In this episode of the "High Profit Event Show," host Rudy Rodriguez welcomes a special guest, Annie Hyman Pratt, an expert in team building and leadership from Leading Edge Teams. Annie is renowned for her role in the expansion of Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, bringing her extensive experience to the forefront of the discussion.

The episode delves into Annie's approach to building effective teams within business, with a specific focus on event planning and execution. She highlights the importance of assigning clear roles and responsibilities, and the need for nurturing leadership within teams. Her insights offer valuable guidance for anyone looking to strengthen their team dynamics.

Annie also explores the nuances of leadership and teamwork, particularly in the context of event organization. She advocates for an inclusive leadership style that is not just about making decisions, but also about fostering collaboration across various functions. This approach, according to Annie, is crucial for efficient problem-solving and effectively handling unforeseen challenges.

A key theme of the conversation is the significance of the human element in business success. Annie shares that despite the diversity of business strategies and operations across industries, the common denominator of success is strong, capable individuals who can think critically and collaborate effectively. This episode is full of insights for those looking to enhance their skills in team-building and leadership.

Listeners are encouraged to apply these insights to their own leadership roles. For more information on Annie's work and her A-Plus Leader Development Program, they can visit the Leading Edge Teams website. Fans of the "High Profit Event Show" are invited to subscribe for weekly episodes and share this enlightening episode with their network.

Want to connect with Annie?

Leading Edge Teams Website: https://leadingedgeteams.com/

A-Plus Leader Program Website: https://leadingedgeteams.com/a-plus-leader-program/

Leading Edge Teams’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/leading-edge-teams/

Annie Hyman Pratt’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anniehymanpratt

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/anniehymanpratt/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leadingedgeteams/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AnnieHymanPratt

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdFmarmCnd8ePWNbLo5myWA

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Hi, this is Annie Hyman Pratt. I'm the creator of the A-Plus Leader Development Program and Mastermind. And in today's show, I will reveal to you how you can build your A-Plus Event Team.

Hi, Rudy Rodriguez here. Welcome to today's episode of The High Profit Event Show. Today, we have a very special guest with us, Miss Annie Hyman Pratt. Welcome, Annie.

Great to be here. Awesome.

Glad to have you, Annie. And we go back a few years. It's been a pleasure working with you and your organization at A-Plus Leadership and The Mastermind Program. For our audience who haven't met you yet, I wanted to mention a couple of things about your background. So if they're curious and they start to lean in when we interview. One, I know, Annie, that you have a background as a business consultant and a mentorship trainer of many leaders working with some very large companies and brands, including Hay House. But you also had your start in the family business, a small little business known as Coffee Bean and Tea Leaves that you and your family grew in the 90s until you sold it. Since then, you've worked with many different businesses and you found that the common pain point has typically been around people.

You built a whole training organization around developing the people part of a business. You do have a unique combination of experiences with finance, operation, executive leadership, and psychology and performance that just has given you a very unique perspective when it comes to the people part of a business. You also have been doing your own virtual events, world in-person events for many years.

You've coached many high-level companies and brands with their organizations in developing their teams, including their event teams, so that they could have excellent events. So welcome. Excited to interview you today. So maybe we could start, Annie, with telling maybe a little bit about your story. People always love to know a little bit about your background and kind of what brought you into the event space.

Awesome. So I grew up kind of in a family business. My parents started the coffee bean and tea leaf in the 60s. When they started, it was really all about selling pounds of coffee, just beans to take home and make. That lasted all through the 60s, the 70s, most of the 80s. At the end of the 80s, there was what I think of as the coffee beverage revolution, meaning people really got interested in having all the fancy Italian espresso drinks. Our company, the coffee bean and tea leaf, were the first ones to really invent the cold blender drinks. It was our discovery. We grew huge all during the 90s. My dad had to retire right after I got out of college and I worked in accounting for a little while. My dad had to retire. So then I came into the business earlier than I probably would have and operated the business as the CEO all during the 90s. At the end of the 90s, part of the expansion, I took the business from seven stores to 70 stores. Part of the expansion was doing some overseas licensing. Our Southeast Asian licensee turned around and bought us at the end of the 90s. So that was very unexpected for me. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do next.

