PAST: Bobby Badalamenti loved her job as senior manager, corporate events, for Siemens Corp., where she was responsible for developing business event strategies for the company’s domestic and global senior executive management. Her success led her to be picked in 2008 to implement an enterprisewide strategic meetings management program, beginning with the U.S. and now in place for North America, working for Siemens’ supply chain management indirect materials division.  

“My first thought is why am I being punished—who wants to work for procurement?” she says with characteristic candor and touch of stand-up-comedy delivery. “Meetings are not after all like buying widgets; there are so many factors that play a part in this decision... procurement?”

But the move turned out to be a very important path to creating a partnership with the company’s event planners. “My role is to strategically manage spend, but I’m also an advocate for our customers, who are our meeting planners and attendees. I’m the voice of every meeting planner. I’m not going to ask anyone to meet for three days in a cave with no windows in order to reduce costs!”

CAVEATS: “Candor in this industry is very important but not prevalent, among suppliers. More would be welcome.” On the other hand, she’s been part of benchmarking groups with industry peers and has been “amazed and delighted with the level of information sharing.”

ADVICE: As your career advances, keep planning at least some meetings. “It keeps you credible and current.”—Regina McGee

PAST: Shari Baron was brought into her company six years ago as part of the team that created its strategic meetings management program.

“I was the third person hired—I was in on the ground floor,” she says. When the SMMP rolled out four years ago, the challenges weren’t over; they were just beginning, with compliance around healthcare meetings now a major issue.

Daiichi was positioned to lead in this area. “Where HCPs are concerned, we’re on the forefont of understanding what has to happen with compliance as we get closer to the August deadline (when the Physician Payments Sunshine Act goes into effect). She’s been working closely with compliance, and has policies and procedures in place.

The biggest challenge is often with international programs. “Each country has its own legalities and you need to keep up with them. If attendees are from different countries, it impacts the types of properties they can stay in.” The responsibility, ultimately, is hers.

EVOLUTION: Baron’s role has evolved, with logistics no longer her sole focus (even though she and her team of five plan 400 meetings a year). She views her position today as more of a consultant. There’s the compliance piece, plus she also has been heavily involved in SMM technology and changing the company’s meetings software solution (an accomplishment, since, as she puts it, “I’m not techy at all”).

It’s not to say that logistics aren’t important any more, but, “We bring a lot more to the table. We live and breathe meetings.”

Little did Baron realize when she started as a meeting planner 30 years ago that her job description would be what it is today. “When I started, it just sounded like a fun job. I never thought it would be a career.”

GIVING BACK: Baron isn’t just keeping all she learned within her department; she recently spoke on compliance at the 2013 Pharma Forum in Orlando, along with Daiichi’s Karen VanderPloeg. She’s also constantly benchmarking with other companies, “both pharma and non-pharma.”

ADVICE: “Don’t be afraid to speak up and say, ‘I’ll do that.’ The more you do, the more you will learn.”—Barbara Scofidio

PAST: Strategic change is what Judy Bauer’s career has been all about. She has developed, launched, and led major travel-related programs for several Fortune 500 companies, including American Express and Lucent Technologies. Currently she is launching a global SMMP for Marsh & McLennan Companies, a professional services firm with more than 54,000 employees worldwide.

EVOLUTION: Bauer got her degree in education, but after teaching in New York schools for six years, she had to look elsewhere for a career when a glut of teachers in the market forced the layoff of untenured professionals.

“That’s when I picked up Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow. It was a $6.95 paperback and the best investment I ever made,” Bauer says. Deciding to follow her passion for travel, she started out with a small travel agency where she learned the ropes, then moved to American Express, where eventually she became the company’s first director of global operations. Later she launched and managed Amex’s Platinum Card Travel Center.

She went on to break new ground at Lucent Technologies, where she consolidated the company’s first global travel/meetings program. After a stint at Pharmacia/Pfizer, where she directed and deployed another multimillion-dollar global corporate travel program, she joined J.P. Morgan Chase, developing a travel and meetings program for more than $450 million in spend in 41 countries.

When she got to Marsh & McLennan Cos. in 2007, she first tackled strategic management of global travel, seeking ways to streamline spend in North America and the U.K. across Marsh & McLennan’s four operating companies. This month, she will oversee the rollout of the company’s global SMMP.

