Tool Box
Issue No. 11 - June/July 2003
Meeting Maker
All Occasions Management
Readers who do the rounds of local business functions will be familiar with the state of the meeting art—spectacular multimedia displays, gourmet meals for battalions of delegates and other logistical impossibilities.
Event organiser Anne Marie Quin, principal of All Occasions Management knows the business from the ground up, because she founded the company in 1998 with a single worker—herself—and it stayed that way for the first gruelling year.
AOM’s business is organising meetings of all shapes and sizes, on a complete service basis: AOM handles everything, now including travel arrangements for attendees coming to Adelaide from interstate or overseas. Activities at the event, pre and post-meeting are AOM’s business as usual. One AOM account manager is the point of contact for everything the client needs.
To handle these big asks, AOM now employs eight staff in the core business and in the new division, AOM Travel, founded 12 months ago.
"The reason for creating AOM Travel was simply demand—clients were asking for a complete service, including travel arrangements. For a while we outsourced, but we were getting average results so creating our own facility was a quality control decision. We wanted greater control over what was happening for our clients," Anne Marie says.
This encapsulates the secret of AOM’s success, which is attention to detail. Anne Marie makes a point of being careful with her client’s money while striving to achieve "that WOW factor your delegates will remember for a long time" as AOM marketing puts it.
In five short years Anne Marie’s job has changed dramatically. Rather than handling jobs personally (she still troubleshoots, of course) she is chiefly concerned with marketing and promotion, identifying leads and opportunities to submit quotes. There is a good deal of liaison to be done with the Adelaide Convention and Tourism Authority and Meetings Industry Association.
It follow...