So I did a lot of interim executive work because I wanted to see what other kinds of businesses were out there. I wanted to work with businesses in really all different kinds of fields. That experience was great. I thought I would do it for like a year or two. I ended up doing it for more than a decade, being an interim executive. What I found was that businesses could be very different for their strategy, for how the operations really work, for, oh gosh, marketing, finance, all of it could be pretty different. But at the end of the day, the people part was uniquely the same. Meaning that when you had strong, good people who could really think about the business, who were able to stay in a good place themselves, and do good teamwork, the businesses thrived. A business that had a great product, but not great people, they really struggled. So it just became clear to me that the people part was just more and more important.

Thanks for sharing that background and how you grew the family business from 7 to 70 stores and then sold and then went to work, doing executive work for different businesses. You saw the common pattern, uniquely different that the people part.

Yes. It became such an important part for me that I used to do a lot of consulting that was really around strategy and operations. I pivoted to doing much more around leadership development and team and organizational infrastructure. So not infrastructure like computers, but infrastructure like how do you do a strategic plan? How do you do measurement and metrics? How do you do team meetings? These were all things that business owners, especially entrepreneurs don't know going in. I also found too, entrepreneurs are, I worked more and more with smaller and smaller entrepreneurs, meaning smaller and smaller businesses, not smaller people, but smaller businesses. For entrepreneurs, they get into business because they have a dream. They want to impact the world. They want to have a lifestyle that is not just a grind. They want to make good money. They want to be in charge of their own future. So all of that's awesome. The thing that entrepreneurs don't want, but inevitably, if they want to have a business that grows, they have to have is, and no entrepreneur goes into business thinking, I'd like to have a giant team. I'd like to have a lot of people problems.

Nobody goes for that. So the point of having people is so that they make your business better, stronger, that you can grow it more, that you get more free time. That is something that humans are still the best to provide. Human beings, as far as AI has come, it hasn't come far enough. Human beings are still the best beings we have, the best workers we have to take in all different kinds of perspectives and information and make sense of it. So the example I like to give is that Tesla has been working on a self-driving car for a long time now, and they still don't have one. They still don't have one that could just ride on the road. In fact, a few weeks ago, one of their self-driving cars ran into an airplane. Yet we can teach any 16 year old how to drive. So human beings still have this ability to think when there's so many different factors going on at once. A computer can play chess better than a human can, but a computer still can't drive as well as a human can. There's so much of that about business. I think especially for the people listening to this show that are big in the event space, it's like, oh my gosh, talk about something that's people centered. Everything's people centered. People are going to do all the marketing.

People are going to get the event filled. People are going to plan the event. People are going to deliver the event. People, the customers are people. It's all about the people. That is both a struggle and an opportunity. I think that my career has really developed into taking the opportunity, getting much less struggle, much more opportunity because of having people.

Thanks for sharing that. It all comes down to people. So I'm curious, our theme for today's episode is around how to build an A-plus event team. When you think of an event, even if it's virtual or in-person, the leader can't do it all themselves. At least they have someone that's managing the Zoom room for them, but there's often so much more going on. You said the marketing, the promotion, the people attending, there's administrative work that needs to happen behind the scenes. There's a team that goes on behind the scenes of anybody who's an event leader. Can you kind of speak to that a little bit, like how to build that A plus event team, if someone doesn't already have that in place or wants to aspire to that?

Totally. So the very first thing to think about when you are going to stop doing everything yourself and start having people come help you is what kind of area, what kinds of tasks, but especially kind of grouped into an area, can I put together to have somebody else take responsibility for? So for an event, you probably are going to have one person who leads the planning. By leading the planning, and maybe even they lead the whole execution, the physical execution of the event, if you're doing an in-person event, they're going to plan ahead of time the menus, the room size, they'll negotiate the contract for the hotel, et cetera. They may be the main person to be working with the hotel. So if you have somebody who can do that part of the event, that's awesome. That's probably not going to be the same person who is going to build all the landing pages or the digital advertisements or whatnot. So you want to first start thinking of the event as its own kind of mini business with functions. Each of those functions has roles in it, but each of those functions needs to have a leader. When I think of a leader, it doesn't mean that they have to have a bunch of team members under them.