ADVICE: “Be calm and stay strategic. Always focus on what your function can contribute to the bigger picture. Too many people get stuck in the day-to-day tasks and are easily intimidated by push-back. Find an alternate route and keep moving forward.”—Regina McGee

PAST: Lou Cozzo’s passion around green meetings started at a Corporate Event Marketing Association seminar in 2007, where he learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “All this plastic waste ends up in landfills, blows out to sea, and then it lands on our beaches. It was an eye-opener for me because I never really thought about where it ends up. It’s a scary thing.”

Inspired, he decided to make an impact within his company and began researching green event practices. He paired up with Regan Rhodes, strategic sourcing manager, corporate strategic procurement (also a 2013 Changemaker), to put together a framework of standards that anyone who manages an events can follow. “We couldn’t have done this without each other,” he says.

EVOLUTION: Cozzo, who has spent the past 15 years in Intel’s event group, has reached beyond his own four walls to host webinars with Rhodes and has met other green leaders at tech companies, such as Oracle’s Paul Salinger (a 2010 Changemaker), with whom he shares best practices. He and Rhodes are also creating an app that can be used by Intel planners and meeting suppliers.

ADVICE: When it comes to green meetings: “What I tell event planners at other companies is try to understand what matters to your CEO or COO, or talk to someone who has their ear. Find that something that really matters to them, then create something in your space that can easily build up to a corporate level.

“At our company, it’s about avoiding CO2 emissions companywide. So we convert all the savings from diverting water and waste at meetings into a number for CO2 emissions.” (The app he and Rhodes are developing will do this for meeting planners.)

FORWARD-THINKING: Cozzo wants to see everyone at his company taking green steps—“a lot of people doing a few things.” But he also wants to see meeting attendees taking what they learn home, too. So green practices are visibly displayed at Intel’s meetings (on the screen before the keynote, for example), and attendees are asked to join in the practice of greening the event. He also added a green page to Intel’s Developer Forum Web site.

“Our hope is that they take what they learned and share it at home, or maybe even it at their own companies. Then things start to spread. We want to touch as many people as we can.”—Barbara Scofidio

PAST: Salesforce.com hired Erin Decker in January 2012 as sustainability project manager and promoted her nine months later to lead the department, which sets high-level environmental strategy, tracks and reports on the company’s environmental impacts, and works to engage employees around sustainability issues.

All of those responsibilities come into play for Dreamforce, the company’s enormous annual user event, which last September drew 90,000 registered attendees to San Francisco’s Moscone Center and surrounding hotels. In November, the cloud computing conference will return to the city for the 11th time.

SUCCESS STORY: Decker says she doesn’t deserve all the credit for the sustainability successes of the mega event: “This is something our events team cares about deeply,” she says, “It’s a huge team effort.” But her department gets very involved in waste diversion and raising awareness. One of the stats Decker is proud of is a seven percent improvement in the show’s diversion rate, with 61 percent of the waste last year being reused or recycled compared to 54 percent the year before. Her tactics included hiring Green Angels, people who help attendees focus on whether trash belongs in compost, recycling, or landfill bins.

Decker stresses that early planning is the key. “For this meeting, Salesforce builds large structures, as do the exhibitors. We try to identify in advance what’s going to be built and work to find places where the materials can be donated after the show.” For example, Dreamforce shut down Howard Street to create a pedestrian plaza and all the benches they bought for the area were later donated to Habitat for Humanity.

FORWARD-THINKING: The 2012 event also saw a new sustainability awareness game built into the Dreamforce event app. For the Green Hero Challenge, Decker’s team came up with a list of things attendees could do to make Dreamforce more sustainable, from purchasing carbon offsets for their travel to bringing a reuseable water bottle to walking or biking to the event—about 30 actions in all. Attendees who chatted about their green actions in the app were eligible to earn prizes and to have a Green Hero badge added to their profile. About 200 people got the badge and many others participated at a lesser level.

ADVICE: “I always find it helpful to use frameworks and guidelines as aspiration points,” says Decker. She points to the Green Meeting Industry Council and the APEX/ASTM Environmentally Sustainable Meeting Standards. And she also reminds people to “find the sweet spot between what will have the most impact and what aligns well with the goals of the business.”—Sue Hatch

PAST: Susan Dupart has been awfully busy lately—and that’s how she likes it. In less than two years after coming on board with virus protection and Internet security solutions company McAfee as its senior director, global travel, meetings, corporate card, and mobility, Dupart developed a business case for the company’s first SMMP. The program, which launched in North America this spring, includes an online registration tool, a media policy, and standard contract terms and conditions.

