Rodney Hart: Hello and welcome to Event Perspectives. Another week with another episode I’m really excited about. We’ll be joined by Hannah Elston from Event Leaders Exchange or ELX. And I know Hannah, before we talked about this, I won’t have you speak for an entire generation. Our youngest guest to date, I think are officially our first Gen Z guest. So we’ll probably hit on some of those topics, but before we do anything else, how are you feeling about this podcast?

Hannah Elston: Feeling good. Thank you for having me, Rodney. And like I said, I won’t speak for an entire generation, but I am more than happy to share the things that people have been telling me and that I’ve heard from some of my peers as well in the industry. So it’s an honor to be your first Gen Z guest. Thanks for having me.

Rodney Hart: And thank you for joining us. You know, it’s funny because I remember too, when I was joining, I was kind of the millennial kind of in that like sweet spot where I was like, I can’t speak for an entire generation back. It’s been a while. I know in our pre-calls, we were hitting on some of these, but I think it’s always interesting to kind of reflect on just some of the thoughts and those experiences. But before we do any of that, I know you don’t need a warm up. You’re a podcaster in your own right.

But I like to start off every episode with just an icebreaker question to get the conversation going. And I think for you today, the one that I want to ask you about is what’s something that you’re obsessed with right now? It does not have to be work related.

Hannah Elston: Okay. It is not entirely work related. I love this question. As you know, I am going to be relocating to Spain next year, which I’m really excited about. So what I’m obsessed with right now is Duolingo as an app. I mean, I love, I’ve loved Duolingo for ages. I think their B2C marketing is so good. I love their team. But as an app, I’m obsessed. Spending about an hour a day on it right now. I can’t say that my Spanish is very good because I’ve only been doing it for a couple of weeks.

Actually thinking about it as well. Wouldn’t it be amazing, and I’m being deadly serious here, if Duolingo also had a language for corporate jargon and every new professional that came into corporate had to complete the course so they would have to translate like what does boil the ocean mean? What is low-hanging fruit? Wouldn’t that just make everyone’s lives easier?

Rodney Hart: Yeah. And I love this idea. I have to tell you the very first corporate job I ever took, and this is not a joke whatsoever, and this will start to date me a little bit, is I walked into it and I had a massive monitor. It was just an old style computer. And on my desk that they gave me at this internship was a binder full of acronyms for that specific company. It was Procter and Gamble. So it was a massive marketing company.

It was like, as part of your warmup, just go through hundreds of pages of acronyms. And we’re talking like dictionary-type pages, like 50 per page. And I remember thinking, do I really need to know all of these? But I love this idea. I just wonder, how specific does it have to be? Is it marketing and IT or is it company specific? I think we should start this.

Hannah Elston: I think we should too, maybe we should pitch it to Duolingo. If they’re listening, hit me up.

Rodney Hart: Yeah, I think they are. And one question I’ll have, because I know I’ve had many friends on Duolingo, the streaks. You said an hour a day, so is there a length of lessons? And then I also know about the streaks. What day in a row are you right now?

Hannah Elston: I am day 17 and the little bird emoji is kind of squatting over something. It’s not entirely appropriate. But yeah, I’m on day 17. I only have to do 15 minutes a day. The lesson length varies from five minutes, but my longest conversation in Spanish I’ve had is eight minutes, which I was very proud of. So…

Rodney Hart: Wow. That’s great. You know, if you want to practice, we could do this a little bit in Spanish. I grew up speaking some Spanish, so we could try that at the end maybe.

Hannah Elston: I’m regretting admitting this is my obsession now. Because I’m talking about relocating, a lot of the stuff it’s teaching me is about buildings, what’s in your neighborhood, how many floors does your apartment have, so not necessarily the content you’re looking for on this podcast.

Rodney Hart: Right. But probably a lot more valuable to what you’re going to be moving into. So very exciting. And I think now I want to transition a little bit into just your entry point into events. I think almost all of these episodes when we’re talking about people and how did you wind up here, there’s never a super straightforward answer of, well, I went to school seeking to be in events and then I ended up there. I feel like I have not heard that answer yet. I don’t think I’m going to hear it here, but tell us a little bit about your work experience and what initially brought you to events.

