home with the whole evening ahead of you and you decide, tonight, you’re going to switch off properly. You’ve earned it. You sit down. You put something on. And within 10 minutes your hand has found your phone, your thumb is moving before you’ve asked it to, and some part of you is scanning. For what, you couldn’t say. There is nothing to scan for. The event is over. Everyone is fine. And your body has not received that information.

So you try harder. You put the phone in the other room like the articles say. And now you’re sitting in your own living room feeling strangely wrong, like you’ve forgotten something important, like something somewhere needs you and you’re the only one not answering. Ten more minutes and you’ve fetched the phone, answered 2 emails that could have waited a week, and felt better. Calmer. Which is the part nobody understands unless they live in a body like yours: the emails calmed you down.

If you’ve ever wondered why.. why rest feels like an itch, why stillness feels like a mistake you’re making, why you can be exhausted to your bones and still unable to stop.. that’s what this piece is about.

There’s a reason. It has nothing in common with willpower, laziness, or any of the things you’ve privately called it. Once you see it, an enormous amount of your life makes sense, from the post-show cold to the 47 tabs to the way you feel weirdly calmer in a crisis than on a beach. And it comes with something better than an explanation. It comes with a way through.

That’s the rest of this piece:

• the mechanism, in plain English.. what a decade of show sites did to your baseline, and why it stayed

• the recognition list: everything this one pattern explains

• the part where you blamed yourself for it, and why the blame was always misplaced

• what I tell the women I coach, including the client line I’ve never forgotten

The rest sits with my paid readers. If you’re new here from Instagram: your first 7 days are free with a trial subscription. Come inside, read all of it, and decide from there 🤍 I think you’re going to like this little corner of the internet..

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And after all of those conversations in our coaching sessions and events, all of those hours, all of those breakthroughs and breakdowns and business pivots (so.many.pivots), I can tell you with total certainty that the thing that separates the event leaders who will define the next decade from the ones who will slowly fade into the background is not what most people think it is.

It is not experience. There are plenty of experienced event professionals who are stuck.

It is not connections. There are plenty of well-connected people who are invisible.

It is not talent. There are plenty of talented operators who are undercharging, overworking, and burning out.

The thing that separates them is point of view. Your POV is your secret weapon, and this article is going to be your POV PLAYBOOK!!

But first - if you’re here, hi, welcome!! Please subscribe for free so you don’t miss a post. And if you’re really serious about the events industry - upgrade to my inner circle for £9/month. I won’t let you down.

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What I mean by point of view

I do not mean having opinions. Everyone has opinions. I mean having a clear, specific, defensible perspective on the events industry that shapes everything you do, say, build, and attract.

A point of view is the belief that sits underneath your business. It is the answer to the question: what do I see about this industry that most people do not? What do I believe about how events should work, how businesses should be built, how leaders should lead, that is different enough to be noticed and strong enough to be remembered?

The founders who have a point of view attract people. This is what I call your magnetic personal brand. Their content has gravity because it stands for something. Their offers have clarity because they are built on a philosophy, not just a service. Their brand has weight because it means something beyond “we do events.” (Well, I should hope you do..)

The founders who do not have a point of view blend in. They post the same observations everyone else posts - usually regurgitated ChatGPT slop or something they just read 5 minutes earlier as they scrolled LinkedIn.. They offer the same services in the same way at the same price. They are competent, professional, yes.. and completely interchangeable with the next person on the pitch list.

In a market that is getting more and more crowded every year - even more so in the age of AI - interchangeability is the most dangerous position you can occupy.

Why point of view matters more now than ever

Three forces are making this urgent.

AI is commoditising execution. When anyone can produce decent content, decent proposals, and decent operational plans with the help of AI tools, the baseline of competence rises across the industry. Being good is no longer enough to stand out. Being good with a point of view is what creates differentiation.

Audiences are saturated. Your ideal clients see hundreds of event professionals in their feeds every week. Most of them blur together. The ones who cut through are the ones saying something that the reader has been thinking but has not heard anyone else articulate. That is point of view. It is the thing that makes someone stop scrolling and think “this person sees what I see.”

The market rewards specificity. The era of being a generalist with a big portfolio is ending. The era of being a specialist with a clear perspective is beginning. Clients do not just want someone who can deliver. They want someone whose approach matches their values, whose philosophy resonates with their brand, and whose point of view gives them confidence that this person understands what they are trying to build.

I write The Debrief twice a week for event leaders, agency founders, and anyone building seriously in this industry. If this landed, you will love what lives behind the paywall. [Subscribe to The Debrief →]

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How to find yours

If you are reading this and thinking “I do not know what my point of view is,” that is normal. Most event professionals have never been asked to articulate one because the industry has historically rewarded execution over perspective. You were hired for what you could do, not what you believed.

Here is how I would start.

What makes you angry about the events industry? Not mildly irritated. Actually frustrated. The thing you see happening constantly that you believe is fundamentally wrong. That frustration is usually sitting on top of a deeply held belief about how things should be done differently. Name it.

What do your best clients have in common? Not demographically. Philosophically. What do they value? What do they care about? What do they want their events to do in the world? The overlap between what you believe and what your best clients believe is where your point of view lives.

What would you say on a stage if no one could judge you? The real version of your industry commentary, not the polished, safe version you post on social media. The take that feels almost too bold. The opinion you share in private but have never published. That is usually the most powerful version of your point of view, and it is the version that will attract exactly the right people.

What do you want your legacy to be? Not your career highlights. Your contribution. What do you want to have changed about this industry by the time you step back from it? That forward-looking vision is the north star that your point of view orbits around.

The compounding effect

Here is what happens when you have a clear point of view and you express it consistently.

Your content becomes magnetic because it stands for something specific rather than trying to appeal to everyone.

Your offers become easier to sell because people understand not just what you do but why you do it, and that why resonates with the people who are meant to work with you.

Your pricing becomes easier to hold because you are no longer competing on execution. You are competing on perspective, and perspective is not a commodity.

Your brand becomes referrable because people can describe what you stand for in one sentence. They do not say “she does events.” They say “she is the one who believes X about the events industry and everything she builds reflects that.”

That referrability, that clarity in other people’s minds about what you stand for, is the most valuable marketing asset you can build. And it is only available to people who have done the work of defining and defending a point of view.

The next decade of the events industry will be defined by the people who see it most clearly and say it most consistently. Make sure you are one of them.

I built Events Elite for the people who already have a point of view and want to sharpen it, and for the people who are ready to find theirs. If you are a senior leader or founder in events, applications are open for October.

Apply for Events Elite →

Juliet x

So lets dive into it because this one might surprise you;

Run my last retreat through a standard event P&L and it looks like a lovely weekend that more or less washed its face. Luxury venue. 24 hours together. A small, carefully chosen room of senior founders and leaders in the events industry. Ticket revenue: about $10k.

Most of our industry would close the file there, right? Nice event, thin margin, hard to justify doing twice.

But within days of that room emptying, the revenue it produced had crossed $100,000 (and kept counting)

And before you ask.. no, this wasn’t one of those ‘run to the back of the room with your credit card if you’re signing up right now’ situations- however sexy and cool they look on instagram (and look - no shade, it works for some people)

I was also almost 8 months pregnant at the time, so every step of this event had to be planned.

Nobody got pitched at big time over the dinner they were relaxing at. There was no script waiting after dessert, no taking everyone aside for a 1:1 meeting to sell to them. What happened instead is the thing I’ve spent years trying to get this industry to see, and my own retreat turned out to be the cleanest proof I’ve ever held in my hands.