The majority of meeting owners have greeted the SMMP as a big time-saver, she says. “In the training, we emphasized that the meeting owners can still do the content, the food and beverage, everything except the sourcing and contract negotiating—those are pieces you want to have an expert handling anyway,” she says.

EVOLUTION: Dupart still has a photo of herself with Elvis Presley from her early days as a Continental flight attendant in the late 1960s. But her career really took off when she began to concentrate on the business of travel, first in travel agency settings. In 1989, she got her first corporate job with Hitachi Data Systems, where she created the company’s first travel and meetings department. Then she moved on to overseeing travel, meetings, events, and site services at the technology firm Quantum; she added facilities operations and corporate services to her role when she moved on to Aspect Software—“I wore multiple hats there,” she says—before becoming director of global travel for integrated data storage solutions firm NetApp. Now, “I’m very happy with overseeing the global travel and meetings program at McAfee,” she says.

Once the SMMP is firmly established in North America, she plans to roll out the second phase in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific next year. She also recently completed a global RFP for the corporate card, and is considering incorporating the travel and expense cost control and compliance tool SAP Travel OnDemand into the program.

ADVICE: Dupart learned early on the importance of getting buy-in from both corporate leaders and stakeholders. “When I was at Quantum, I went to the CFO and said, ‘Let’s take the money we bring in from commissions and use it to pay for [online business and travel expense management system] Concur.’ We did, and I realized that when you gather support at the executive level, you can accomplish a lot.” She also garnered names from her management and created a travel advocacy board comprised of the company’s senior leaders and key financial stakeholders. “It has been a vital resource in helping me do the things I want to do here.”—Sue Pelletier

PAST Before landing her career-defining job as global strategic meetings manager at Apple Inc. in January 2001, Angie Henderson spent six years learning the industry, starting as a hotel convention services manager and then moving to meeting planning positions at an international association and a medical device company.

EVOLUTION: When a job opened up at Apple to grow its meetings team, create policy, and implement a strategic meetings management program, she was ready for the challenge. But with the company’s first iPod device still nine months away, little did she anticipate Apple’s coming mobile technology breakthroughs and the accompanying growth that would give her the opportunity to build a truly global meetings organization.

The Meeting and Event Services team in 2001 was U.S.-centric, handling 50 to 75 meetings a year. Today, it supports more than 3,000 global groups a year. Henderson and the majority of her global in-house team (largely CWT Meetings & Events employees) are based in Austin, Texas; but there are also regional managers and staff in Cupertino, Calif.; Miami; London; and Singapore.

FORWARD-THINKING: Henderson has focused on building a service-oriented culture in the Meeting and Event Services team, “because service is so important to Apple,” she says. “Finding staff who get that and have that kind of personality is important to us, probably ahead of technical expertise or experience in the industry. We can teach them all that, but they have to have the right mindset around service.”

SUCCESS STORY: Henderson instituted service-level agreements when she began working with CWT in 2010, tracking typical quality-control metrics. But about 15 months ago, she decided to try a more creative approach to service-level agreements, focusing not just on the meeting planning process but also spurring progress on Apple’s broader priorities: the customer experience, automation, and process simplification. Quarterly, she now rewards her employees with iWow awards for outstanding service based on customer feedback and Genius awards for ideas that improve departmental processes, and she also runs a competition among three regions—the Americas, EMEIA, and Asia/Pacific—tracking who gets the highest marks in terms of response times, savings percentage, and other metrics.

“I love the team that I have and what we’ve accomplished at Apple, and I love where the industry is going,” says Henderson. “Our meetings and events world is changing. It’s becoming more strategic and there’s more recognition of the importance of the consolidation of meeting spend. And that’s something to be proud of because I know where the industry was way back when I started.”—Sue Hatch

PAST: Jennifer Honan has parlayed her early training in hospitality and meetings management into a successful long-term career with Deloitte LLP, one of the country’s largest financial, auditing, and tax-consulting conglomerates. In 2011, she was appointed director of Deloitte’s National Services organization, where she is responsible for hundreds of professionals across a diverse array of disciplines, including creative services, administrative support, meetings and events, and many others.

