Building a Personal Brand (Follow the Good, Avoid the Bad, and Prepare for the Ugly)

1. Building a Personal Brand (Follow the Good, Avoid the Bad, and Prepare for the Ugly) Bill Peeper, CEO (retired), Orlando, Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau

2. Building Your Personal Brand • Learn from the good CVB executives, the bad, and prepare for the Ugly • Know the external success factors - friends to grow and the foes to know

3. What We Did & Why & Why You Should Care DMAI Education Committee Support Interviewed Twenty Two CVB Executives Divided into “more” versus “less” successful Six Small CVBs – less than $2 million budget Six Medium CVBs – $2-10 million budgets Six Large CVBs – more than $10 million Four Internationals – not categorized Plus talked to: National Hotel Sales Executives Meeting Planner Executives

4. Managing Destination Marketing Organizations: The Tasks, Roles and Responsibilities of the Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview Chapter 2: Historical Foundations of the CVB Industry Chapter 3: Importance of Mission in Aligning Everyone Chapter 4: Governance Chapter 5: Selling the Community Chapter 6: Selling the Destination Chapter 7: Managing the CVB Operation Chapter 8: Managing the Marketing of the Destination Chapter 9: Creating and Sustaining a Strong CVB Culture Chapter 10: Communicating CVB Value Chapter 11: Developing the CVB Executive Chapter 12: Future Challenges for the CVB Executive

5. Personal Branding(Wikipedia) Personal branding is the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands. It has been noted that while previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging. The term is thought to have been first used and discussed in an 1997 article by Tom Peters.

6. Why Having a Personal Brand is Important to You • Because my Hartford guy said so • Everything that you say, do, and write reflects on your personal brand and your CVB and vice versa – that is, a CVB executive that is branded as successful is known as part of a successful CVB • Successful CVBs result from the effective practice of management

7. The CVB Executive’s Job Imagine a job where you are hired and evaluated by one group of people and funded by another. The group evaluating you sees your work responsibilities as properly focused on short-run, industry-specific results because members of the group are themselves evaluated on those results. But the group funding you sees your work responsibilities as focused on long-term, community-wide results as members of this group are evaluated that way. To make this job more challenging, imagine that neither group understands the perspective of the other. The members of each group are preoccupied with pressing issues in their own jobs and tend to be ignorant of or indifferent to the other group needs, wants, and political realities.

8. The CVB Executive’s Job Finally, just to make this job virtually impossible, imagine that the task for which you are hired and evaluated is to sell an intangible product that is subjectively measured and over which you have no control with respect to pricing, quality, or quantity. And even if you persuade a customer to buy the product, the organization that owns or controls it may not want to sell it to the customer on the terms the customer wants. In that situation you will have to sell the product owner on the customer after you have sold the customer on the product just to meet the goals for which you will be evaluated!

9. What We Plan to DO? Any questions you’d like us to answer? Lessons learned from comparing the Successful with the Less Successful CVB Executives (Good vs. Bad) A visit to customers and hotel partners A peek into the future

10. The Good Top Ten Things We Learned from Successful CVB Executives

11. The Good 1. Successful CVB Executives engage their boards in developing clear focused mission statements. (They know why CVBs were created and stick to their knitting.)

12. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “If you ain’t booking the business, the rest of it is irrelevant because you aren’t going to be there anyway.”Small Market CVB Executive

13. The Good 2. Successful CVB Executives make sure that everything they write, say, and do is aligned with the mission.

14. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “I think the mission statement is used to a great degree. It doesn't mean that we didn’t steer away from it sometimes to our advantage, but to a great degree the mission and the accomplishments went hand in hand, people were pushed by the mission, and I think that had a great deal to do with our success.” Large Market CVB Executive

15. The Good 3. Successful CVB Executives don’t take trust and board support for granted.(They keep their boards engaged and demand formal measurable evaluations for both them and the CVB annually.)

16. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “My contract requires an annual review. It also says if I am not given one it means I am doing a satisfactory job and I send a memo to the compensation committee to remind them of that. I also try to meet with each board member at least once a year to sit in their environment to hear their concerns, questions, or suggestions.” Large Market CVB Executive

17. The Good 4. Successful CVB Executives are communication fanatics. They work hard to constantly communicate their mission and activities to all stakeholders(e.g., industry, members, employees, media, funders, community & especially board)).

18. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “I would say I spend 35% of the time out of my office with customers and 65% with stakeholders, hoteliers, board members, restaurateurs, people who are involved in the community that can help move us forward…We like to keep visibility locally at a peak level.” Small Market CVB Executive

19. The Good 5. Successful CVB Executives spend time with those that can influence allocation of critical resources (When they can’t be with the ones they love, they love the ones they’re with).

20. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “Running a convention and visitor’s bureau is every bit as complex as running any private sector entity. You have everybody grabbing at you and everybody thinks they own you, your leaders, your members, your customers, your funding sources. And you know what? You need to be able to make each of them feel as though they do. I really think there’s a mastery to that. You have to enjoy doing that.” Large Market CVB Executive

21. The Good 6. Successful CVB Executives systematically identify key stakeholders and seek ways to engage them in their mission driven activities.

22. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “ I try to spend a good deal of my time out of the office either seeing hoteliers face-to-face or attending meetings where I’m going to see them. Also, I want to be out in the community or talking to groups to get the word out about the importance of this industry. I really try to spend a good deal of time out of the office. That's the most productive time for me, because that’s where you’re swaying opinion or reinforcing the importance of this industry.” Small Market CVB Executive

23. The Good 7. Successful CVB Executives gladly spend time and energy building trust with all stakeholders. (They are known for candor, openness, transparency, and specificity in their answers. They avoid secrets and surprises.)

24. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “…you need people to trust you, that you’re headed in the right direction. Trust that you’re open about where the money is spent. Trust that there is influence other than my personal preference on performance measures. People know that our performance measures get set by the board and get debated there and so forth….trust is maybe the greatest asset a bureau can have. Because, and I’ve heard this, they say even when we don’t think what you’re doing is the right thing, we still trust the bureau. But that’s not always there. It’s so easy to lose the trust.” Middle Market CVB Executive

25. The Good 8. Successful CVB Executives seek out ways to measure everything that can show their CVB effectiveness to all stakeholders. (They can prove what they do and how well they do it so even the press believes.)

26. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “We identified each of these things as to what we were going to be doing. We talked about how we were tracking our efforts to deliver more in the market place in a number of arenas…We had very specific “here’s our measures and here's where we are trying to move them” statements.” Large Market CVB Executive

27. The Good 9. Successful CVB Executives set measurable goals for everyone that works in their CVBs and hold each team member accountable for goal achievement.

28. The Good: An Executive Speaks “I guess setting goals is a logical thing. We’re a very performance driven bureau. We’ve got about 74 different key performance issues. That’s in part because of accountability. We have very high expectations. All measures are transparent. When we wanted to set up the incentive program, we became more focused on setting goals because you want them to motivate people to achieve them. There can be a stretch factor. We get some healthy debate on setting our goals, but we’re pretty focused on where we want to get to at the end of the year.” International CVB Executive

29. The Good 10. Successful executives have a passionate commitment to a destination vision that inspires all inside and outside the CVB.

30. The Good: A Successful Executive Speaks “Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” Jack Welch, Former Chairman, General Electric

31. The Bad The Top Ten Things that Less Successful Executives Did that Helped Make Them Less Successful.

32. The Bad 1. They think they own the job.

33. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “I think that the lessons I learned is understanding the value of the position. You really don’t own the business. It’s not your business. There’s a tendency over time to forget about that and that’s a lesson that I’ll never again underestimate.” Middle Market CVB Executive

34. The Bad 2. They don’t listen to the board members that tell them they need to do something that they don’t want to do. (After all, they are the professionals and you shouldn't try this at home.)

35. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “You really have to have the approach of being a rookie. When you’re a rookie, everything’s open. You do everything. When you become a veteran, you no longer have a rookie mentality. You don’t want to do things anymore. I think you always have to have a rookie viewpoint.” Middle Market CVB Executive

36. The Bad 3.They tend to stake out their own positions and defend them instead of realizing their role is to mediate conflicting stakeholder’s views.

37. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “ A big big issue out there today is people are really not listening. I would have liked to have listened better when the message is, “this isn’t working.” Your tendency is to defend it - that it is working because you have a lot of anecdotal evidence and you have a lot of third party evidence, you have a lot of quantitative evidence and think that you are right. It takes a real headiness and ability to not try to defend what you’ve done. If major leaders are saying it ain’t working, it’d be better for me to understand that point of view and investigate it for its virtue versus trying to defend what we have done.” Middle Market CVB Executive

38. The Bad 4. They think they are doing a good job by their own standards – they forget to make sure that their board agrees with the metrics.

39. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “I always looked at the business side of things – if I’m pulling in the numbers, if I’m bringing in the money, then why would anybody mess with me? I don’t have to kiss anybody’s ass on top of that – that should be sufficient. I would focus on that aspect of it and not be as open to some things they were asking and they were coming to me asking dumb stuff. They were stupid things and I kind of shrugged them off. Looking back, would that have been so bad to do? No. It wouldn’t have hurt to play a little more ball and to work a little bit overtime to let that Mayor know that I could be your guy too, in essence, which I didn’t.” Small Market CVB Executive

40. The Bad 5. They don’t believe in research or numbers or goal setting .

41. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “We’re so goofy. We can look at numbers and see whether hotel occupancy or whatever compare with some others. We are so different because we are so far from everybody – the next place is another country. We’ve got different kinds of markets. We don’t do many group tours because we’re so far away. Plus our average daily rate is so much higher than most places in this part of the country. I get very critical of statistics. It’s so hard to get apples vs. apples when we’re comparing us against somebody else.” Middle Market CVB Executive

42. The Bad 6. They are too busy selling to talk to other stakeholders.

43. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “The stakeholders that got the most amount of my time were the ones that I described earlier – my customers and members. The ones that got the least amount of my time, or deserved the least amount of my time were all the governmental people. I’m not trying to lump all the government activity together. There were some, however, that was just wasteful and others that were positive and important. Clearly, that’s why collectively they probably got the least amount of my time. They were consistent – they only held meetings during the day, and we used to do our real work at night.” Middle Market CVB Executive

44. The Bad 7. They are unwilling to accept much responsibility for their destination stakeholders not “getting it”.

45. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “They (the politicals) don’t understand what we do and they don’t want to understand it. It’s hard talking economics to a bunch of housewife activists who got elected to the council. I don’t mean to be critical. That’s how they get elected to city council. They’re only concerned about the alleys, the garbage collection and the pot holes and stuff in their neighborhoods and that’s it. Working with them was very very difficult.” Middle Market CVB Executive

46. The Bad 8. They didn’t like to evaluate their own employees or take the time to do goal setting.

47. The Bad: Two Less Successful Executives Speak “The thing I didn’t like the most is doing evaluations of employees. That was a real chore.” Small Market CVB Executive “In a perfect world I would have gotten rid of personnel and the political end of it. I would have preferred to spend my time wooing customers.” Large Market CVB Executive

48. The Bad 9. They don't feel collaboration with other industry partners is necessary

49. The Bad: A Less Successful Executive Speaks “There was always too much territorial – there’s another word - where everybody wanted to protect their pot. There was too much parochialism of all of the CVBs.” Large Market CVB Executive

50. The Bad 10. They have the answers and there is nothing left to learn.