So this diary is a debrief of my own event. The real figures, the model underneath them, and the line on the spreadsheet almost everyone is reading wrong.

This is for paid subscribers only. The full commercial breakdown, the trust engine model, the 3 conditions it all collapses without. If you build rooms for a living, this is a must read.

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The debrief is the talk after it’s over. The client’s gone home, the adrenaline is dropping, and the people who were actually in it sit down and say what really happened. The real real.. What worked, what you’d never do again, the supplier who saved the whole thing, the number that didn’t land, the decision you’d take back. It’s the one room where the politeness stops and the truth starts, and it’s where all the actual learning lives.

Here’s the thing though. Every good event gets a debrief. The people running them almost never get one for themselves.

Think about what actually exists for you at the top of this industry. Associations you pay to be listed in. Leadership groups that meet to talk about trends. The occasional consultant charging five figures a month to hand you a strategy deck and disappear. Plenty of places that will talk at you about where the industry is going. Almost none that will sit down with you and tell you the truth about the business behind your events. The pricing you’re too nervous to raise. The client you should have walked away from. The growth you want but can’t quite see the path to. The fact that you’ve somehow become the person the entire operation runs through, and no one has ever shown you how to change that without it all falling over.

That’s the room I wanted to build. Because I’ve watched too many genuinely brilliant people in this industry, people who are the best in the world at what they do, get almost no real support for the part that actually keeps them up at night.. They need someone who’s been in the room to tell them the truth, and to help them grow without setting fire to their life to do it.

So from today, The Edit is now The Debrief.

And I’ll be honest with you, this has become my favourite place on the internet. It’s a tiny, specific corner of the events world, and I’m writing here far more than I ever planned to, because there is so much I want to talk to you about. The things I can’t fit into a caption. The things most people in this industry would never put in writing.

Some of that lives out here, in the open, for everyone. The rest, the parts with the real numbers attached, lives behind the paid door.

→ If you want the version where nothing gets held back, that’s the paid subscription. It’s the behind-closed-doors thinking I usually only share with the people who pay me directly for the answer.

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So here’s what being in The Debrief gets you.

The industry debrief. The event trends, the growth strategies, where this business is genuinely heading and what it means for the people building in it. The commercial reality, not the highlight reel, so you’re reading the market a season ahead of the room you’re standing in.

The behind-the-scenes debrief. What it really takes to scale to the top 1% of events. The money conversations no one has out loud, the pricing calls, the decisions I’m making in my own business in real time, including the ones that didn’t work.

The event debriefs. I’ll pull apart the biggest events in the world, the ones I go to, the ones that go viral, and tell you exactly why they worked, commercially, and what you’d take from them for your own.

And the intel from the rooms you’re not in. The business tips I’m picking up, the debriefs from my own client sessions, the things I’d normally only say one to one. All of it in one place, for a fraction of what any of it costs anywhere else.

→ The deepest of those, the real figures and the full breakdowns, sit with the paid members. If you’re serious about the business behind your events, that’s the seat to take.

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Now, who this is really for. Because I think it’s two people.

The first is the events leader. The founder, the agency owner, the person heading up events inside a big brand. You don’t need convincing that events matter. You need the behind-the-scenes truth nobody in this industry says out loud, from someone who has actually sat where you’re sitting.

The second is the founder, the coach, the creator who has realised something the rest of the market is only just catching up to. Events are how you grow now. The smartest businesses of this next era will all be built on real, in-person moments, and you want to understand how that actually works before everyone else does.

Both of you belong here. The people who win in events over the next few years will be the ones who understood the business behind the room, and had somewhere to go for the truth when it mattered.

That somewhere is this.

And then, for the few of you still reading right down here.

I’m going to cut to the chase, because you’ve earned it. If you got this far, I already know something about you. You want to grow, seriously, in events. You’re very likely one of the leaders in this industry already, or you’re on your way to being one. And a newsletter, however good, is never going to be enough for someone like you.

So let me extend a genuine, personal invitation.

I’m building a room for the elite leaders in events. Twelve months, working with me directly, alongside the most commercially driven and ambitious people in this industry. People who want serious growth, and refuse to buy it at the cost of their life. It’s the room I always wished existed when I was in the thick of it, and honestly, nothing like it has existed in this industry before.

If you’ve read this far, I already think you’d be a fit.

Find out everything about Events Elite here → https://www.theeventscoach.com/eventselite

Or if you already know, put your name forward here → https://7nj9yur9hrj.typeform.com/to/j2yxaaof

I won’t dress it up. I’d just love you in the room!!

Juliet x

And I think the events industry in 2030 will be almost unrecognisable from the one most of us entered.

That is not a threat. It is an opportunity. But only if you can see it clearly enough to position yourself on the right side of the shift. So let me tell you what I think is coming.

The founder-led era

The biggest structural change I see is the shift from company-led to founder-led. In 2020, the events industry was dominated by agencies, organisations, and corporate teams. The brand was the business. The company name opened the doors.

By 2030, I believe the most valuable events businesses will be built around individuals. Founders whose personal brands carry more weight than their company name. Leaders whose reputation, perspective, and taste are the reason clients choose them. Operators whose name is the brand.

This shift is already well underway. The most interesting work in events right now is being done by founder-led businesses where the founder’s visibility and authority drive demand. The personal brand is becoming the business model.

What this means for you: if you are still hiding behind your company name, your team, or your client list, and your own name does not carry independent weight in the market, you are building on a foundation that is weakening. Start building your personal brand now. By 2030, it will be the single most valuable asset in your business.

The experience economy matures

The experience economy is not new. But by 2030, I believe it will have matured beyond recognition.

The early phase of the experience economy was about novelty. Pop-ups. Instagrammable moments. Brand activations designed to generate social content. That phase is ending. Audiences are tired of experiences that exist to be documented rather than lived.

The next phase is about depth. Recurring communities. Curated rooms. Transformative experiences. Events that change how people think, connect, and make decisions. The value will shift from “was it photogenic” to “did it change something.” From reach to impact. From impressions to relationships.

The event professionals who understand this shift are already building for it. They are designing experiences that compound over time rather than evaporate after a single night. They are building recurring containers rather than one-off moments. They are measuring success by retention and depth rather than attendance and reach.

The consolidation and the gap

Private equity is consolidating the mid-market of events aggressively. Apollo, Blackstone, and other institutional investors are acquiring events businesses and building larger platforms. This consolidation will continue through 2030 and it will create a very clear two-tier market.

On one side, large consolidated platforms that offer scale, efficiency, and broad capability. On the other side, specialist, founder-led businesses that offer depth, specificity, and premium quality.

The middle, the generic mid-sized agency that does a bit of everything but is not known for anything in particular, is the space that gets squeezed. Too small to compete with the platforms on scale. Too undifferentiated to compete with the specialists on quality. That is where the most business failures will happen over the next four years.

The opportunity is at the edges. Either build something large enough to be acquired or invested in, or build something specific enough to be irreplaceable in your lane. The worst position to be in by 2030 is the middle.

I write The Edit twice a week for event leaders, agency founders, and anyone building seriously in this industry. If this landed, you will love what lives behind the paywall. [Subscribe to The Edit →]

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AI changes the floor, not the ceiling

By 2030, AI will have transformed the operational layer of events. Logistics, scheduling, vendor management, budget tracking, guest communication, post-event reporting.. much of the repetitive operational work that currently consumes enormous amounts of time will be automated or dramatically accelerated.

This does not make event professionals less valuable. It makes the wrong kind of event professional less valuable. If your primary value is operational execution, if you are the person who is good at managing spreadsheets and timelines and vendor relationships, AI is coming for a significant portion of that work.

