Valorie Karter: The goal is, when guests walk into an event, they feel wowed, they feel appreciated, and they want to keep coming back. They want to do and achieve what they need to achieve for their company or for their family or for whomever. They want to do all of those things so those same people will be back the next year, because they want to find out, “What did they do this year? What did they come up with now?”
Eric Karter: There are a lot of clients coming to Florida for their conventions, events, galas, and it’s just a great place to have an event décor company, and we knew that we had a good product and good service that we could provide to clients.
Jonathan Tyson: We do most of our events in the state of Florida.
Lauren Doyle: Jacksonville, Naples, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando.
Jonathan Tyson: Far north, far south. East to west.
Valorie Karter: And the main aspect of our business is the décor. So we’re creating environments. We are doing indoor events, we’re doing outdoor events.
Jonathan Tyson: We do a lot of corporate events.
Lauren Doyle: There are welcome receptions, there’s gala dinners, general sessions, after parties. There’s sales meetings and there’s hospitality suites that we do for them. We’ll set up out by the pool, if they’re having a pool party.
Jonathan Tyson: We’ve done large projects for a lot of big, large Fortune-500 companies, and those are totally different monsters, because those require a lot of planning and communication.
Valorie Karter: Where I start is by asking a lot of questions because I’m trying to understand what their goals are, what it is that they want to achieve.
Jonathan Tyson: At that point, they tell us what they’re looking for.
Lauren Doyle: I create the proposal, I send it to the client.
Jonathan Tyson: And once everybody’s in agreement, they give us the okay. We do what we call a walk-through or site inspection where one of us will go out to the location where the event is being held. Our guys are experienced with how long it takes to set something up. There’s the whole team, so we know these many items may take four, five, six, seven, eight hours, so we will request the access time in the hotels, so that when that day comes, we like to make sure it’s a smooth transition. Make sure it’s to the client’s liking. We want to make sure the client’s happy. We don’t really want to hear them say, “Okay, that looks great.” We want to hear them say, “I love it, that’s wonderful.” And that’s our goal.
Eric Karter: There’s a lot of meeting planners that we work with. Although they’re coming in two months, it might not be the first thing on the top of their mind. They’re doing a lot of events all over the country, so for us to get a call forty-five or thirty days out that there’s a big event or a big group of five hundred thousand people coming, it’s not uncommon, so …
Valorie Karter: You always have to be open to making changes to make things better. That’s what we’re here to do. That’s a big part of what we do. I don’t really think that we would be in the service industry unless we were willing to monitor and adjust.
Eric Karter: There’s a number of things that make us unique. One is the product. Everyone could go to a store and buy a piece of furniture, but, just like anything, you’re going to spend five, six, seven times as much to buy it, and then you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to deliver it. So we’re really the one-stop shop. We have unique products, so you can come to us, and, just with one phone call, we’ve got everything under one roof, and we can take your ideas, the environment you want to create, and we can create it all in-house.
Valorie Karter: Clients can come sit down, talk with us, and they can actually walk through our warehouse with us, and we can come up with different ideas together. I think that’s the huge advantage. And we actually really enjoy doing that, because it gets everybody on the same team, and we’re all working towards the same goal.