EVOLUTION: After graduating from Colgate University, Honan worked several jobs in restaurant and hotel management before joining Deloitte’s meeting planning department. In the subsequent 18 years with Deloitte, she spent 16 of them navigating roles from meeting planner to planning operations manager to national meeting services director. In that position, she oversaw the strategy and spend for all U.S. and global meetings, as well as a staff of 50 meeting professionals.

“I have had a wonderful journey with Deloitte, one that has capitalized on my hospitality industry experience and allowed me to expand and develop professionally.”

HIGHLIGHTS: Noting that career highlights “come in all sizes and shapes,” Honan says planning her first meeting with more than 1,000 attendees counts as one. Others include assuming Deloitte’s inaugural planning role for global leadership and producing events in Cape Town, Tokyo, and Paris, “which were among my most challenging destinations.”

Other highlights: participating in the development and opening of Deloitte University, being named Deloitte firm director in 2007, and seeing people she’s hired as entry-level staff develop into successful managers.

ADVICE: “The current environment in any industry is going to demand adaptability, operational efficiency, high-performance results, strong relationships, and innovation. Stay true to yourself, and don’t be afraid to take calculated risks.”—Regina McGee

PAST: When downsizing ended his 21-year career planning incentive travel at Mutual of Omaha, Ken Juel didn’t have to venture far to find a new challenge. It was 2006, and across town in Omaha, the online brokerage company TD Ameritrade was just launching its first sales incentive travel program.

EVOLUTION: Juel’s annual responsibilities now include planning the company’s national sales meeting, a sales education series, and 75 to 100 ad hoc meetings. But more than anything else, he brings his expertise to the company’s incentives. There was one travel incentive on the books when he walked in the door—an event that Juel jokingly refers to as a “camping trip”—and he’s expanded that to four annual incentive programs, two focused on sales staff, two on service employees.

SUCCESS STORY: TD Ameritrade has the right environment for incentives, says Juel. “They’re very focused on rewards and recognition. They understand that the happier employees are the more engaged they are.”

Juel has helped make the incentives more motivating by including spouses, lengthening the trips to four nights, and always including special experiences that attendees could not arrange on their own. Internally, he’s focused on establishing specific objectives for the events, and he’s established a destination rotation that brings more predictability to the planning process.

ADVICE: “It’s all about the little things,” says Juel about incentive travel. “You don’t have to throw a ton of money at a program. You can do things that make your attendees feel special and important every step of the way.”—Sue Hatch

PAST: Bhart Sarin started his career in 2004 as a management trainee in manufacturing, and “after not enjoying one minute of it,” he began interviewing with companies he had previously turned down after graduating from the University of Maryland. “One of them, Allegheny Technologies, graciously welcomed me back to take on a strategic sourcing role and the rest is history.”

EVOLUTION: These days, he is in the process of completing a strategic sourcing and management program for Ingredion’s global meetings and travel. This will be the second such program that the 35-year-old has built for a Fortune 500 company. Last year, he was elected to serve on the board of directors of the Global Business Travel Association.

MENTORS: “Ernest Gabbard, the chief procurement officer at Allegheny, taught me everything I know. He pushed me to become professionally certified and involved with the major trade associations. Without him, I’d be five to seven years behind where I am today. My current mentor, Barbara Holcomb, has also been a catalyst for a transformation in my capabilities and productivity. She has challenged and encouraged me to operate outside my comfort zone.”

ADVICE: “I live by the famous quote from President Calvin Coolidge about the value of persistence. Essentially, he says that intelligence, education, and talent do not achieve great things—it takes persistence and determination. So my advice is to never give up.”—Regina McGee

PAST: Jennifer Sisk’s contract negotiation skills and on-site logistical support work, honed through working in operations, sales, and conference services with various hotel chains around the country, prepared her well for flipping to the planning side when she joined Cole Real Estate Investments seven years ago. As vice president, events, she shapes events to align with the goals and mission of the company.

“It is exciting to be a part of the collaboration process and provide input to help make decisions,” she says, adding that her team of six handles more than 400 events a year, including trade shows, due-diligence meetings, roadshows, and employee events. “This kind of volume always keeps us on our toes!”