But if your value is strategic. If you are the person who understands why a room works, how to design an experience that creates a specific emotional and commercial outcome, how to read a client’s real need beneath their brief, how to curate a guest list that creates chemistry.. AI cannot touch that. And as AI handles more of the operational layer, the strategic layer becomes more scarce and more valuable.

The event professionals who will thrive by 2030 are the ones who position themselves as strategists and advisors, not operators. The ones who sell their thinking, not their time. The ones whose value is in their judgement, their taste, and their ability to create something that no algorithm could design.

Who will be leading

The leaders of the events industry in 2030 will share a few characteristics.

They will have visible, trusted personal brands that carry weight beyond any single business or client relationship.

They will run focused, specialist businesses that are known for doing one thing extraordinarily well rather than many things adequately.

They will have built recurring revenue models that do not depend on the feast-and-famine cycle of project-based work.

They will understand community and design experiences that compound relationships over time.

They will have positioned themselves as strategic advisors whose value is in their thinking, not their execution.

And they will have started building all of this now. Not in 2028. Not when it becomes obvious. Now, while the category is still being defined and the window to position yourself is wide open.

The founders who see this clearly and act on it today will have options in 2030 that will be almost impossible to create from scratch by then. That is the advantage of moving early. And the events industry rewards the people who build the room before everyone else realises they need to be in it.

I built Events Elite for the people who are building for the next decade, not just the next quarter. If you are a senior leader or founder in events and you want to be in a room where the strategic conversation is this forward-looking, applications are open for October.

Apply for Events Elite →

Juliet x

Something has been playing in my mind all week and I think I just need to type it out.. that’s what Substack is for, right??

Stay with me, this is going to take us there to something that’s been a real, detrimental (I feel) problem for our industry for the longest time. As a coach I see it often, prior to that as an event leader I FELT it often.

There’s this moment that happens on nearly every first call I have with someone senior in events.

We spend, say, 45 minutes on the business. The agency, the team, the pipeline, all the stuff she booked the call for. And then with about 5 minutes left her voice changes and she says some version of the same sentence, every time.. like a little lightbulb moment realisation: “I don’t really have anyone I can talk to about this stuff.”

And this is a woman with thousands of contacts?!

She could fill a ballroom with people who know her by first name. Somewhere in the ‘climb’ we all know way too well she ended up with nobody to be honest with, because everyone she knows is someone she leads, someone she serves, or someone she competes with.

I know that feeling from the inside, by the way. I had it at 31, in the director role, with everyone in my phone or on my LI feed and nobody to call. So this one’s been bugging me.

Because the more I think about it, the more I can see what the loneliness is doing to us. It’s exactly why we keep the big decisions to ourselves and make them slower and smaller than we would with the right person in the room. It’s exactly why we walk into a networking event and perform “all good, busy season!!” at people we’ve known for a decade. It’s exactly why I watch brilliant, sharp women get AI to write their panel notes instead of risking the contrarian take that’s theirs.. because being disliked feels expensive when everyone in the room is a potential client. And it’s exactly why so many of us people-please our way around this industry instead of saying the big goal out loud and going after it.

None of that is a personality flaw btw. It’s what carrying the top alone does to a person.

And I can’t even fully blame us, because look at the rooms our industry built. Open mixers. Awards nights. Panels. Every single one asks the most senior people in it to perform the on-stage version of themselves, in front of people they might pitch against next quarter. A founder applying to work with me said it in one line I think about a lot: “I’m so tired of surface level networking.” Same. Everyone is. And we keep booking the tables anyway because they’re the only rooms on offer.

Here’s where my head has been going with it. Bear with me 😅

I keep thinking about the old school boys’ clubs. Membership by invitation, everyone recommending each other, telephone numbers shared over dinner, doors opened in rooms the rest of the world never saw. Careers made on a first-name basis. A phone call instead of a pitch. I’m obviously not romanticising them.. a lot about those rooms deserved to die, starting with who was allowed in. But the mechanism? The mechanism worked. Quiet rooms of senior people who backed each other built entire industries.

The events industry never built its version of that. And the women of this industry, least of all.

And look, I hear you. There are leadership groups. I’ve seen the agency round tables, some of them do good work.

But I kept asking myself one question last year and I still can’t get past it: have you ever seen the true top of this industry.. buyer AND supplier AND agency founder AND in-house leader AND thought leader.. in one room together that wasn’t set up to sell them something?

I hadn’t. Not once in 15 years. The only place those people stand together is a trade show. Which is a room with a sales target, let’s be real about what it is.

So last year I built the thing I couldn’t find. And this is the bit I hesitated to write because I don’t want it to read like an ad, but it’s true so I’m writing it.

I was soo fussy about what it would never be.

Anyone can host a circle where everyone sits around and talks about their problems, and that was never the assignment.. the people I’m talking about are some of the most commercially sharp people in this country, they don’t need a support group and they’d never join one.

What I wanted was the curated Rolodex.

A room small enough that everyone knows everyone, senior enough that nobody has to explain themselves, private enough that the guard can come all the way down. The kind of room where you pick up the phone and somebody answers.

When a 6-figure decision needs pressure-testing before Friday, somebody answers.

And on the day you feel really, really shit because of what’s happening behind the scenes at home, or your mental health is taking the hit this industry pretends doesn’t happen.. somebody answers that too.

Both. From the same room. Because you shouldn’t need one circle for your commercial brain and a separate secret one for being a person. This is the room where you get to have it all, and I mean that in the least Instagram way possible.

Anyway. That room is Events Elite®, the 12 month mastermind I run for founders and senior leaders at the top of events. Application and interview only, and the October cohort is open now. The info and application is here- https://eventselite.replit.app/

It’s been lonely at the top of this industry for long enough.

Juliet x

We had spent two days having the conversations that most people in the events industry never get to have. Real conversations about wealth. About wanting more. About the fact that wanting to make a lot of money from your expertise, and enjoying it, and building a life around it, is allowed.

And I was sitting in traffic replaying all of it when a thought landed that I could not shake. This must be quite a big month for me. So I did the maths in my head. And then I did them again because the number seemed too large to be real.

My business had crossed six figures in a single month. Around $150,000 USD. As a coach to the top 1% of the events industry, working three days a week, with a very small team.

I have had years that hit that number, and those felt extraordinary at the time. My salary at the peak of my events career, even at senior level, even after a decade, was a long way below it.

I want to talk about it. Not because I want to show off a number. Because the events industry has a silence around money that I think is holding brilliant people back from building what they are actually capable of.

This is for paid subscribers only. What I actually did with the money, what the retreat showed me about what people are afraid to say out loud, and the conversation I think our industry needs to start having. I’d be so grateful for your support as part of my inner circle.

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You put out a piece of content that’s genuinely good. Maybe the best thing you’ve written all year. The engagement lands.. the saves, the shares, the “this is so me” in your DMs. And then you open the doors on something you’re actually selling, and it goes quiet. Not a no. Just.. less than the numbers said it should be.

You tell yourself the offer you came up with was off, or the timing was wrong, or the audience was never really big enough. I want to take that thought off you, because honestly it’s usually none of those things. There’s a step between someone watching you and someone buying from you, and almost nobody in the events industry is building it. And the reason I’m writing this for you is there’s never been a better time to double down on your unique skills to stand out in the age of AI, but the eventprofs I see launching digital products, retreats, courses, consultancy are mostly not getting the results they’d hoped for.

