Cooke knew that if Eventup was going to stand a chance as a business, it had to have a much sleeker and more user-friendly interface. She set about hiring a developer who could turn the site into the kind of product that could compete in the online marketplace space.
She also focused on figuring out who her best and most valuable customers would be. At Echo Global Logistics and Groupon, she'd made a name for herself as someone who could close multiyear, multimillion-dollar deals. She knew the trick to growing the business meant finding customers who would come back and do business with Eventup on a regular basis.
Cooke broke down the market to determine where the greatest spending was coming from. While weddings were an obvious major events market that required plenty of venue scouting, she also knew they were one-time occasions that wouldn't lead to long-term relationships with repeat customers. She realized that the biggest piece of the pie came from corporate spending, which makes up about 80% of the market share. Those were clients planning corporate events and team-building activities—the kinds of people with budgets and recurring needs that might make them ideal repeat customers. Cooke started focusing on attracting venues and experience packages that would appeal to corporate team-building exercises.
No matter how strong your vision and how many hours you're willing to work to make it happen, if you can't find the right team to back you up, you're at a loss. For Cooke, this part of the business has been the toughest to master. "People are the X factor to me," she says. "I haven't come across that many amazing people who make me say, 'I want this person to be on our team to do the job.'"
Whenever she's hiring, Cooke prioritizes two factors that she says are important to the culture of the company: kindness and resourcefulness. "You get so much more from people if you play nice in the sandbox," she says. "People come to work because they really like the people they are surrounded by."
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