It's what the definition that I hold for a leader is that a leader is responsible to work with themselves and others to achieve results. So an event planner has the responsibility of achieving a great result for their part of the event. So the very beginning of thinking about building your A-plus event team is what kinds of roles do I have? What are the role categories? Probably things like planning, like marketing, like technology, like filling a sales team. Oh my gosh. There's all kinds of parts and you want to be thinking of it not as one big jumble, but how can I organize these so that I can find people to take a part of it and really be able to hold that and deliver the result? Because otherwise, if you let's say you don't do it that way and you end up keeping kind of all the decision making for yourself, you end up wanting to, how would I say, be the one to delegate all tasks to your team. The issue with that is that you won't, how would I say, you will get buried in having to do all the follow up, all the tasking, all the figuring out if there's a problem.

It's just too much. We need people who can take real responsibility. Not just do some tasks that you tell them to.

I remember being in the classroom with you one time and you drew out this kind of functional kind of diagram and business into all these different sections and having these kinds of where they meet, but also where they have leads. That memory always ingrained in me. Like you say, you have to think of the event in that context. Like, hey, what are the different parts of the events and breaking into functions and having each function have a leader, which is someone they may not have a whole team below them, but they're responsible for the function, like the planning, marketing, the technology.

Yes. It can be one part-time contractor. It's not a problem. You may have one part-time contractor who's responsible for the technology. But we need that part-time contractor to be able to show up to the morning meeting with all of the leaders on the event day, for example, because it's your leaders that are going to cross-function during an event.

Can you speak to that a little bit more? Because I think that's an important point, how to get your leaders, once you've identified your leaders and you have them on your team, how do you get them to cross-function at the event?

Yes, exactly. So instead of you being the hub of a wheel and everybody comes off the central entrepreneur, instead, you want more of a pyramid where people can work directly across functions. So if I'm having an issue with the door opening time of the event or whatnot, and because the technology's not ready, it's like I want to be able to talk to the technology people. You want to have that kind of cross-functioning so that you don't have a, what you would call it, a triangle, a game of telephone going all the time. The two people, two or three or however many are involved, that are closest to the issue happening, those are the ones that need to solve it. So we want that kind of cross-functioning going. The way to have that going regularly so that in cases where you have an unexpected issue, it happens naturally, but the way to get that going regularly is to meet regularly with your team, with your cross-functional team. So all those leaders start to get to know what's my part, what's your part. It's kind of like, most small businesses, I kind of think of like a basketball team. Like there's five people out there, which kind of signify the leaders. They each have different roles. There's a game strategy. There's an outcome that they're going for. Even though they have roles and they know the outcome that they're going for, things happen on the court. It's not like they're playing all by themselves. There's an opponent on the court.

So unexpected things happen all the time and they need to regroup and they need to replan and talk about what we should all do together.

I like that. I was recently working at an in-person event with one of our partners and it was a fairly large event. We had over 300 people in attendance and we had obviously many A-list speakers. We had MC, we had an audio team, we had a sales team, which we're looking over. We had a registration team, we had a finance accounting team. We had all of these different people. Obviously we had our actual host who was leading the event. One of the things that worked well is that we had regular meetings leading up to the event with the key leaders and making sure that we had checklists and they're clarifying and verifying what was needed. Even during the event itself, we had a full walkthrough prior with the functional leaders. Each day, even each morning, there was a set time where we would meet with the team. It can seem like a little bit of redundancy at times, but I found that those regular meetings, like really create that rhythm of communication and success that allow for an event to go, what, apparently seamlessly, but in fact, it's a lot of moving parts and a lot of leaders and teams moving in conjunction. One of my mentors once made a reference to how an event is like a duck that's on the water and it seems to be very still, but underneath the water, you see little feet.

For sure. And preparation, the reason you want to prepare as much as you can is because then when something does not go according to plan, you will be a 10 times better problem solver. If you don't plan, you don't have any sense of what changed, what's not working right here. It takes too long to diagnose a problem. If you don't plan, you too easily get thrown into chaos, more or less chaos and crisis. By having planning, by having structure, by having people know exactly what to expect as the event goes, is happening. Then when something happens that's unexpected, they recognize it quickly. They're able to figure out what the heck to do differently and do it. Super important to prepare. I think that for new people, they are kind of newly into events to not to not beat themselves up for maybe planning things a bit late, because that's normal too. But for each time you do an event to get a little bit better, the most successful entrepreneurs, they get the planning cycle to be a little lengthened each time. The more you plan into the future, and I don't mean years into the future. I mean, when I work with entrepreneurs, usually they're planning an event that would happen next week. The next one they're planning a month ahead.