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Posting on socials more is not the answer. The founders growing fastest right now aren’t the ones posting the most. They’ve built a pipeline. A real one.. a path that carries someone from finding you on a random Tuesday evening to becoming a client, a member, a relationship that lasts years. And they’ve worked out what actually turns a follower into a buyer.. which is Belonging. The feeling of being part of something you’re building, instead of watching it from the outside.

That’s the edge you need right now. And taking what’s in your head as an event expert, your years, your judgment, and turning it into something people will actually pay for is the thing I do better than anyone I know. Content is where it starts. BUT community is what makes it pay.

Why the audience never becomes a business

I see this constantly. Someone builds a following. Good content, real engagement, the numbers climb. Then they launch, and crickets. The followers were watching. They just weren’t ready to buy.

It isn’t the offer and it isn’t a fake audience. There’s a step missing between being seen and being paid, and that step is belonging.

People follow you because you’re interesting. They buy from you because they feel connected to you.. because they feel part of something, not just subscribed to it. That kind of connection doesn’t happen in a LinkedIn feed. It happens when someone feels they’ve found their people, the ones who think the way they think and are building what they’re building, with you right at the centre of it.

The founders who get this build what I call the creator-to-community pipeline.. Content brings people in. Community makes them stay. And from inside that community, the offer never feels like a pitch, because the trust was built long before you asked for anything.

What the pipeline actually is

Discovery. This is your content and your personal brand doing the work.. your Instagram, your Substack, your LinkedIn, the stage you took to last month. The job here isn’t to sell. It’s to be specific and generous enough that the right person stops and thinks “I need more of how this woman thinks.”

Depth. This is where most people stop, and it’s exactly where the whole thing breaks. Depth is any way to go deeper with you than the feed allows. A newsletter they hand their email over for. A guide they download. A live session they show up to. A DM that turns into a real conversation. You’re moving someone from watching you to knowing you. Small step. It changes everything.

Belonging. This is the community itself. A paid membership, a free community, a recurring event, a curated group, even a comment section that genuinely talks back. The format matters far less than the feeling. People need to feel part of something, surrounded by others who value what they value and want what they want. When someone feels that, you don’t have to sell to them. They’re already leaning in.

Offer. This is where it becomes revenue, and if the first three are working it barely feels like selling. The retreat, the mastermind, the consulting, the productised offer.. the thing that finally sells your expertise instead of another slice of your hours. You’re not convincing a stranger. You’re opening a door for someone who’s already been standing at it.

I write The Edit twice a week for the founders and leaders building something serious in this industry. If this one landed, the sharpest stuff lives behind the paywall.

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Why you’re built for this more than anyone

Most creators in other industries have to build community out of nothing. Slack groups, comment threads, hope. It works eventually, and it often feels hollow.

You don’t have that problem. Creating belonging is literally your job. You know what happens when you get the right people in the same place at the same time. You know a room isn’t a guest list, it’s a feeling, and the feeling is designed.. the seating, the pacing, the moment the doors open and everything lands. You’ve been building community for other people’s brands your whole career.

So you can do what almost no online creator can. Take an audience that only ever knew you through a screen and give them somewhere to actually belong. One dinner, one retreat, one curated night with your people in the room, does more than a year of posting. For you this was never a digital strategy with events bolted on. It’s an events strategy with a digital front door. Your content brings them in. The connection is what keeps them.

The mistake I see most

The one that costs people the most is going straight to the community. Announcing the membership, the group, the paid space, with nothing built underneath it, then wondering why fourteen people joined instead of a hundred and forty. Community isn’t where you start. It’s where you’re heading. You earn the attention in public first, you give away enough that people want the part they can’t get for free, and then you open the door.

And if you’ve watched your own best work go quiet at the point of sale, please hear this. You’re not bad at this. You’re not too senior to be posting. You haven’t missed anything. You’ve been doing the hardest, most valuable part all along, building the audience and the trust, and missing the one piece in the middle that turns it into a business.. giving people somewhere to belong.

I’m making this a huge part of the Events Elite mastermind for the year ahead, because I’ve got so many founders and leaders coming to me right now ready to build exactly this. Ready to turn a following into a community, and their expertise into something that finally pays them what it’s worth.

If that’s you, and you want to build it alongside people operating at your level, applications are open for October. Read more and apply here;

Apply for Events Elite

Juliet x

But I am going to be really honest with you about what that version of my business actually looked like behind the numbers. Because I think a lot of people are chasing six figures thinking it will feel like arrival, and I want you to know what it felt like for me so you can decide whether the way you are building is going to get you where you actually want to go.

This is for paid subscribers only. What actually changed between six figures and multiple six figures, the thing that nearly broke, what I had to let go of, and the lesson I wish I had learned sooner. I’d be so grateful for your support as part of my inner circle.

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I ran my event leaders’ retreat this year, and honestly, I went into it with more nerves than I admitted to anyone at the time. A lot of those nerves came from the fact I was running this for some of the world’s leading event professionals. No pressure?!! But for real.. the nerves were there: No industry association behind me.. I’m not a media company, I wasn’t collabing with one of the industry publications, it was literally just me, an application form, and a real hope on my strategy that the calibre of a room could matter more than the size of the event itself.

It sold out - fast. People flew long haul from across the world.. we’re talking multimillion dollar agency founders, Fortune 10 events leads, sitting around the table together because they chose to invest in themselves, and in my mission. And in the months since, the same DM keeps landing, from senior events people and from the coaches and entrepreneurs in my community - ok but HOW?! How do I build one of those?

Almost everyone who asks starts with the venue. Which country, how many nights, what the agenda should look like.. and I get it, that’s the fun part to imagine. But every retreat I’ve watched succeed, mine included, was built from the other end. It started with why people come.

Why people really come

Nobody flies 11 hours for an agenda. After hosting my own room and coaching people building theirs, I think there are 6 real reasons I’m going break down for you today. GET READY to take notes!!

Permission. The people who bought seats at mine are high achievers who cannot justify stopping, slowing down, etc. They would never book themselves a rest.. but something strategic, something that counts as investing in the business? That, they can say yes to. A retreat is the version of stopping they’re allowed. Watching that land for people on day 1, watching shoulders visibly drop, was one of my favourite things about hosting this one because the attendees were able to let their guard down, be vulnerable, and be tuned in to their own goals for once - and it was super powerful to witness.

Proximity. They’re buying you, up close. Not the recorded version or the stage version.. the one who sits next to them at dinner and answers the question they would never type into a group chat. For anyone with a personal brand this is the most valuable thing you have, and a retreat is the only format where it’s fully available.

The other chairs. Your guests are buying the guest list. Senior leaders & founders are starved of peers.. their days are full of clients, teams and competitors, and a table of people at their level who want nothing from them is one of the rarest experiences available to them. The ‘who’ took me far longer than the ‘how’ when I was building mine and I spent a really long time carefully reviewing applications because the curation of the group was everything to me.

The container. Real change rarely happens in a 90 minute session between meetings. It happens when someone is far enough from their normal life that the usual story about themselves loosens its grip. Distance, days, and no easy exit. It’s why the conversations on night 2 go places a conference never will.. the guard comes down when the return flight is still 2 days away.

Being chosen. A room that runs on applications gives everyone in it something a ticket never could: the knowledge that they were selected. Acceptance into a curated room is its own small transformation. It tells someone they are who they hoped they were becoming.

The marker. This is my favourite!! People use rooms to mark chapters of their lives. The retreat becomes the scene of their before-and-after.. the place they decided to raise their prices, leave the partnership, finally start the thing. And once your room is part of someone’s story, you’re in that story for good. Which brings me to the money.

