“The First Question I Ask Every Event Organizer”

“Right thinking, right outcomes. Wrong thinking, wrong outcomes. Your outcomes are the verdict on your thinking. The Formula is diagnostic, not prescriptive. It runs backwards: you look at what happened, and that tells you what to think about how you thought.”

— The Operator’s Playbook, Volume 1: Perspective — [The Outcomes Formula]

The presentation that produces applause produced the wrong outcome.

Applause means the audience felt good about what they heard. A decision means the audience saw something they cannot unsee — a gap between what they are doing and what the operation actually requires — and left with enough clarity to do something different on Monday. Those are not the same result. And they do not require the same preparation, the same content, or the same relationship to the audience.

[The Outcomes Formula] runs in every direction. The operator whose thinking was wrong gets wrong outcomes. The event organizer who measures a speaking engagement by the feedback sheet gets feedback. The one who measures it by what changed in the operation six weeks later gets results. The question I ask every event organizer — what do you want to have happened as a result of me being there — is [The Outcomes Formula] applied to the event itself. The answer determines everything: the content, the structure, the preparation, the delivery.

The outcome you want is a decision. Everything else is built backward from that.

What do you want to have happen as a result of me being there?

Not what topics you want covered. Not what the agenda looks like. What do you want to be different — in your organization, in your leaders, in the way your operation runs — in the weeks and months after the event? That question does more work than any speaker brief, because it forces the conversation away from content selection and toward outcome accountability. If you cannot answer it, the event will not produce what you are hoping it produces. If you can answer it, everything else — the content, the structure, the delivery — gets built around that answer.

That is how every ThinkWorx™ speaking engagement begins. With that question. And with two weeks of preparation before anyone walks into the room.

Why comfortable presentations do not change behavior:

An audience that leaves feeling validated does not do anything differently on Monday. They had a good experience. They applauded. They filled out the feedback sheet. And they went back to running their operation exactly the way they were running it before they sat down.

Provocation is not the same as confrontation. It is the act of putting a new frame in front of an operator that makes their existing frame impossible to unsee. When that happens — when the idea lands and the operator recognizes themselves in it — the behavior change is not motivated by inspiration. It is motivated by the uncomfortable clarity that what they have been doing is costing them something they did not fully understand until that moment.

That is what I am in the room to produce. Not a standing ovation. A decision.

What the preparation looks like:

I invest up to two weeks before every engagement. Interviews with key stakeholders — staff, managers, Guests, vendors. Direct observation of your operation where possible. Social media and review research. The goal is to walk into your event already knowing your audience — their specific challenges, their specific blind spots, the specific arguments that will land and the ones that will not. By the time I take the stage, the content was already built for the people sitting in those seats.

I will also help promote the event across my platform beginning two months out. Your audience arrives primed, not cold.

During the event:

A presentation of up to 90 minutes including Q&A. I stay for the full day — available for one-on-ones, follow-up conversations, and the questions that did not get asked from the floor. The work does not stop when I leave the stage.

After the event:

Every attendee gets direct email access to me for follow-up questions. The conversation that started in the room does not have to end when the event does.

Topics:

I do not give the same talk twice. Every presentation is built for the specific audience, the specific operation, and the specific outcome the event is designed to produce. Past topics have included:

Guest Experience — what it actually is and what consistently produces it
Culture — how it is built, how it is destroyed, and why most operators are doing both simultaneously
The fundamentals of hospitality business performance
Shift leadership and real-time operational decision-making
Building and retaining cast that drives Guest loyalty
Financial performance — what the numbers are telling you before they become a crisis
Marketing in a down cycle — why the problem is almost never the economy
Menu engineering and revenue strategy
The art of the shift — what great shift leadership actually looks like in practice

Do not see what you need? Call me. I will build it.

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