Hannah Elston: Yeah, of course. So I’ve been working in events for five years now, which seems crazy to me because I think for myself as pretty young, at least, like you just said, I was the youngest on the podcast, but that’s still 20% of my life I’ve been working for the events industry, which does feel like a significant amount of time to me. I fell into the industry, as everyone likes to say, because of the pandemic. So before the pandemic, I was in college and I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I do think that is still a crazy thing that we expect 18 year olds to know exactly what it is they’re going to do for the rest of their lives and run with that. So I decided not to go into education and just get the first full-time job that I could get, which is more and more common these days, you know, just trying to make a living and make a life.

And eventually after a series of bar jobs and other things I rounded up as a makeup artist for Estee Lauder at Gatwick Airport, which is really random but I thought that that was my dream. It was very early starts working in an airport. I would be up at like 3am and then getting people glammed up before their flights and then the pandemic happened and I had no idea what I was going to do because all the airports were closed and because I was fairly new to the role I was made redundant pretty quickly. So thankfully at that time my partner’s mum had just started a medical communications agency and they were looking for someone to do some admin work for them. So my start in events was for the pharmaceutical industry and it was really just doing registration reports and sort of basic admin work to begin with and then I worked there for a few years and I kind of realised that I wanted to be more involved in the event specifically. So we started focusing more on logistics and planning and speaker coordination and I liked it, I liked it a lot but my heart kind of fell with the marketing side of things. So when things were evolving a little bit more and the events were getting a bit bigger and a bit more intense I also started to do some community events for a community of general practitioners and that kind of gave me the insight and the knowledge that I needed to do other community events. And eventually ELX came up as an opportunity and you know when you just, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but you read a job description and you think this was written for me, like this was built for me. I read that job description and I was like, I have to get this job. I’ve never felt that way about anything else but I was like, I have to get this job, I have to give it everything I’ve got. I don’t think I’ve ever stressed so much over a presentation for a role but I did eventually get it and now I’ve been with ELX for three years. In fact, it was my three-year anniversary on Friday so there we go!

Rodney Hart: Wow. Well, early congratulations on that. I know you’re now the senior manager of partnerships, marketing, and communications at ELX. So I think in those years, it sounds like you’ve probably already landed and continue to grow that area of responsibility, which says probably a lot about you. I want to hit on some of these things that led you there, if that’s okay. Just what was that experience? So as you were coming into more of a corporate work environment, what was that like? Were there things you were discovering or learning for the first time?

How did you continue to plug away? Because I think you hit on a lot about initiative and I think in even some of the work that you and I have done together, I’ve identified that quality of, I’m going to solve that problem. But tell us a little bit about how you grew that area of responsibility or how you grew from that initial role into more corporate work.

Hannah Elston: Yeah of course. Well, so starting in the medical industry there’s a lot of rules, a lot of guardrails, a lot of things you want to do that you can’t do. And I’m a creative person so before I dropped out of college I studied art, I studied photography, I’ve always been a very creative person and so I really wanted to get more innovative with the way that we were marketing things. Now it’s very hard to do that in med comms so I was constantly being told no and I remember there were some times where I would design an invite or something and they would say make it more corporate and more corporate to me just translated to more boring and so I would just keep trying to get things perfectly boring, as I described it, so that it would meet all of these requirements and get through approval. And I think you have some fun with it to a degree but I just had bigger and brighter ideas.

And so when I finally stepped out of that industry and into working for ELX as a community, nobody’s really been doing it like ELX, we’re so unique as a company and so there was so much opportunity to create new brand identity and new projects and new ways of outreach and all of a sudden those creative wheels really got spinning for me and I think having been told for so long, stick in this lane, stick in this box and just do that, it gave me this problem where I was like, what should I do, what do you want me to do? But then also that joy of freedom, like you actually want me to suggest something, you want me to play on that innovative piece. So I feel like it’s actually worked out pretty well. I’m able to take stakeholder suggestions quite well mixed with my own ideas and deliver something which is no longer boringly corporate but is to spec and also fun and exciting.

