Like many on the planner side of the meetings industry, Shawna Suckow stumbled into the career but soon found it was her calling. And now she heads a group that represents the most-tenured planners in the profession.
“It fell into my lap like most planners of my generation,” Suckow remembers. “There was no official job description, there were no college courses.”
For Suckow, it started with a temporary receptionist job she took in 1992 with a commercial real estate company, and after a promotion to the public relations team and the opening of the firm’s corporate university, she started planning one-off courses, which led to regional meetings, which led to a national conference.
After being charged with doing the curriculum design for the educational series, and discovering that the planning portion was really her forte, she struck out on her own to form Compass Events in 1999.
“It was a robust little company—we grew really well, with clients domestically and internationally,” she says.
But the collapse of the commercial real estate industry in 2008 meant her business suddenly dried up, so Suckow launched SPIN, The Senior Planners Industry Network, “and that changed everything.”
“In 2009 I had a decision to make, because commercial real estate was going in the tank due to the economy and SPIN was taking off,” she says. “SPIN was where my passion was, so I closed my doors.”
Suckow says she originally started SPIN after receiving advice from a LinkedIn webinar that suggested joining groups that represent one’s career, and if there were no groups to join, you should create your own. Thus, SPIN was born.
“Within a couple of months we had a couple hundred people reaching out to us due to word of mouth, and it changed my whole career, and I could not be happier,” she says. “I found that there were thousands of senior planners out there who felt there was something missing. The amount of education just for [senior planners] is significantly decreased, and it’s harder to find time, so many of us just back out from face-to-face industry opportunities.”
To qualify for the 2,300-member organization, planners must work full-time and have at least 10 years of experience. The group doesn’t accept third-party planners—SPIN considers them suppliers for membership purposes—and dues are $200 annually. The group holds an annual conference a series of face-to-face and online educational programs.
Of course, the person who heads the industry association for veteran meeting planners would be the natural person to query about the most pressing issues facing the profession.
“Electronic RFP spam—my mission,” Suckow notes, adding attendee engagement to her short list, too.
On the presentation side, Suckow says she speaks a lot on planner-supplier relations, and although planner pet peeves is a popular topic, she firmly believes relationship-building is a two-way street.
“There are a lot of suppliers out there who are really confounded by planner behavior, so I try to be the bridge,” she says. “It shouldn’t have to be this hard for suppliers to do business with us. We have made it incredibly difficult in the last few years.”