Being a manager on duty for a large resort also taught her a lot about conflict resolution and customer service. “The calls to the MOD are never good ones. I would jump every time my pager went off! (Now I’m dating myself by mentioning a pager!)” she jokes. And her work as a destination wedding planner for an island hotel made her realize that “I enjoyed booking it and cooking it—meaning I sold the wedding packages then executed the event, which is essentially being meeting planner on the social side. “I much prefer corporate meetings,” she adds. “There isn’t so much emotion around the ‘big day.’ ”

KUDOS: Sisk is most proud of the 2008 Cole Advisor Symposium that she and her team planned and executed within seven months. “This was our largest event to date, with over 500 advisers in attendance here in Phoenix. It shaped our way of hosting due-diligence meetings for years to come, and it was so successful we planned another one for four months later!”

MENTORS: She says she has been lucky to have worked with talented and caring people during her career. “My managers over the years have always taken a vested interest in seeing me succeed and coaching me along the way. I try to give back the same kind of support to my employees that I have received because we can only be better as a cohesive and supportive team.”

GIVING BACK: Sisk is actively involved in Financial & Insurance Conference Planners and has served as West Coast Region vice chair and chair, which she says she truly enjoyed. “My experience with FICP has been very positive, and I am grateful for the relationships I have made within the organization.”—Sue Pelletier

PAST: Jami Stapelmann was brought into Estée Lauder four years ago to implement a strategic meetings management program in this highly decentralized organization. It was no easy task: She spent a full year researching and meeting with brand managers at the 27-plus brands that comprise Estée Lauder Companies and created a task force of key planners and organizers from the various brands.

After this research phase, she began standardizing processes and documents, and launched a meetings registration site with a mandate to register meetings of 10 or more. The registration form populates the company’s global business calendar, which provides her with global visibility into the company’s events.

SUCCESS STORY: She was one of only 16 people to receive her GLP (Global Leadership Professional) designation from GBTA last year at its annual convention.

AHA! MOMENT: “Meeting management can be hidden if it sits in marketing or on its own, and no one knows the value of it. When I was brought in, I was sitting in the travel department, and managed travel is well recognized and consistent around the company. It made sense to register a meeting, and it was easy because we already had a visible link right on the corporate intranet.”

FORWARD-THINKING: Her next step is to connect meetings with procurement. “That’s the direction organizations are going.”

MENTORS: Stapelmann is living proof of the value of mentors. She has had one who advised her that the way to implement strategic meetings management (or any change management, for that matter) is to first take time to understand the organization.

“You want to look at meetings management wholistically. You need an end-to-end strategy to figure out how it fits within your organization.” This person also “put me in front of the right brands and the right people at those brands.”—Barbara Scofidio

PAST: Taking a chance on an “unknown” path has led to rewarding career opportunities for Cindy Heston. She started out in sales for USAirways, and although she enjoyed that job, she moved into corporate travel management with Thompson/Technicolor. She took another leap after that to lead a travel-purchasing consortium for four French-based organizations.

In 2008, she joined WellPoint, one of the country’s largest health insurers, as business travel manager, moving on to oversee management of meetings and events as well. She led the development of WellPoint’s strategic meetings management program, which has been a multi-year, collaborative effort between her travel team, marketing, corporate compliance, and accounts payable. A new meeting and event policy was launched in January.

“When you stretch yourself professionally and personally, you have the opportunity to grow and experience so much and have fun,” she says. “I will always seek the more challenging path in both areas. At WellPoint, there is intense focus on the internal customer. This allows me to develop strategies around the experience and needs of our customers. Of course, you have to build your business case around value, but the definition of value isn’t always cash. There are multiple ways to demonstrate this, and customer satisfaction has to be the core of your strategy.”

MENTORS: “At USAirways, David Lim was instrumental in developing my knowledge of the travel industry. At Thomson/Technicolor, my manager Jackie Taylor-Boggs taught me the importance of building a culture for your team. My peers Margaret Brady from AT Kearney, George Odom from Hewlett-Packard, Pam McTeer from First Data, and Corry Leigh from BCG have been fantastic resources and friends to me.”

ADVICE:“When I start a project or initiative, I know going in that there are multiple paths for success and failure, so if I end up at a dead end, I just turn around and go a different way. I always develop projects in stages, and have several backup plans. Tenacity and flexibility are keys to success in this industry.”—Regina McGee

PAST: A veteran meeting/travel leader in the fast-moving technology industry, Deborah Matarazzo has mastered the art and science of strategic meetings management for companies where change is not just a reality but a mantra. She’s now developing an SMMP for global meetings at Salesforce.com.