Rodney Hart: Right. Because there is something in there too. Like I’ve learned, when you’re younger and you see something, you said it’s like, what’s perfectly boring. And then there is also, once you’ve been somewhere for a while, that idea of defending brand guidelines and so I still have a push and pull in my own mind at times where somebody might have a wild idea and my brain, after decades plus in the industry, is like, no. But you realize the importance of separating it out and really saying, well, why? Brand and protecting a brand or having brand guidelines is an important concept, but at the same time, it’s important to be aware of, are we not breaking through because we are perfectly boring and just like everybody else?

Tell us a little bit about, you described ELX as this perfect role for you. How did it come across your way? And how did you prepare for it? And tell the audience a little bit about ELX and who that audience is, because I think that makes it a pretty interesting and fun role in terms of who you’re building and communicating with as it relates to events.

Hannah Elston: Sure. Well, I moved from my first agency, med comms role and I decided that like every young professional should do, I should work in central London because working in a big city means success. And so I took a very similar role there and I would say I gave it about two months before I was like, I absolutely hate this. This is not for me. And I called up my partner on the phone one lunch break and basically burst into tears and was like, I’ve ruined my whole life. Why did I do this?

And just by chance, and this is why I always say it’s all about who you know, sat across from him was a lady renting a desk for a company called Explori and she was their head of marketing and also had connections with ELX, as Mark, who is the CEO of Explori, is also a co-founder for ELX. And so she overheard this conversation and just from hanging around my partner knew that I was working in events or that I had some sort of background in working for a community. And so she basically said, hey, I heard this conversation, firstly is she okay, and secondly, would you be interested in this marketing role that we have for a new company called ELX?

And that was how that opportunity came around. I saw the email and I was like, this is so perfect. A bit of context about ELX and its growth in the past three years: when I joined the company, there were almost 50 members of the community. We’ve now surpassed 300 members. So in my three years of being there, we’re very pleased with that growth. We’re an invitation-only community for senior global event leaders from some of the largest organizations in the world. We gather people that have reached the top of their journeys. We have this saying, it’s lonely at the top, and we bring them together to still talk about that growth and how the events industry is evolving.

Personal growth and career growth doesn’t have to stop just because you’ve become a VP, and there’s still so much more to learn especially with how fast technology is evolving right now. You can guarantee there’s a million and one things still to learn. So we bring them together in that space to talk about that, to talk about maybe challenges that they’re having in their events function or organizations, and just really providing them a safe space. And so watching that flourish from less than 50 members to now over 300 and seeing that come to life in the room just brings me so much joy.

Working for a community I think plays in well to my role in communications. I think I’m forever going to be a communications event girl just because I love hearing how things are going for other people and connecting with other people and the bottom line is that’s what we do. We connect. We connect people that share the same ideas or share the same lives in some way that maybe wouldn’t have known each other before. We bring them together. So that’s ELX and the magic of it.

Rodney Hart: Yeah. And I think really in some ways this podcast is really an attempt to also establish those connections and help people come across conversations that feel familiar. You know, I think sometimes there are people who understand our roles and then there are people who go, I don’t know, I don’t get it. And I don’t know why it seems like it gets stressful at points and then it’s crazy and then like it’s a world and never mind being at the top of an organization or a really large company.

I know that there are requirements for someone who wants to be a member at ELX in terms of their role but also the size of the company. So I think you’re really helping to bring that audience together. Like who better knows your challenges and problems and how they’re solving them? I think those communities can be so beneficial, and when you’re curating that set of people and bringing them together, it must be a group of people who know a thing or two about why you said it this way or why you’re doing it that way.

I know a little bit about building events for event people. Anything you want to share? What is that experience like for you, building and doing events for some of the best in the world?

Hannah Elston: Yeah, my gosh, I love this question. So firstly, to start with what you were saying earlier about people not really understanding what you do, try explaining to your friends that you make events for event people that run events for big organizations. I feel like my granddad looked at me with the blankest face ever when I first tried to explain what I do. In fact, I’m not even sure my partner’s fully convinced.

I love this question because I feel like everyone assumes that you’d be feeling the pressure, right? It’s a little bit daunting to put on a show for people that have done this for so many years for such large organisations with massive budgets and do it really, really well. You know, I’ve been in this industry for five years, which feels like a long time to me, but that’s pocket change to some of them who have been doing this for decades. And so I think when I first joined, in that first year, I was basically on high alert and nervous all the time and we’re all human, right? A couple of times I made some mistakes in my emails or things like that. These things happen. AI wasn’t being used as much as it is now so I didn’t have it to proofread for me.