The part most people never see

After running mine, I stopped being able to think of a retreat as an event with its own P&L. It’s the centre of a brand ecosystem, and the ticket is simply the door price.

The real return arrived in the months afterwards, and it’s still arriving. The attendee who becomes a long term client. The 2 people who met at dinner and now mention your name in rooms you’ve never entered. A year’s worth of photos and stories that market the brand, and next year’s room, without a single ad. Alumni who rebook, and bring someone when they do. Partners who want into your world once they’ve seen who gathers in it.

Mine became the front door to my mastermind. The relationships from that room are compounding right now, months later, while I’m on maternity leave with my phone bricked in another room. Client work paid me once for the trust I built. The retreat is still paying me for it.

And that’s true from either starting point. The agency founder building her first owned asset after a career of building rooms for other people. The coach or entrepreneur whose audience keeps asking for the in-person version of her. Same mechanics, same ecosystem.

On Friday for my inner circle readers: the honest truth about scaling past 6 figures.. the diary version, with the parts I’d usually only say to a client. upgrade to receive access:

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If you’ve been circling the idea of your own retreat

What I’d do first is honestly a bit boring. Write the list of your 12.. actual names - these are your dream attendees. These should be true dream clients or connections for you, and you should deeply understand their goals, challenges.. what keeps them up at night, and what lights them up, and then we build upon that.

Mine started as a note on my phone, long before there was a venue or a date, and rereading it now it’s basically a map of who I most wanted to be around.

I really would recommend having some form of application process to ensure the calibre of the room and the nature of the attendees is aligned with your values and what you are offering. The application form did more of the selling than any page I could have designed. Mine asked people about their business, where they wanted to be in 12 months, and what they wanted to be different by the time they flew home.

Reading them, I could feel who the room needed.. and every application turned into a conversation, which is where the selling naturally happened, person by person.

There was a hard part I hadn’t prepared myself for, though. I sent no’s to phenomenal people.. people I’d happily spend a whole day with, who just weren’t right for this particular room at this particular moment. I’ve written before that I’d rather run a room that isn’t completely sold out than a room that’s compromised, and the retreat tested whether I meant it. Saying those no’s cost me revenue in the short term, and the room worked because of them - I feel like a lot of people would not be ‘brave’ enough to turn people away.. there’s probably a version of me a few years ago who wouldn’t have had the confidence to do so, but trust me that it is sooo vital with events like this.

Get clear on the transformation of your retreat.. the sentence you could say out loud about who someone becomes by the time they leave.. because every decision after this one hangs off it.

The white space within my retreat got designed with as much care as the sessions, because by then I understood that these little moments would outperform a timetabled agenda that went minute by minute.

The event sold in conversations.. there was never a public checkout page. And the price made sense to people because it was anchored to the room and what they’d leave with, the transformation.

If you’re wondering about numbers, you don’t need to go crazy on this and IMO shouldn’t be looking at a retreat as a big event.. a room or table of 6-12 absolutely counts as a first one. Mine taught me more about my own business than almost anything I’ve done.. and rooms like it are now part of how events elite® works, because this is what I build with the people I coach.

12 months of strategy, boardroom sessions and in person retreats, for senior leaders and founders in events. Applications for October are open. [Apply for Events Elite → here]

And if you’re new here, this is what The Edit is every week.. the business of events, brand, and rooms that compound, written from inside them. Subscribe and it lands in your inbox every Tuesday.

Juliet x

Anyway. Let me fill you in on her story. She spent her university summers doing door to door pest control sales in Minnesota, which is, I guess, about the least glamorous and most brutal sales education that exists on this earth, and she was doing it while finishing a bachelor’s AND a master’s at Arizona State in 4 years. By 22 she was reportedly the first female owner of a million dollar door to door sales team. Then she discovered remote high ticket closing, the world of taking sales calls over Zoom for other people’s programmes, and she did what the best positioned people always do.. she stopped being the practitioner and became the teacher. Aka, she monetised her excellence, her experience, and started getting paid for her years, not just the hours.

She Sells was born: a certification that teaches women the art of high ticket sales, priced in the thousands and climbing as demand grew, wrapped in an identity her audience would walk through walls for - giving her and her brand a whole heap of “vision board” vibes from her community. She claims hundreds of thousands of women have come through her world when you count her virtual sessions. She has taken on a historically very male industry - flipped it on its head - sprinkled on a load of girlboss energy (pink glitter rolls royce included) and even if it’s not your thing on paper.. it is seriously impressive

And a few days ago, her first ever large scale in person event sold out. A woman who has never worked in events, out-selling rooms that people with 20 years of production experience struggle to fill.

I have been in events for 15 years and high ticket coaching for 6, and I want to walk you through why this was never in doubt.. because once you see the machine, you cannot unsee it.

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I wanted to open up today about something I have had soo many private conversations with industry friends about over the years. At the time, pre-those conversations I genuinely thought it was just me feeling this way - ticking goals off the list and rising fast whilst simultaneously a little whisper of a voice in my head asked.. but what about having a family??

And that voice - I discovered - existed for so so many more ambitious people in our industry, the wild world of meeting and event planning.. doing the maths over and over.

It goes like this. I am 10 years-ish in. My name is known to others, it finally means something, I have a personal brand helping me rise. If I step out for a year, the pitches carry on without me, the network sort of forgets who i am.. and I come back as the one who USED to run those big events. So when?!! And the answer her maths keeps equating to is usually: never. There is no ‘good year’ or ‘good time’ to take that break. She feels like the big career she built has no obvious place for a baby to fit, and she knows it, because she has watched what happens to the women who tried.

I did that maths for years. And I was told, more than once, in ways big and small, that you cannot be successful in events and be a present parent. The hours make it impossible. The travel makes it impossible. The clients will not wait.

I am writing this via voice dictate to my iPad 4 weeks into mat leave with my second baby asleep on my chest. My businesses have not slowed down. My clients have a plan for their summer and a plan for when we return later in the year. Applications for my mastermind are coming in. And I have not missed a minute of either of my children’s special moments in exchange for work or the industry.

Now, before anyone says it.. yes, my business looks different from running an agency with a team of 20, or being on the ground delivering 5 days a week. It might look very very different to your business right now. There is real nuance in this conversation and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am not writing from outside the events industry. I work with the top people in events. I run events, I attend events, I am in it every. single. week. The difference is that I built a version of being in this world that does not ask me to hand over my family life to stay in it. That was deliberate. It took years. And it is the thing I get asked about more than anything else I do.

So this one is the full picture, for my inner circle readers. What my days look like with a toddler and a newborn (2 under 3 isn’t for the weak 😅). How we parent with no village, no nanny and half our family an ocean away. The 30 minute routine i stick to that saves every single day. The thing that shocked me most about ambition after kids. And what I let go of to get here.. because I did let go of things, and one of them used to be my whole identity.

If you have ever sat to yourself and wondered - truly - can I actually be successful in events and navigate parenthood?! this is the one to read. I’m so grateful you’re here.

This is for paid subscribers only. What my days actually look like, how we parent without a village, the thing that surprised me most about building a business as a mom, and what I have gained from letting go. I’d be so grateful for your support as part of my inner circle.

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There’s a conversation I keep having on coaching calls and it’s starting to feel like deja vu.. same words, different woman, every single time.

It comes out near the end of the call, in a kind of smaller / shyer voice than everything before it. “I’m still good at the work.. I might be better at it than I’ve ever been. But it doesn’t feel the way it used to.. and I can’t say that to anyone, because it sounds SO ungrateful.”