A leader in providing cloud-computing services, Salesforce.com was launched by its founders in a San Francisco apartment in 1999 and now has over 10,000 full-time employees. Forbes has named Salesforce.com its Most Innovative Company for the past two years.

Matarazzo’s career spans more than 25 years in the events industry, and she has managed programs for Tandem, Compaq, and Hewlett-Packard, where she developed a successful SMMP called “Smart Meetings.” She started at Salesforce.com three years ago, establishing global event processes, hiring staff, and building the infrastructure for a strategic sourcing program.

KUDOS: Active in the industry, Matarazzo has served on the Global Business Travel Association’s SMMP task force, as well as several hotel advisory boards. She obtained her Certified Corporate Travel Executive designation in 2002.

AHA! MOMENT: “I remember being at an industry seminar in 2007 when I met the wonderful Deb Scholar and we just clicked. She was incredibly generous in sharing her successful approach to meetings management. It was then that I learned there was a name for what we had implemented at our companies—strategic meetings management—and that there was a lot of help available to develop it further.”—Regina McGee

PAST: In Courtney Page’s case, “getting your arms around meeting spend” involved consolidating planning practices and processes for about 1,000 meetings across Chevron’s 20 separate operating companies—each with their own legal and procurement departments—and meeting planners. She was brought in four years ago to create a strategic meetings management program from the ground up, then found herself also in charge of travel. She’s a different kind of procurement person, with an agency background handling meetings.

“They didn’t tell me this when they hired me, but we have 13 people in the company who are true meeting planners but 600 people who have really no background—geologists, for example—planning meetings.” So one of her first steps was to take the guesswork out of the meetings handled by those occasional planners, so she has loaded customized meeting packages into the Active|StarCite tool, so they can easily choose room-night and F&B pricing at approximately 100 U.S. properties, as well as access the company’s contracts via the software.

“It’s a self-service model,” says Page, who estimates that it has cut the time that it takes to source an event, negotiate a deal, get it approved, and implement a contract from an average of 20 hours down to a single hour.

FORWARD-THINKING: Next, she plans to take the SMMP global, where the company spends another $86 million on hotels. She has begun a Web-based, information-gathering program as a first step.

GIVING BACK: Page is a member of the IHG Advisory Board and is active in the Global Business Travel Association, Meeting Professionals International, MCAF (Meetings Competitive Advantage Forum), and the Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

AHA! MOMENT: In a non-mandated environment, Page has learned, it helps to give people an incentive to register their meetings—and allow them to capture what they have saved the company by doing so. So she provides people with documentation on their cost-saving decisions that they can then use in their job reviews. This low-pressure approach has resulted in a 67 percent increase in meeting registration. “We’re all about the carrot, not the stick, in terms of getting people to register meetings.”—Barbara Scofidio

PAST: Rhodes started at Intel about four years ago (having worked at Visa and Motorola before that), just as the buzz about sustainability was building in procurement departments. “Everyone was looking at their supply chains and what they could do to be green. It was a new opportunity for me and I was very lucky, because I have passion in this area in my everyday life.”

Along with Lou Cozzo (also a 2013 Changemaker), and the Portland, Ore.–based consultancy MeetGreen, Regan launched Intel’s “Blue Guide to Being Green” in 2011. She thought people would use it immediately, but when she checked back with event owners six months later, they said they loved the ideas but had no time, staff, or budget to implement them.

That’s when the real work began: They trimmed the guide down to short lists of tips and have created a mentor program to help people integrate green steps and track the results. Intel has sent 14 large events through the program since 2012, and the plan is to continue among the top 25 large meetings, then open it up to “any and all.”

GIVING BACK: Rhodes frequently uses the term “green goodness” in reference to sharing best practices with others. So she and Cozzo have done educational webinars in conjunction with the Corporate Event Marketing Association and spoken at their annual Summit.

AHA! MOMENT:“I learned a tremendous lesson [from the “Blue Guide to Being Green”] about how you can create something and put it out there, but unless you have the time, the bandwidth. and the passion to get people to actually use it, it won’t go anywhere.”

FORWARD-THINKING: The next step is a green app, which is in the development phase, “for Intel folks [and suppliers] to track, measure, and implement green practices and to incentivize them throughout the journey, making it fun.”—Barbara Scofidio

PAST: Meghan Schilt joined Apax Partners almost five years ago, with stints at Bear Stearns and FSC Securities before that. She was featured in this magazine late last year when a 100- person conference she was planning in New York City fell victim to Hurricane Sandy’s wrath. It was her ability to stay calm and collected in the middle of a real-life disaster that allowed her to coolly reschedule the meeting with minimal losses.