I got about five email responses and they were so lovely. It was just members of our community being like, hi Hannah, I just wanted to point out that this happened. No big deal, it’s happened to the best of us. And that’s when I realised that it may seem they would be the most intimidating audience, but actually they’re the most understanding. They’ve gone through every challenge, every mistake. I had to, for our North American summit that we did in February, get up on stage at last-minute notice, an hour until show time, and present. And the support I had from them was incredible. They were like, hey, these things happen, we know how it goes, you handled the situation well. So I think yes, they can be a bit intimidating sometimes, but they’re also very, very understanding.

And finally, the feedback is so valuable. Think about your feedback surveys that you get from customers who don’t run events, they just think that nothing goes on behind the scenes. Whereas these people get it so well that their feedback on our events and our experiences is so well written and so incredibly valuable to us. So actually I think it has far more perks than pressures.

Rodney Hart: I mean, it’s a phenomenal answer. And similarly, as I build events, what you’re saying is that feedback that comes through is often so constructive, you know, compared to generally speaking having designed events for non-event people. Sometimes the feedback or the questions or the ideas are like, okay, it would be great if we could pick you up in a rocket and send you around to every event. But the feedback that often comes from this audience has so many good valuable elements. And sometimes it’s like, you’re right, that’s obvious, we should do that.

Well, what about navigating AI? I know there are a couple of components and you hit on a keyword that I think these days we cannot not talk about, which is AI. I’m curious, as you’re thinking about your role, challenges, things you’re working on now, tell us a little bit about what your focus is. Let’s talk about AI and how that’s working its way into your approach and how you’re feeling about it.

Hannah Elston: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I love AI. There’s no question about that. I do think it has so many benefits and it is used to make everything more efficient. I can’t imagine doing my job now the way that I do without using the support of AI. So that is my big disclaimer.

I too, it’s not that I’m tired of talking about it, but I’m overwhelmed by just how much is coming in about AI at the moment. There is a new update or a new capability every 10 seconds. And it is a little bit like, oh my gosh, how do I make sure that how I’m using AI is still the most current and the most efficient way of doing things? I think the challenge I’m having right now is trying to translate that to my own team.

And one of the things that I think I touched on with you as well is, how do I make my team still feel like they are so efficient within themselves and that the work they’re doing is great, when at the same time I’m saying to them, can you train a robot to do what you do for me, please? And then that frees up a whole new bunch of time that we have to think of what to do with. But it’s just changing that, and how do you navigate that as a leader?

Because that is what I would say is my ultimate biggest challenge right now. I’ve been executing events for the past four and a half years and very recently have come into a leadership role. So how do I make my team feel valued and that they are efficient enough and doing a good enough job while also telling them that they should be using AI to do those things for them?

Rodney Hart: Right. And let’s hit on that because I think that’s really well said. You know, here at RainFocus we’re very much embracing AI tools and how are we incorporating these not to automate things we’re spending time doing, but instead freeing us up to do something else. I know in our pre-conversation we both shared this idea of freeing up time from some of these tasks enables or potentially unlocks new things we can be solving. But I’m curious to get your take on that. If someone’s coming to you in your new leader role and saying, you want me to automate my job but I want my job, how would you approach that conversation?

Hannah Elston: Yeah, I’ve had to approach that conversation a few times. And I think the best thing I can say is that AI is your strategic advisor. Ask it, what have we not considered that we could be doing that would make my role easier or the member experience better or improvements to our website? Is there anything our brand is missing? Having it identify these holes that we can then build a project from and fix.

Something good about AI is that it’s always going to say something could be better or finely tuned. Maybe that’s just mine, but I swear it’s always giving me suggestions on how I could be better. Thank you AI, no one asked. But in this instance, it is actually really, really helpful. So I would say to them, use it as your strategic advisor. We actually have our own GPTs. We have our CEO as a GPT, Nicola GPT. So a lot of the time I will ask her first before I ask Nicola. So we’re protecting each other’s schedules. We also have our own assistants and a proofreader and a membership qualifier. So we’ve built a lot of GPTs to help us that we can go to for specific things. But I have what I call Hannah’s executive, which is my strategic advisor. So I come up with ideas with it, and then I’ll talk to Nicola GPT about that until I have something that feels really tangible and has good grounding, and then I can bring it to one of our monthly meetings or directly to Nicola.