Agency founders. In-house directors. Women & men 15 and 20 years into this industry, holding the career other people would literally kill for. Almost word for word.

And every single one of them thinks theyre the only one.

So today, this gets a name. Because I’ve watched it play out enough times now to promise you it isn’t a you-problem, or a phase, or the thing you’re most scared it is (that you’ve fallen out of love with the industry you built your whole life around!!). It’s an identity crisis. It’s hitting nearly every senior woman in events at the same time. And it has a mechanism.. once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

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Sound familiar? Let’s check.

You still deliver. The event lands, the client is thrilled, the debrief is glowing.. and by the Tuesday after, you feel flat in a way you’d never admit in that debrief. The site visit that used to give you butterflies is now a checklist. You catch yourself saying “I love what I do” in a client meeting and it comes out like a line you memorised years ago. Someone junior on your team is practically vibrating at the load-in, instagramming everything..and you watch her with something that’s half fondness, half envy.. because you remember when it felt like that, and you can’t find the moment it stopped.

And so you conclude, privately, that something is wrong with YOU. Because this is the dream. People would kill for your seat. You built this. Who are you to be bored by it?

Why it’s happening to so many of us at once

Events doesn’t hand you a job. It hands you an identity. I like to call it ‘hashtag eventprof’

From your first show you’re told events is in your blood, events people are a different breed, this isn’t a career it’s a calling. And you were young and hungry and it FELT true.. so you didn’t just do the work. You became the woman who loves this. The one who can handle anything. The safe pair of hands. After 10, 15, 20 years of being introduced that way, the line between what you do and who you are doesn’t blur. It disappears.

Then 2 things collide.

The 1st: you finish the script. Somewhere in a drawer, or in the back of an old notebook, is the list. The career you mapped out at 25 when you were hungry for all of it. The venues. The budgets. The title. The clients whose names make people at dinner parties stop talking. At some point in the last few years, without any ceremony at all, you completed it. Every line. And nobody warns you what finishing it does to you, because our industry has no script for that moment. It has 2. Keep climbing, or leave.

The 2nd: the woman that identity was built FOR has changed. Maybe motherhood did it. Maybe 15 years of 5am load-ins caught up with your body. Maybe you just grew. Either way, the woman the industry knows and the woman you’re becoming are 2 different people.. and you’re the only one who has met them both.

THAT’S the identity crisis. You haven’t fallen out of love with events. You’re being introduced, booked and paid as someone you’ve outgrown.

And it feels like it’s only you because we all hit this wall in private.

Your network is full of people you lead, people you serve, and peers who are also competitors.. so nobody says the sentence out loud, so every woman hitting the wall is certain she’s the only one hitting it. The woman you’re convinced has it all figured out? She’s said a version of that sentence to me on a call.

One more uncomfortable thing, then the good part. The industry has no reason to help you out of this. The version of you that stays as you are.. endlessly capable, always available, known for delivery.. is worth a LOT to everyone who isn’t you. Nobody is plotting against your evolution. But nobody who profits from the current you is going to hand you the next you, either. That part is yours to do.

You’re not broken. You’re finished.

Not finished with events. Finished with a level of it.

Because interest doesn’t die when you complete something, by the way.. It moves.

Notice where the flatness ISN’T. It isn’t there in the strategy conversation. It isn’t there when a peer asks how you’d structure her retainer and 45 minutes disappear without you looking at your phone once. It isn’t there when you’re mentoring, or untangling a business problem instead of a ballroom problem, or lying awake thinking about the thing you’d build if you were starting today, knowing everything you now know.

The interest hasn’t gone. It has moved to a level you haven’t given yourself permission to occupy yet. The industry still knows you as the woman who delivers, and you are becoming the woman who thinks, advises and builds.. and neither the market nor your own self-image has caught up.

And I’ll put myself on the map here, because I don’t write about machines I wasn’t inside. I LOVED being the one who delivers. That identity paid me well and I polished it daily. When my own wall arrived, in a senior role that looked like the peak of the mountain from the outside, I did what you might be doing right now.. I was flat, then guilty about being flat, then convinced the problem was me. It took me far too long to see that nothing was wrong with me. I’d finished a chapter and had no language for that, so I read the flatness as failure instead of reading it as information.

One more thing you’re allowed, and I mean this word: grief. You’re allowed to grieve a career stage you’ve outgrown. Nobody tells you that either. Loving events and being done with a VERSION of events can both be true at the same time. Missing who you were at 28 doesn’t mean you want her job back.

What to do with it

Say it to one person. Someone with no stake in you staying the same.. so not your team, not your client, probably not your business partner. The sentence is “I’ve outgrown the version of this career I’m in, and I don’t know yet what the next one looks like.” Notice what happens in your chest when you finally say it out loud. That feeling is how heavy this has been.

Then follow the interest, not the obligation. For the next 2 weeks, just notice the moments your energy comes back. The conversations, the problems, the parts of the week you’d do unpaid. That list is not a nice-to-have. It’s the blueprint for your next identity, drawn by the only part of you that has never once lied about what it wants.

And start showing up as the next version before it feels legitimate. This is the hardest one!! Talk about strategy before your whole business is strategy. Share your thinking before the offer exists. The market takes 6 to 18 months to update its picture of you, so if you wait until the new identity feels earned before you show it, you’ll wait years. You decide first. The market follows.

The other side

The women who come through this middle stretch end up somewhere better than the list they finished. Competing for strategic relationships and advisory work instead of execution. Known for their minds, not just their hands. Building things that live beyond the next event. And every one of them will tell you the uncomfortable part.. the stretch where you’re becoming someone the industry doesn’t recognise yet.. was the price of entry.

If that’s where you are right now.. flat where you used to be lit up, guilty about it, with no room in your life where it’s safe to say so.. you’re not off track, and you’re SO far from the only one. You’re at the start of the next era. It’s just the loneliest point in the whole arc to walk alone.

That’s what Events Elite is. A room of founders and leaders in events who are all serious about growth, authenticity and ambition. Applications are open for October

Apply for Events Elite →

Juliet x

We all know AI is moving at the speed of light right now and quite frankly I’m no expert so won’t be the one to try and catch it. BUT what I will say, and why I’m here with you on this topic is because over the past few months I have really locked in on all things AI.. and specifically.. how to actually make it work for busy event industry pros and CEOs.

IDK about you, but I switched off from 99% of the panels, podcasts, articles, webinars on the topic.. it felt like everyone was saying and teaching the same thing. I always want to bring you useful stuff you’ll ACTUALLY use.. so here goes.

First, let’s take it back to a coaching call I had earlier this year.

I had a call in the spring with a woman who runs one of THE sharpest agencies in our industry. They turn over multiple 7 figures, have a high performing team of 15. She personally is the kind of operator who can hold a room of 5000 people and a client having a meltdown at 4pm without blinking. An events industry MVP.

Halfway through the session she said, a bit embarrassed.. “Juliet, I think I’m behind on this whole AI thing” I tried it, I just can’t get it to click, I spend more time prompting it than I would have done if I just did the task myself.

And it’s not just her. I hear a version of that conversation constantly from the most capable people I coach. Men and women who run rooms, budgets, teams, other people’s biggest nights of the year, freaking out that they’ve missed the boat, they’re not ‘techy’ enough, they’ll never learn.

And I’ll tell you what I told my client. She’s not behind at all, but she asked a tool a tool-sized question, got a tool-sized answer, and closed the tab and assumed that AI, sweepingly, was not for her. The problem was never her. It was the type of question and size of ambition she had for the tool in front of her.

