Changemaker 2024: Hailey Warriner Turner

When Hailey Warriner Turner joined LEO Events two and a half years ago, she quickly made waves—especially around food-and-beverage management.

Armed with an eye for process improvement, experience working at a catering company, and a knack for teaching, Turner brought fresh ideas to the Memphis-based team. In fact, a colleague described her work as “revolutionizing” the company's approach—thanks to her overhaul of existing templates along with the creation of new systems.

Looking back, Turner says she approached change in four steps: learning, buy-in, implementation, and feedback. Turner began by understanding the F&B processes LEO had in place, and then suggested ways to streamline those practices—especially around sharpening the F&B budgeting process to avoid surprises.

While budgeting for future F&B programs does require estimating, Turner saw ways to bring more “science” to the process.  “Just because something’s not broken doesn't mean it can't be better,” she says.

Change Requires Education
While management might be sold on the bottom-line benefits of change, new processes won’t hold up unless the people implementing them are on board. Turner says that an important part of success is in “teaching the ‘why.’ … You can't expect someone to truly understand a process unless they know why the process is in place.’” 

Turner says this is the way she was raised. “I like to stop and teach. I do that quite often, and it is definitely because of my mom. She was always saying, ‘Do you know why I do that? … Well, this is why.’”

“A lot of people come to planning just out of college, and don’t have true service-industry experience or an understanding of the logistics behind food and beverage,” Turner says. “So that's kind of where I came in.”

WWHD?
While efficiencies are critical, Turner doesn’t see building new processes to be her biggest accomplishment at LEO. Rather, she’s most proud of helping fellow planners to feel empowered in their jobs.

“The camaraderie of feeling empowered, that's a big thing for me—feeling empowered to either ask [questions] or empowered with information,” she says.

One resource Turner helped to create is a PowerPoint presentation on the step-by-step basics of F&B management for LEO’s planners. While the document is a guide rather than a rulebook—there are always going to be nuances, she notes—it’s helped set baseline tactics for a wider community. The presentation was created for the meeting-services department but has since been shared with the operations and production teams, which may use it when they go on site and need crew catering. “I've had people on the team say, ‘When I'm doing a food-and-beverage group, I just pull up that PowerPoint and ask, what would Hailey do?’”

Turner says that “there are plenty of things that do not come naturally to me,” but food-and-beverage management is not one of them. She’s happy to share her knowledge and, most importantly, help others feel more confident creating well-orchestrated F&B experiences.