So I will say that to my team all the time. If you have free time, have a conversation with AI, I guarantee we’ll find something for you to do. But hey, we work in events. We’re never short of stuff to do anyway, right? So I guess it’s easy to say, while we’re making things more efficient for them and streamlining things, AI still always needs a bit of human input. So as much as I am saying to them, use your free time wisely, I’m also not so naive that I don’t recognize AI doesn’t run fully on its own yet. There’s a lot of workflow checking, automation health checks, all of these things that they still have to focus on too.

And then I would finally say, don’t use AI for AI’s sake, because that’s something I’m seeing a lot of. So I’m trying to be careful about that too. When I say, in your free time, let’s use it to find things to do, but at the same time, if it gives you a suggestion which is just, build a custom GPT because why not, that’s not good enough. It has to be relevant, and we’re not just doing this because we’re jumping on some sort of AI bandwagon, which I fear a lot of people are falling into. So that is what I would say.

Rodney Hart: I think those are all phenomenal answers. I was going to ask you to give me an example and I think you did as part of your answer. You must do a podcast or something. And I think that’s so important. I do understand the caution or the concern around what does this mean for me? But at the same time, I think there is an importance of learning to understand the tool, and also learning to understand how can it help your role?

I’m not going to let you get away without speaking for your generation. So let’s talk some Gen Z things. I’m curious in your role and as you’re looking at events and who you’re planning for. How are you thinking about content? And I know in some of our pre-conversations, we talked about this idea of, are we doing things for that other generation? Or are we actually doing things that maybe meet the needs of everyone? It could be a common thing like session formats, but I’m curious just from your thought process coming into the events world, what do you see that maybe to us is like, this is how we’ve always done it and it’s not broken, don’t fix it, but maybe from your perspective, you say, why are we doing those things this way?

Hannah Elston: Love that question. Yeah, of course. Very early on when I started working at ELX and Nicola joined us, one of the first things she told me was that “we’ve always done it this way” is the most dangerous sentence in the events industry and I believe she was absolutely right. So when I have a look at some of the ways that we’re doing things now and there is an underlying tone of we’ve always done it this way, the real question is, do we like this? Is this enjoyable? Is this still entertaining? Or is this something that we see as a drag? Because quite often there are a lot of things that people are complaining about and they’re not doing anything to change because that’s the way it is.

One of the examples I will say is the classic panel format. Everyone has seen a panel. We know how they work. They’re the same every time. You sit down and then you’re on your phone half the time because you’re either taking notes or you saw an email that came up that was more relevant and it doesn’t matter because you’re getting the AI summary at the end of the session anyway. And instantly you’re just there for the sake of being there and not actually absorbing what’s being given to you.

Something that I have decided to do: I have a session at IMEX Frankfurt next week and we’ve decided instead of labeling this as a panel, we’re labeling it as more of a live show, if you will. And I’ve said this is not going to be an interview, this is a conversation. So instead of the host just throwing questions at the people on the panel, it’s an actual conversation about a topic and we’re having it led by the audience. So it’s a fully interactive session. We start with learning more about the audience, throwing out a couple of polls, a couple of word clouds, finding out who it is that we’re speaking to in the room first. Because a lot of the time with a panel, you just assume who’s going to be there. But we’re starting by finding out who our audience is first, then we’re going to move into selected topics. What do you want us to talk about? The synopsis is not, this is exactly what we’re talking about; it’s, we can cover a variety of things, what do you as an audience want to hear first? And then we move from there.

On Q and A, one of the things that I have noticed, especially within people maybe my age, is that going through the pandemic and a lot of other things we went through at a more developmental time in our lives is that we don’t always love to raise a hand or draw a lot of attention to ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to seem stupid when we’re asking a question, which actually I think is a problem that loads of people have faced over many generations. And now we have a function that allows us to ask questions without having to actually stand up in the room or have a microphone in our hand, but people aren’t using it. Not really, not as much as I would like to see. So we’re also having just a QR code so you can raise your hand if you would like, or if you do not, you can also just submit your question that will appear on the screen behind us and we can talk about it. So it’s finding a new way of doing something that has been done before but making it more tailored and more personalized to the experience of someone sat in the audience.