The question I want to look at with you instead is this: if I could hire a chief of staff, a research analyst, a content team and a personal assistant tomorrow, for less than the cost of 1 team lunch a month.. what would I have them do?

I taught the full answer as a session at the Events Elite retreat this year. One of the founders in the room called it gold, and said she had never heard AI talked about in our industry that way. Another emailed me about it: “Chief of Staff.. genius.”

So you’re getting the session. Free. The build takes an afternoon.

The advisor at the coffee shop, or behind you with the clipboard

What most people in our industry mean when they say they’re “using AI” is this. They open ChatGPT or Claude, type “write me a follow-up email after a pitch”, copy the output, move on fast.

That’s useful, sure. It’s also about 1% of what’s possible. It’s AI as an advisor you meet at a coffee shop.. it gives you ideas, then you go home and do all the work yourself. You ask, it answers, you start from scratch every time, and it never knows your business.

A chief of staff is behind you with the clipboard. You direct. It builds. You finesse. It already knows the business, so every project compounds on the last one.

Most operators I meet are in 1 of 3 stages. Pre-AI, where everything still passes through your hands. AI as a tool, the ad hoc prompting and the underwhelming output and blaming the AI. And AI as a trained chief of staff. There’s no shame in the first 2 BUT if you want to get ahead there’s also no future in staying there.

If your AI sounds like AI, you haven’t taught it anything yet

The gap between a generic output and a brilliant one is almost never the tool you sign up and pay for, but the brief.

So the build starts with 1 document, and I made every founder at the retreat start it in the room. I call it the Operating Brief. It’s you, written down for a new senior hire: who you are and what you do, who you serve and who you’ve outgrown in terms of clients and projects.. how you sound (with at least 3 real examples of your writing so it can pick up on the real style you have), what you stand for, what you DON’T do, and what you’re focused on right now. 6 sections. 30 to 45 minutes if you do it properly. Long, flowing answers beat short ones.

Then open Claude ( I love claude but ofc other AI systems are available) create a Project, and paste the brief into its instructions. Add the context a real hire would read in week 1.. your best proposals, a pitch that won, your client testimonials, your case studies. The plan starts at $20 a month. Mine costs more than that now because it runs half my day, and it’s still the cheapest member of staff I’ve ever had.

From that moment it stops answering as “AI” and starts answering as someone who knows your business. You paste in a difficult client email and say “draft my reply, warm but firm, don’t give away scope”.. and what comes back sounds like you on a good day. You say “I’m thinking of dropping this retainer, walk me through what I lose”.. and it can, because it knows the retainer, knows your rates, knows what you said last month about wanting fewer clients.

1 more unlock, and it’s the biggest one once the brief is in. Stop typing at it. Talk to it. Your typing is a tidier, flatter version of you.. your voice has the pace, the instincts, the asides. I brief mine out loud on walks and school runs with a voice tool, and it learns how I think, not how I type. I actually use the most phenomenal app for this called WisprFlow. It literally changed my life (Especially as a founder and new mom of two.. I save so much time)

Get a free month on me by signing up here.

The 10-80-10 rule

This is how you work with it day to day, and it’s the line I’d tattoo on the industry if I could.

The first 10% is yours. The original thought, the direction, the standard. What do I want built, who is it for, what should it feel like. The 80% is the machine’s. The drafting, the research, the formatting, the analysis, the work that used to eat your evenings or just never got done. The last 10% is yours again. The finesse. Does this sound like me, would I send this to a client I respect, and is every fact in it true.. because it will confidently invent a venue capacity, so you check.

You are the operator. It is the chief of staff. The moment you hand over the first or last 10%, you become indistinguishable from everyone else using the same tools. AI takes the execution. You keep the identity.. the voice, the judgment, the taste, the relationships. In a world where execution is getting cheap, your taste is the moat, and the premium on it goes up, not down. People will ALWAYS pay for YOU and in this system you’re not having AI replace you because it literally could never.. we’re just unlocking wayyyy more time for you by using it smartly. I love having a chief of staff to brief me on workdays and triage my tasks for me. It’s already given me a full handover before I’m even awake - built from my inbox, my asana board, and my dms.

The trick almost nobody knows

When it gives you something sub-par/mediocre, don’t fix it yourself. Type this: “Score that from 0 to 100 against my brief I gave you originally. Then give yourself notes and recreate it to score above 90.”

It will find its own weaknesses and close them, and the second draft is almost always sharper - whether you’re creating a new project, a visual, copy, anything.

The Event pro delegation problem.. and why this is the delegation you’ll finally accept

Let’s face it.. You’ve always struggled to hand things over. Somewhere along the way, being the one who does it all became part of who you are, and delegating comes with the little voice.. they won’t do it to my standard, quicker to do it myself, I’m the only one who gets this right. (I know you are nodding along right now!!)

This is different. You train it to your standard and it never misses out of ego or tiredness or just because it’s having a bad week. You say “no, sharper, less corporate, cut the third paragraph” and it doesn’t sulk and take forever to re do it. You correct it 50 times and it just gets closer to you. For a certain kind of high-standard, control-holding operator.. and I say this with love because I am one.. this is the first delegation that doesn’t threaten the part of you that needs to be the one holding it all together.

And 1 number, because it surprised me!! Microsoft surveyed 20000 people already using AI at work this spring. The top 16%, aka the ones getting the most from it, turned out to be the most deliberate, not the most automated.. 43% of them do some of their work WITHOUT AI on purpose, to keep their own skills sharp. The people winning with this are the most decided about what stays human. The read you do at 7pm when the energy dips and the speaker has overrun. The client who rings you before she rings her own board. No AI earns that, and no client has ever paid a premium for anything else.

My agency client did the build after our call. 1 afternoon. A week later she messaged me, and I won’t paraphrase because she said it better than I could: “It feels like I hired someone senior and nobody’s off sick and I don’t have to firefight anymore!!”

The 1 hire you can’t onboard yourself

There’s a catch, and it’s the reason I built what I built.

However well you train it, a generic AI has 1 blind spot. It doesn’t know events, and it isn’t a coach. It will draft your proposal and argue your decision from both sides, but it’s guessing from the whole internet, not from 15 years inside this industry and over 1,000 event businesses. It can’t look at your numbers and tell you your pricing is too low, or that the growth move you’re excited about is the wrong one for where you are right now.

That’s the hire you can’t create by feeding in your own context, because you don’t have that context yet.

So I built one. The Events Coach® AI is my coaching.. my frameworks, 15 years, thousands of hours of real sessions.. trained into an AI you can reach by voice or text at 9pm on a Sunday when you’re spiralling on a client situation or staring at a proposal wondering if the number is right. One client is using it to talk through her strategy on a live RFP right now. Build the chief of staff for the doing. When you need the thinking, the honest read from someone who has lived this industry,sold out the events, built the teams and strategies.. that part is me, on tap. You can literally call ‘me’ and have a coaching call with me any time, in my actual voice and giving my actual strategies.

It’s on the founding rate right now and that goes up soon, so grab it whilst you can.

Meet Events Coach AI →

You can start tonight.

See you next time here on the Edit, and please consider joining as a paid subscriber if you love in depth writing and lessons like this!!

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Picture this.. It’s Monday AM and I’m at the park with my little boy, watching him climb the same steps to the same slide for what must be the 15th time, iced coffee in hand (double shot, ofc) and my phone is at the bottom of my bag on silent. No calls today. No clients. Nothing to catch.

On. A. MONDAY. The day that used to have me frantically running for 6am trains, leading team meetings.. and not switching off until at least 11pm..

