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senior vice president and manager, meetings and events
TCW, Los Angeles

PAST While Stuhff had developed some corporate training programs for the retail bank she was working for, she was a meeting planning neophyte when she was asked to take on a special assignment: planning a management conference for 500 people. After cutting her teeth on that assignment, she made a case for a department devoted to managing internal meetings and client events.

CRED Before Stuhff joined TCW, the financial services firm’s meeting planning was diffused throughout the organization, with everyone from administrative assistants to vice presidents juggling logistics. As the company grew, the ad hoc meetings model needed to change. Stuhff was hired to start up her second successful corporate-event-and-meeting-planning department—all while raising four children. “I feel pretty good about that,” she says. In addition to internal and external client meetings, her three-person department also started a corporate university three years ago.

SUCCESS STORY Stuhff developed a process for her firm’s senior leadership conference that involves her department on both a strategic and a logistical level. Her department put together a planning team that includes representatives from the different areas of the firm. Getting input from everyone from the CEO to the end users “keeps our fingers on the pulse of the needs in all the different areas,” she says. Their input, along with survey data from the previous year, allows the meetings team to create the meeting objectives and ensure that everything about the meeting ties back to those objectives. —Sue Pelletier