“These days, if people tell me they think my job is so fun or easy, I take that as a compliment. If I can do it all, make it look easy, and display grace under pressure, I consider that a success.”

MENTORS: “I wouldn’t be where I am today without Rich Venezio, president, Events Forum Inc., who luckily took me under his wing from practically day one of my very first events job. Recently through my role as [Meeting Professionals International of Greater New York] president, I have had the opportunity to work with Terri Breining, CMP, CMM. She continues to challenge me to develop the skill sets that I never knew I always wanted.”

KUDOS: Schilt was just named a 2013 Pacesetter by the Convention Industry Council, an award established last year to salute emerging leaders and industry supporters.

ADVICE: “Get involved. Give back to our industry—whether you have one hour or 500 extra hours. Make the time to make a difference. It matters, and I know from experience that you will gain far more than what you give.”—Amanda Lucci

PAST: Lynn Schwandt started working for Aid Association for Lutherans (one of the two companies that merged in 2002 to create Thrivent Financial, her current employer) while she was still in high school. She did six jobs in many areas before a posting for a part-time meeting planning position caught her eye, and she eagerly applied, with visions of travel and glamour in her head.

Then the illusions became reality: “I saw how much accountability and responsibility it involved,” she says. “I hadn’t realized what it entailed.” But once she started, she never looked back. “I knew I wanted to do this for my career,” she says, and when a full-time spot opened up, she took the leap.

EVOLUTION: Getting involved in conferences for the company’s field force allowed her to use her natural gifts. “I’m a people person,” she says. “I’ve made so many friends out in the field; I’ve developed relationships with our vendors. When you work on a program over a year or two, it’s great to develop that relationship. It creates a positive atmosphere when everyone gets along.”

One of her biggest challenges was getting herself—and her attendees—through AAL’s merger with Lutheran Brotherhood more than a decade ago. The planners and the salespeople from both companies had been “friendly rivals”—now they had to work, and meet, together. “There was a lot of apprehension. People lost jobs on both sides.” But with the new meeting department headquartered in Minneapolis, the Lutheran Brotherhood HQ, most of the losses were in Appleton, Wis., where Schwandt worked.

She, however, survived and thrived with Thrivent, and is now the lead planner for three annual incentive conferences. “We are proud to say that we are a full-service event planning department at—we plan meetings from start to finish.” She and Dan Young, who had been the head of meetings at Lutheran Brotherhood and now heads up the Thrivent events department, worked together to draw best practices from each other’s previously separate meetings. “Now, 10-plus years later, Thrivent Financial’s Event Planning Department has a stellar reputation within the organization,” she says. “I am proud to be a part of this amazing team.”

ADVICE:“Relationships with vendors and attendees are very important in the success of a meeting. I strive to make every relationship a positive one.”

GIVING BACK: Schwandt has been an active member of Financial & Insurance Conference Planners since 1998, including serving on several design teams for the FICP Annual Conference and Education Forum, and as co-chair of the Great Lakes Region Meeting for two years. She also has offered her expertise to two local nonprofit organizations, and assisted the local technical college in developing a meeting and event management curriculum.—Alison Hall

PAST: Theresa Tamer started out on the hotel side of the hospitality industry, becoming a convention services manager at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside, then moving on to Hilton Hotel Corp. where she spent 10 years as director of meetings and events.

EVOLUTION: She joined The Coca-Cola Company 14 years ago, launching its strategic meetings management program in 2006, long before the practice was on most meeting managers’ radar screens. Recently, she introduced technology changes that will make the program more effective.

GIVING BACK: A frequent industry speaker, Tamer has been particularly active in the Global Business Travel Association, where she was a member of the Groups and Meetings Committee and authored whitepapers about SMM that catapulted the discipline to the forefront. She is also an active member of MCAF (Meetings Competitive Advantage Forum), an impressive group of Fortune 100 companies focused on strategic meetings management.

ADVICE: “My advice to anyone just starting out in the SMMP journey? Secure an executive sponsor who understands the value and importance of the contributions the program can bring, they will do your selling for you! And engage, engage, engage!”—Regina McGee