People ask me how I do this all the time. How do you run a business on three days a week.. and still be taking mondays off (and fridays.. and weekends..) I can feel them waiting for a hack. A tool, a system, some clever little secret that makes it all click into place.

Honestly?! I don’t have one. What I have is a decision. One I made on purpose, one I guard more fiercely than almost anything else in the business, and one that came with trade-offs I didn’t see coming and results I never would have predicted.

I want to break it right open for you today in this post, because the three-day week has very little to do with productivity. I promise! It’s a question of how the business is built underneath you. And I think a lot of people in events are working five and six days a week. Not because the work demands it but because nobody ever told them they were allowed to ask whether it does.

Have a proper think about your own week for a second. How much of it is truly required.. and how much of it is just habit, or the quiet fear of what stopping might say about you?

Behind the paywall I’m giving you the real version. My actual three days, what happens on each one, and the two days I refuse to work. The exact question I now ask myself before I say yes to anything, the one that saved me from myself. The single thing I was most frightened to let go of, and what happened to my income the month after I did. And the honest answer to the question everyone whispers, whether working less just means earning less.

This is the behind-closed-doors version I keep for paid subscribers, my inner circle. If this is the calibre of thinking you want landing in your inbox, your support means the world to me.

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When I announced that our second baby had arrived, the messages came in two waves. The first wave was pure love, and I felt every bit of it. The second wave was disbelief. I cannot believe I did not know. You hid that SO well.

I read those messages from inside my newborn bubble and I kept coming back to one word. Hid.

Hiding takes effort. Hiding is a performance you have to maintain, a secret you carry, a story you manage. What I actually did was much simpler and much more peaceful than that… I just did not mention it.

So today - still inside that bubble, I sat down with a coffee whilst my little girl napped and voicenoted my thoughts and reflections on it all.

I built this brand on real talk. I have shared my burnout, my numbers, my leaving, my becoming a mother the first time. And yet I carried the single biggest thing in my life for nine months and said nothing, on purpose, and felt no guilt about it at all.

There is a whole philosophy inside that decision. There were three real reasons I kept this pregnancy private, and one of them I have never written about here. And there is what happened, and is still unfolding, in my business whilst I’m on maternity leave.

So here is the unedited version. All of it.

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I hear this every single July. “Things are quiet.” “Everyone is on holiday.” “Nobody is booking anything until September.” “I will get back to strategy in the autumn.”

And every single year, the founders who treat Q3 as a strategic season come back in September with more momentum, clearer positioning, a stronger pipeline, and a better business than the ones who waited for things to “pick up again.”

The summer slowdown is not a fact. It is a story the events industry tells itself. And if you buy into it, you are handing a three-month head start to every competitor who does not.

What is actually happening in Q3

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying you should grind through the summer without rest. Rest is essential. Holidays are essential. Stepping back from delivery to recharge is one of the smartest things any founder can do, and I will always advocate for that.

What I am saying is that the gap between delivery seasons is not dead time. It is the highest-leverage time in your entire year if you use it properly.

In Q3, most of your competitors go quiet. They stop posting. They stop pitching. They stop building. They tell themselves the market is dead and they will pick it back up in September. That creates an enormous opportunity for the founders who keep showing up, because the noise drops and your signal gets louder.

In Q3, the brands and organisations that plan their events calendar around the fiscal year are actively making decisions about Q4 and Q1 budgets. The pitching season for autumn and winter events is not September. It is July and August. If you are not in conversation with potential clients during the summer, you are not on the shortlist when they make their decisions.

In Q3, your audience is still scrolling, still reading, still thinking about their careers and businesses. They might be on a sunlounger, but they are on their phone. The content you publish in the summer reaches an audience that has more time to actually read it, think about it, and act on it. Some of the highest-performing content I have ever published has been in the summer months, because the competition for attention is lower.

What the smartest founders do in Q3

The founders I coach who consistently have their best Q4s are the ones who use Q3 strategically. Here is what that actually looks like.

They audit and simplify. Q3 is the best time to step back from the daily noise and look at your business with fresh eyes. What is working? What is not? Which offers are profitable and which are just busy? Which clients are energising and which are draining? The founders who use the summer to simplify their business, cut what is not working, and double down on what is, come back in September with a clarity that is almost impossible to create during a busy delivery season.

They build the assets. The case studies, the testimonials, the portfolio updates, the website refresh, the content bank, the sales deck, the pricing restructure, the proposal template, the onboarding process. All the things that get pushed to “I will do it when things calm down” and then never get done because things never calm down. Q3 is when they get done. And having them ready for September means you can move faster than everyone who is scrambling to catch up.

They invest in visibility. While everyone else goes quiet, they keep posting. They keep writing. They keep showing up. Not at a gruelling pace. At a consistent pace. Two posts a week. One newsletter. One coffee with a potential collaborator. The compounding effect of staying visible during the months when everyone else disappears is enormous. By September, you have built three months of trust and authority that your competitors are starting from scratch to rebuild.

They fill the pipeline early. They reach out to past clients. They send thoughtful check-ins to warm leads. They start conversations about Q4 projects before anyone else is thinking about them. The best clients do not wait until September to book their October event. They decide in July. The founders who are in those conversations early get the best briefs, the best budgets, and the most interesting work.

They rest properly. This is the part that might seem contradictory but it is not. The smartest founders plan their rest. They take a proper holiday. They switch off completely for a week or two. They come back recharged rather than depleted. The difference is that their rest is intentional and bounded rather than the slow, guilty, half-working drift that most event professionals call “a quiet summer.”

I write The Edit twice a week for event leaders, agency founders, and anyone building seriously in this industry. If this landed, you will love what lives behind the paywall. Subscribe to The Edit →

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The real cost of going quiet

I want to name what is actually happening when an event professional or agency goes quiet for three months.

Your audience forgets you. Not because they do not care. Because attention is short and the people who stay visible stay top of mind. Three months of silence means three months of someone else occupying the space you used to hold.

Your pipeline dries up. The conversations you should have been having in July and August did not happen, so you start September with nothing in the pipeline and spend the first month of autumn scrambling to fill it. That scramble leads to underpricing, saying yes to the wrong work, and starting Q4 on the back foot.

Your momentum breaks. The hardest thing about content, business development, and personal brand building is not starting. It is restarting. Every time you stop and start again, you lose the compounding effect that makes all of it work. Three months off is not a pause. It is a reset. And the restart cost is higher than most people realise.

What to do this week

If you are reading this in Q3, you still have time. Pick one strategic project and commit to it for the rest of the summer. Simplify your offers. Build a sales deck. Publish weekly. Reach out to five warm leads. Audit your pricing. Refresh your portfolio. Start the conversation that your September self will thank you for.

The founders who win Q4 are the ones who built for it in Q3. This is that window. Do not waste it.

I built Events Elite for the people who think strategically about every season, not just the busy ones. If you are a senior leader or founder in events and you want to be in a room where this level of intentionality is normal, applications are open for October.

Apply for Events Elite →

Juliet x

I want to talk about something that I think a lot of people in the events industry have strong opinions about but very few people talk about honestly. Investing in coaching. And I do not mean this in a “everyone should have a coach” kind of way because I actually do not believe that. I believe coaching is a luxury. I completely get it. It is not a life-saving necessity. Nobody is going to tell you that you cannot build a business without one.

But I can tell you what it has done for mine. And I think the honesty is worth more than the pitch.

This is for paid subscribers only. The full story of my first coaching investment, the biggest return I have ever seen, how I choose who to work with, and my honest take on whether you actually need a coach. I’d be so grateful for your support as part of my inner circle.

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