Then the one after that, three months ahead. Then suddenly, they have next year's event dates already. That's where you want to get to because then you can spend your critical thinking time, your real strategizing on the content on how to do the marketing, not on the parts that really matter, instead of at the last minute, trying to figure out where the food is coming from.

I've definitely noticed some of the people that I've worked with, the ones that tend to have the best results are the ones who are most proactive with their dates and planning. Have their event planned out 6, 12 months in advance, and already on the dates are on the calendar, goals are set. We're thinking long term, strategically towards that those are always the best and most enjoyable. When we show up, we've already planned for it so thoroughly, that it's the heaviest thing that has been done.

Exactly. And nothing will go without a hitch. Things change. I mean, we do it more like a basketball game. We businesses and events happen in the real world, the unpredictable real world, there's things that change all the time. So we do need to be able to change. But the more we have structured and planned, the easier that is to do. Because chaos just shuts down your thinking altogether. Then you don't even have teamwork anymore.

That reminds me of our bumper sticker tagline. I learned from Keith Cunningham, it says business opportunity without structure is chaos.

Yes, exactly. So we do want structure. I think that's actually something that is kind of interesting, because especially for the event world. Because you do need structure, you do need systems and processes, you need all of that you need checklists. You need scripts, and you need all the ahead planning, etc. You do need all that. But all that by itself is not enough. It's like, we need all that, so that we can rely on it so that we can do our thinking and our performing on the things that matter. So, if somebody is going to get on stage and make an offer, at that moment, we need them to be concentrating and really focusing on the offer on getting a good result from the offer, not having spent the first half of the day trying to figure out why part of the events are not running right.

We need those things in place and people in place so that we can spend our thinking on the things that really matter. It's not that we're going to not think about systems and processes, they are meant to take the thinking out or make it much easier. But at the end of the day, we do that so that we can actually have the best part of the human mind. And that is for the thinking, the creativity, the innovation, the influence, all of that.

I find that it does free up the mental space to think about the things that matter more, creative things. It's counter and counterintuitive.

Yes, it is. It's counterintuitive. I think sometimes people can go overboard with systems and processes, meaning that they so want the stability of knowing that it's gonna, things are going to get done the right way. But you can't, because business keeps changing, because events and people and everything keeps changing. You can't ever nail that down completely. You are going to need thinking people. You need to have a balance of both. And one of the things that I think is maybe interesting to talk about for event leaders, is that you can have, we don't generally think of people's behavior as systematic, or as something we can totally rely on, unless they're following a process. But we don't generally think that we could have people all behave in the same way during a problem, like encountering an unexpected problem, but we can. I think of it basically as a prescription, a way to do the teamwork that's predefined. So let me give an example. So let's say we're all working together, I'm part of this cross functional team, I'm working on an event with my other team members.

Okay, and I have in the back of my mind that I know that there's a high likelihood that we're going to have a problem with the hotel room when a few months ahead we think it's going to be okay, but we're not positive if it's going to be okay, and I'm starting to get a whiff of that, maybe it's going worse than I, than we all understand. So naturally, if you're me, if you're Annie, you would not bring that forward to the team, you would be thinking, that's my issue, I'll figure out how to solve that on the side. I'll figure out how to just take care of it. Okay, but knowing that that problem, if it did happen, and it impacts everybody. So that is the opposite behavior that we want. What we would want from Annie as a leader in that cross functional team at that moment is to say, hey, here's what's going on, we may have a problem. I don't know. But if we do, here's some ideas for how I think we would solve it. If we don't, great, here's the other way. We'll carry it through. And all of that, we don't want me hiding that kind of information. We don't want me because if I don't share it early enough, and it actually turns into a problem, then we don't have time to solve it.

And we don't have the awareness, we don't know who else on the team might run into something that is a much easier solution for the whole issue. Make sense? So that's the kind of behavioral process that we want our teams to be able to know and do. It's like when you work on this event team, you bring issues early, you bring them right away with potential solutions.

I like that. I like that philosophy of like, you come if you see a problem, come with a solution. Or even an idea for a solution.