That’s just one key example I wanted to share because it does bring in technology as well into how we’re trying to innovate. And I think there was another example I gave you, Rodney, about award ceremonies. I think we need to do something to make award ceremonies more fun for the people that aren’t winning. I still don’t know exactly what the answer is to that. I think we’ve pulled the open bar and free booze card long enough. I think we need to do something else that makes it more fun for everyone else that just sits and claps for two hours. So that will be my next working piece.

Rodney Hart: You know what, I love so much about what you just covered. I think what you’ve hit on is you don’t have to know the answer to know that there’s a problem, right? Award ceremonies, I don’t disagree with you and I feel like I’ve felt this way from early days. And sometimes it’s even framing that can be so helpful. Just calling a panel a live show, borrowing from formats that people go, oh, a live show. Now I know what you might be expecting of me. I’m coming a little bit more ready into this and with some expectations. So I think there’s always a need to meet those expectations. But subtle changes to existing formats can really work. I think there is value to a panel from my perspective running events. It’s a lower lift potentially for great participants that you might have. But then what can be a letdown is when the moderator is not asking the questions you would, like this is theoretically my group of people I want to hear from, but no one’s asking the right questions.

Hannah Elston: Yeah, exactly. And I do think that is one of the biggest problems with panels, that we can’t control what the moderator or host is going to ask as much as we wish that we could. And therefore, by making it more interactive, my goal is that hopefully everyone will leave feeling like we spoke about what they wanted us to speak about and that they had those questions answered. But you know, like you were saying, sometimes there is a purpose and a place for a panel to be done in that way.

And that’s fine, but it’s also about keeping your audience engaged and some people, even if you want to hear from them, hate to say it, not everyone is a natural born engaging speaker, which you might have witnessed on some panels before. So some people need more guidance than others. But yeah, it’s just about tailoring to all of those things in a way that makes it something you actually want to sit and watch. Because honestly, like even watching a Netflix show I get out my phone maybe halfway through and get distracted. I think that’s more and more common these days, to actually have someone’s undivided attention even if what’s on the stage is pretty valuable. And not speaking for my whole generation, but I think some of us would put our hands up and say that maybe we do fall into a category of not having the best attention spans in the world, which is fine. It’s just about catering to a newer audience in that sense as well, making those sessions interactive so that you know they are listening and have their eyes on you.

Rodney Hart: And that is so important to note that, though that maybe is a characterization of a generation, I think I see myself in my work life every day. I’ll bounce between 17 things and do 1% of 17 tasks in an hour and realize you’ve got to do one, focus. So I think though it might be, well, this is the new generation that we need to plan for, really it’s part of the reality of the world and maybe that is just the world Gen Z has pretty much always known. Those ramifications exist across the board. We all have these devices that are pulling our attention span and it’s not just like, well, if you don’t have Gen Z in the room, you don’t need to be engaging because everyone else can focus. I would say no, I think that 90-minute format doesn’t work great for most of us anymore.

Hannah Elston: Absolutely. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. There may not be so many people statistically in the older generation scrolling through TikTok for two hours a day, but ask them the same question about Facebook reels or Facebook videos, then you’re probably going to get a similar answer. We are just all so prone to being involved in our phones and getting new interesting content that we haven’t seen before from all different creators all over the world at a stupid pace. The competition is difficult to try and grasp anyone’s attention, which is why we’re seeing more people doing such outrageous things on social media just to get attention for two minutes. So yeah, I think that’s affecting everyone. And I think because we’ve grown up in it, maybe that’s why there is that characterisation that naturally falls to our generation. But I certainly see it, especially in some of my family members, that we all fall to it sometimes.

