Rubber chicken, ho-hum venues, droning speeches, pat-on-the-back presentations.

Today, these traditional staples just aren't cutting it as magnets for hordes of attendees at annual conferences, product introductions or impress-potential-clients events.

Nor are run-of-the-mill goings-on in predictable places effective in revving up a company's troops or keeping expensively acquired top talent from flying the corporate coop, says Ann Armstrong, a lecturer and director of the Social Enterprise Initiative at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

"Your best people can become jaded and say: 'You've already given me 16 plaques, so now if you want to motivate me, it's going to take something more elaborate.' " This new reality is bringing a bonanza of opportunities for such exceptionally innovative event-management companies as Toronto's Event Spectrum Inc. (ESI).

Brennan O'Connor, Business Edge
Event Spectrum Inc. president and co-founder Cynthia Richards says that functioning as a strategic partner with its clients helps set the company apart.

Says president and co-founder Cynthia Richards: "Our key differentiator is that we function as a strategic partner to our clients and then we surprise and delight them with the results.

"Bombardier Aerospace, for example, came to us with a big challenge.

Every Christmas, they host a hugely expensive seated dinner for about 6,000 employees. But so many people never showed up that they were wasting a lot of money.

"They needed a way to get people excited about attending," Richards says. "So for six weeks prior to the event, we had a Santa Claus character and some scantily clad elves dropping in on employees at lunchtime, and even on the factory line, to tell them how much they'd miss if they didn't attend.

"Then, for the theme of dinner, we chose first-class air travel. So we set up a luxurious VIP lounge with very attentive flight attendants dressed in Austin Power gear. Prizes such as lavish trips were given out, which had never been done before, and Bombardier got its best-ever attendance."

Another recent client was "an automotive company whose third-quarter sales were way down," Richards says. "So they wanted to really motivate the sales force by offering top performers some kind of unusual trip.

"This was in wintertime, but instead of doing the usual hot-weather destination or Caribbean cruise, we came up with Miracle on Fifth Avenue. It was a trip to New York City, with all the winners (based on sales results) staying at the Plaza Hotel. Each was assigned an appropriate personal shopper, which we identified by asking about their interests on the pre-registration forms. Then they got a chauffeured car to take them to whatever types of stores they wanted to explore."

The result, says Richards, was that most attendees deemed this their all-time favourite trip - despite the fact that it happened during New York's snowiest December on record, and ESI staff had to scramble to cope with such disasters as the cancellation of horse-and-buggy rides because of snowdrifts.

There's plenty more creativity where those examples came from, Richards says as she sketches out an enviable entrepreneurial tale whose punchline is a growth rate that's nothing short of astounding.

A Toronto native, she graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a degree in anthropology. But she somehow got into the advertising field, initially as a secretary at Vickers & Benson, where she worked her way up to account executive.

Richards then switched to the client side of marketing, working as a meeting planner at Hyundai Canada and Nissan Canada.

By 1997, she felt ready to launch her own event-planning company, one whose hallmark would be addressing a need she discovered during her time in the corporate world.

"I would always have a lot of suppliers - incentive travel company, ad agency, promotions company, graphic design and so on. But I rarely found that they cared much about helping me communicate the overall message of an event. They just cared about their piece of the pie. So the vision for my company was to serve as a general contractor, a one-stop shop that would truly understand the client's objectives and work to make sure they were met."

So, together with high school friend Zora Kriz, who is now ESI's vice-president and minority partner, Richards scraped up $20,000 for computer equipment and direct mail pitches.

For the first year, the two were the company's sole employees and worked out of their respective homes.

"We knew we weren't ready to do huge events," Richard recalls, "so we went after small but high-growth companies that probably didn't have in-house event management yet.

We basically said we want to be an extension of your marketing department and we did it with a lot of humour and personality."

A modest beginning? Definitely. But it was enough to pull in revenue of $97,000 in the first year. And since then, while increasing the work force to 16, leasing professional digs - and retaining every client they acquired - ESI has enjoyed quadruple-digit annual growth. Revenues for 2005 topped $5.4 million.

A sign of this success is that Richards was recently recognized by Chatelaine magazine as one of Canada's top 100 women entrepreneurs.

ESI's client base now includes the Canadian head offices of Nissan, Volvo and Mitsubishi, as well Siemens Canada, Berkshire Investments and Bell Sympatico, in addition to Bombardier Aerospace and its first client, Oasis Technologies.

Yet another client is Guelph-headquartered Syngenta Crop Protection Canada (a division of a global agribusiness conglomerate). Company spokeswoman Anne-Marie Fraser praises ESI's "exceptional attention to detail," yet says "they are very relaxed in the way they execute everything that needs to be done and they're a lot of fun to work with."

What Fraser calls "a particularly good fit for our people" was Syngenta's 2005 national meeting, during which ESI arranged to replicate TV's The Amazing Race. "They organized about 160 of us into teams, gave us compasses, flashlights and very cryptic instructions that had us running all over downtown Toronto following clues."

Meanwhile, famed Canadian explorer Jeff MacInnis, whose adventures include Eco-Challenge, and his team observed their antics and tactics and then analysed them to great effect in his keynote speech. "That broadened our whole view of our place in the world," Fraser says.

Jennifer Santamaria is equally enthusiastic about working with ESI for the past four years in her role as executive director of the Jays Care Foundation, a charitable arm of the Toronto Blue Jays baseball organization.

"I call them the 10th member of our team because they do the lion's share of running our annual Northern Diamonds gala (which entails) everything from working with the venue and decor to food and beverage catering, entertainment, all those logistical areas. They have a ton of experience and contacts and it's very reassuring to have them on your side."

Santamaria says she also likes the fact that ESI's staff are all female because "women are often so good at perceiving all the details that add up to a successful event."

Richards agrees with that contention, although she says she never set out to build an exclusively female company. "It's just a fact that many women choose to go into event management. I'm inundated with resumes, but very few are from men.

"I do know that the corporate culture we've ended up sets us apart. In fact, we recently won some business away from a very large competitor partly because of our culture and values."

Richards adds that egalitarian collaboration - another trait that's often evident in female groups - is the rule at ESI. "Every time we have an opportunity to pitch, we all brainstorm beforehand and everyone here is a part of that.

"We're a pretty happy bunch and I know that that is reflected in the way we treat our clients."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)