Interview with M. Theresa Breining, CMP, CMM
June 2008
Give Me 5
M. Theresa Breining, CMP, CMM, Founder and President, Concepts Worldwide San Diego, CA
Theresa Breining, CMP, CMM is the founder and president of Concepts Worldwide, a meeting management firm that celebrated its 20th anniversary last January. She was MPI’s International Planner of the Year in 2000 and has served as adjunct faculty for meeting planning programs for universities throughout Southern California. Breining also maintains an active volunteer schedule, including serving on the board of directors of the San Diego CVB, and was recently selected for HSMAI’s 35th Annual James V. Cunningham Service Award.Q: How do you make time for all your volunteer commitments? Why is volunteering important to you?
A: I work with a remarkable group of people at Concepts Worldwide. If I didn’t have them, I couldn’t do all that—and run the business and take care of clients, too. It’s a tribute to the people I work with.
Fundamentally, I feel I have a responsibility to give back to the industry, but also to the community. We do a lot of things locally as a company, like deliver meals for Mama’s Kitchen to people who have HIV/AIDS and can’t get out. If we have any success at all as a business, we owe it to give back.
Q: ROI has become increasingly important in the meetings arena. What does this mean for planners and their professional success?
A: ROI is not the only measure of a meeting’s success, but it’s an important part of it. It’s a financial analysis some meeting planners are not comfortable with, but it’s one of the business management tools that planners must have to earn a seat at the table. Planners need to talk about meetings in the context of business; they have to have a grasp of the strategic objectives of business. It’s a different skill set than logistics management—but logistics is still critical. ROI requires planning on the front end and doing analysis on the back end.
Q: You have a new book out, Return on Investment in Meetings and Events, which you co-authored with ROI guru Jack Phillips. What is its approach to ROI?
A: (Compared to his earlier book) this is really more of a textbook: a how-to, step-by-step process. We thought this would provide another way to serve up fundamental ROI methodology. We provide a quantifiable measurement for the first time. A lot of people say you can’t measure ROI; they dismiss it out of hand. It’s not easy, but it is possible. Satisfaction surveys, which have been the primary measurement tool in a lot of organizations, are squishy and anecdotal; that’s not the measure by which other business initiatives are measured. This piece was missing from our industry and (our book) provides this piece, gives some specific financial metrics against which meetings can be measured.
Q: What are the biggest challenges ahead for planners and companies such as yours?
A: Clearly we’re in some kind of economic slump, which provides some challenges for all of us. The meeting industry mirrors business in general: when business slows down, meetings slow down. Planners need to keep an eye on the business case for meetings and make sure we continue to speak the language of business. Meetings are a very easy area to cut; if we are able to make an articulate case for keeping meetings, we’ll be able to keep them.
Q: How do you see the job of meeting planner changing?
A: We can no longer focus exclusively on logistics; we have to be involved in the strategic elements of meetings and how they’re connected to overall business objectives. We need to expand our areas of expertise and knowledge; learn things like financial measurement, how meetings fit in with marketing objectives and how we integrate other tools into the process.
Q: What’s the most important advice you’ve ever received?
A:It was something my dad said. When I started my business, I had been doing (meeting planning) already for 11 years. I was working from my home by myself, and I was a single mother. I called him and was saying, I don’t have any business, should I quit or hang in there, or should I get a real job. He said, “Don’t ever forget that what you’re doing is a real job. Some day you may be providing real jobs for other people. What you’re doing counts.” This was profoundly important to me.
Q: You’re often seen and photographed with a Jerry Garcia doll (see Smart Scene, March 2008). What's the story behind this?
A: In reflecting on my company’s 20th anniversary year, I recalled the words of that great philospher Jerry Garcia, who said, “What a long strange trip it’s been.” My friend Mitchell Beer with The Conference Planners then sent me the Jerry Garcia doll as an anniversary gift in January. I decided that it would be fun to have Jerry travel with me this year and get photos of him at the various meetings I attend. So, we’ve done that, and some of the photos we've taken are pasted on our website (conceptsworldwide.com) with the permission of the doll’s manufacturer, Liquid Blue. C.K.