Rodney Hart: Yeah, absolutely. Hannah, I could keep having this conversation, but I’m going to transition us into the next topic. Keep solving those problems. Let me know as you figure out that awards dinner as well, because I’ve got one that I’m going to be thinking about pretty soon. So one question that I like to ask all guests when they join the show is the event industry, as we’ve talked about, is kind of a crazy place. It can be stressful, it can have its ups and downs and crazy things thrown at you. I’d love to know in the years that you’ve been in events, what’s your favorite piece of advice? Whether it’s one that you like to give or maybe it’s advice that you’ve been given as it relates to fellow aspiring event professionals.

Hannah Elston: I love that. Okay, my piece of advice. There’s so much advice to give that I’ve learned from some of my mentors over the years, but I think something that I would tell everyone is know when it is time to focus on the development of your life and who you are as opposed to the development of your career. I think it’s too easy because we spend so much of our lives working that when we’re looking for progression, we naturally think that needs to be career progression. But actually it’s so healthy to just stop and think, is that really what I want or am I seeking a bigger change? What does success look like to me as a person? Your career doesn’t define your whole life and it’s really easy for that line to get blurred especially when you’re younger and you think I need to lay the groundwork for the rest of my life. I need to make sure that I reach this title by this age so that when I’m 50 I can achieve all these great things that I want to achieve. But actually sometimes you need to know when to prioritize that, but also prioritize yourself. Maybe it’s a new skill that you want to learn or a new hobby you want to take on or a country you want to move to. Instead of thinking that the validation of success and progression can only come from your career, you have to know when to switch that and just focus on you.

The main bottom line of all of this is look after yourself. There is so much more to life. Don’t let the little things that happen at work weigh you down long term because it all works out okay at the end of the day. Events are not saving lives. It’s a really stressful job. It’s in the top three most stressful jobs, I think Chloe always tells me. So it is stressful but hey, life goes on. There’s tomorrow. Events get delayed. Marketing comms don’t always go to plan. It’s fine. Look after yourself, think about your own growth and that would be my biggest piece of advice.

Rodney Hart: Hannah, that’s wise, wise advice. One of my favorite ones that I’ve heard so far. When I think about some of the people who’ve had the biggest impact on me, even personally and professionally, it’s a lot of people who are great people, right? Who have kind of figured out their own lives and reached a certain level of achievement, but so much about them and what I think I’ve gleaned from them is how the people that they are is really the gravitational pull. So I absolutely love that answer of keeping yourself and making sure you’re not pursuing things that are maybe for a life that you think you’re supposed to have, but they’re not fulfilling you personally. Because at the end of the day, you’re not going to be a person who is all that great to work with most likely if you’re pursuing a whole bunch of things that are not really what you want deep down. So I think the event industry is very happy that after COVID happened and you were at Gatwick Airport, you pursued this path. We look forward to seeing what you continue to do at ELX.

Hannah Elston: Thank you.

Rodney Hart: Last question. If you’re on board, I want to do a lightning round. So all of the hard content is done. This is just going to be rapid fire questions. And the hardest part for me is I’m not supposed to respond. We’re supposed to just put these together and you answer with the first answer that comes to mind. If you’re ready, I’m going to start firing away.

Hannah Elston: Okay, yes! Let’s go.

Rodney Hart: TikTok or LinkedIn?

Hannah Elston: TikTok.

Rodney Hart: True or false: you prefer small intimate events over large-scale ones.

Hannah Elston: False.

Rodney Hart: The best airline is…

Hannah Elston: British Airways.

Rodney Hart: Window seat or aisle seat?

Hannah Elston: Aisle.

Rodney Hart: RSVP early or last minute?

Hannah Elston: Last minute. I’ll complain about people doing it, but…

Rodney Hart: You have a concert to close your event. Who’s your dream musical artist?

Hannah Elston: Billie Eilish.

Rodney Hart: What is your go-to comfort food during event planning stress?

Hannah Elston: Pizza, and just in life, pizza.

Rodney Hart: What is your current favorite mobile app?

Hannah Elston: Duolingo!

Rodney Hart: Great answer. Well, we’re going to get them to sponsor this, I don’t know if you have a contact or not. I’m going to get them to sponsor this episode. Hannah, thank you so much. This was so much fun. For anyone who’s listening and wants to participate, there is a link to join if you’d like to be interviewed on this podcast as well. Hannah, thank you.

Hannah Elston: Thank you, Rodney. This was really fun. Take care.