It's okay if you don't even have a full solution, but there's a big difference between like, hey, this event may not work out at this hotel. If I tell that to my leader, to my boss, and then they're in a place of like, oh no, what the hell does that mean? Then they're going to ask me 10,000 questions. But if I come from a place of, hey, we may have a problem with hotel rooms. Let me tell you a little bit about it and I think if we did, here's what I think we could do to solve it. Here's another option that we may want to look at a different hotel. It's like, we want to bring our leader as a basket of thinking, not just dump the problem in their lap, but we have to bring it. That's one of the biggest issues in teamwork and leadership today is that we have this idea that if I'm responsible, I will just solve it all myself. That is the slowest way to solve things. It's the riskiest.

Trying to do it all yourself.

Yes. In isolation, not even exposing yourself to who else might have extra pieces of information, who else might have some support for you.

I needed to hear that right now. There's many things that I'm still holding on to. I do my best to delegate the team, but the things I continue to hold on to, I'm like, no, I need to at least let it be known that I need some help.

Yes. Yes.

Allow for a team to step up.

Absolutely. And you help them by doing that because otherwise, by the time entrepreneurs say something that they need help again, it's often just too late and it's often going to make it just too stressful for the team, and the vast majority of teams can handle more information than you give them. That will make them better thinkers. It'll make them better support for you.

Thank you for sharing that, Annie. I think this has been a really terrific interview and how to build an A-plus team for your event and just understanding the people part, whether it's an event or not, like you said, it's uniquely similar across the board and if someone's listening to this call or if this interview or watching the interview, and they're an event leader and they're like, hey, I'm recognizing that I need to build my team or maybe train my team to be more proactive and to plan further ahead or to bring solutions forward, or to learn how to cross-functionally communicate with other leads or how to create that, those leads, all of that. If somebody is a leader and they're like, I want an A-plus event team, how can they embark on that journey? How can they learn more about you and your services and how can you support them?

Thank you for that question. So our company name is Leading Edge Teams. So first of all, you can find us at leadingedgeteams.com and because we have recognized that this kind of leadership development is so scarce out there and that smaller businesses cannot usually afford a high power consultant we have a group program that's really great. It's called the A-Plus Leader Development Program and Mastermind. In that program, we teach all about leadership, all about teamwork, all about how to do all of the infrastructure pieces of a small business, including an event team. Like how to do roles and responsibilities, how to set up your business so that you can keep stepping into the more creative and innovative parts of it, parts you really want to do and how to develop others to do the rest. So that program is going into its eighth year. It's a fantastic program. We're really proud of it. You can find that at leadingedgeteams.com/APL as well. It's the A-Plus Leader Development Program and Mastermind.

It's a great group as well. Other leaders that you have as a peer group. I've personally been a student of your work as well. We've had members of our team go through, multiple members of our team, go through your programs and all of them, both of them, I should say, because there's two of them, have just said wonderful things. I've seen remarkable development in their leadership abilities and cross-functional abilities and the way they've been leading. So I definitely have seen a marked improvement within our own organization. So thank you for that resource. For our listeners, if you're an event leader and you have a team or you want to build a team I highly recommend checking out Annie's website and learning more about her leadership development program or a-plus leader program, a really great program. There's a lot of other awesome leaders in that program that it's a great community to network and connect with. So thank you for that resource.

I wanted to mention, Rudy, it's been a joy to see you and your whole company grow and that you have leaders now who can really take on good responsibilities so that you can do things like a podcast. It's a total delight. It's a total delight to see you guys all grow and you have some fantastic leaders.

Yes, we do. Thank you very much. That many props to our team and then they are a-plus player. So thank you. Any closing comments before we wrap up today's episode?

I think to just be compassionate for the human part of business. You are working with humans and if you can just kind of remember that humans are messy, but they’re still the best way to go. There's still salvation for entrepreneurs, event leaders, growing a business, getting more of what they want and a much greater impact in other people's lives. Because when you have support, when you have people who can take on responsibility, you can do so much more.

A hundred percent. I agree. That's a great closing comment. Thank you, Annie. Appreciate that. For our listeners, if you found value from today's episode, I highly recommend sharing this episode with someone who you think would find value from hearing today's message from Annie. Also if you haven't yet, be sure to subscribe to this particular show. We release a new episode on a weekly basis. So again, thank you, Annie, for being on today. It's been a pleasure having you as our guests. Thank you so much.