| January 2004 • Volume 24 • Number 1 • The Meeting Professional |
Cover Story
A Seat at the Table
The meetings and events department at Amway—led by Craig Ardis, CMM—has established itself as one fo the company's most integral components.
By Don Nichols
This story is the first of several monthly features that tell the stories of organizations within which meeting planners have achieved positions of strategic influence and the business of meetings has become critically important to the organizations’ bottom lines. In support of Pathways to Excellence, MPI’s multiyear strategic plan, The Meeting Professional will showcase meeting planners and their organizations throughout 2004.
Amway Corp. sells its consumer products through a direct-sales force of independent business owners (IBOs) in nearly 80 markets worldwide. Amway generates most of its sales in China, where meetings have played an integral role in the company’s success. In fact, meetings helped save the company’s interest in China, when communist leaders shut down the direct-selling business a few years ago.
“One thing that made the government nervous was that large numbers of Chinese people were coming together at meetings under the auspices of American companies. So they had to make some rules, and we had to modify our plan to address those rules,” said Craig Ardis, CMM, director of global special events for Amway—the international arm of Alticor Inc. in Ada, Mich.—and a member of the MPI International Board of Directors.
Along the way, Amway used meetings to educate the country’s leaders about the industry and improve Amway’s reputation with them so its sales force could get back into action.
“We had several meetings with different government officials, and we even had some officials come to the United States to see our business and meet with senior-level management,” Ardis said.
Ardis says meetings are tremendously important at Amway.
“We were started with meetings, we were built on meetings and we continue to grow through meetings.”
The Power of Meetings
Amway holds nearly 600 meetings each year that range in size from 10 to 6,000 attendees, and about half are handled through Ardis’ department. Meeting topics range from sales meetings and incentive programs to senior-management meetings and core-competency team sessions.
When asked to name an especially important meeting that helped Amway achieve key goals, Doug DeVos, Alticor’s president, mentions the Founders Council. At this global meeting—held in San Francisco in October—the company’s IBOs interacted one-on-one with developers during a product expo, which was key to building sales.
“Providing IBOs with high-quality products and fostering a better understanding of them ultimately helped enhance their businesses and made them more profitable,” DeVos said.
The Global Growth Conference held in August is another meeting DeVos holds in high regard. At that meeting, senior managers received training on how to grow the business through change.
“We built team-building activities into the conference,” DeVos said. “We knew that a cohesive, cross-functional team would be better equipped to manage all aspects of our global business.”
Offering Incentives
By far, the largest meetings are the annual leadership conferences held for IBOs in each of the company’s markets. These lavish incentive programs, which typically pamper anywhere from 500 to several thousand winners, reward the top producers and encourage them to increase their sales even more. The programs are held in exotic locales and luxury resorts, including some in Australia, Hawaii, South Africa and Tahiti.
“Our IBO meetings contribute greatly to the continued growth of our business by providing our IBOs with an opportunity to come together to share their business experiences, to learn from one another and to map out their plans for future growth,” DeVos said. “Meetings also serve as great motivational tools. They help energize our IBOs, and they help them maintain excitement and a commitment level necessary to successfully continue in this business.”
Given that top management considers meetings so important, Ardis is involved in executive-level meetings and participates in the company’s strategic planning sessions.
“Together with our business support department, global special events is at the forefront of servicing key stakeholders—the IBOs,” said Steve Van Andel, Alticor’s chairman. “Their participation in long-term planning allows us to strategically align all IBO meetings and events to ultimately achieve our business goals.”
The Planning Team
To plan all of the meetings his department handles, Ardis relies on a staff of 26, which includes two managers, one supervisor, 10 senior planners, four assistant planners, one accountant, six pre-trip administrators responsible for registration and housing lists, one executive assistant and one travel coordinator. It’s a very seasoned staff, with the planners possessing an average of 13 years of experience as meeting professionals.
Before working with Ardis, one of the planners was in the hotel business, two worked at travel agencies and some were administrative assistants in other Amway departments who transferred into event planning.
“We brought them into our department when we had openings and trained and groomed them,” Ardis said.
More recently, hiring in-house employees is not something he has been inclined to do.
“When we have a position open—which is very seldom as you can tell by the years of experience of my planners—we’re now looking for people who have international experience, who can speak another language, who have industry experience and who are certified meeting professionals (CMPs),” he said. “We’ve elevated the planner position because we see its importance and understand it’s a discipline, just like finance, marketing and sales.”
As part of elevating the position six years ago, Ardis developed a specific career path for planners, charting the route to a senior-level position in his department and a higher salary. To become a senior-level planner, an employee must now have at least five years of experience and must have earned a CMP designation, a task the company will finance for interested employees.
“We worked with our human resources (HR) division to set this up, and as we did, they came to understand our discipline and the skill sets we needed with our folks—and that raised the level of the level of professionalism within the company,” Ardis said.
Training Regimen
To ensure high-quality work from his staff, Ardis emphasizes training and development. All new hires must attend a three-day cultural seminar developed by Amway to teach employees about the company’s culture, organization and business.
In addition, Ardis is working with MPI and Amway’s HR department to establish a curriculum all of his planners will be required to follow. The company will mandate certain base courses and offer electives. The base courses are still being identified, but all will include training in strategic planning through an evolving new MPI program. To determine which electives should be taken, the company is doing independent assessments on all of the planners. Ardis will then recommend they take internal or external courses that will meet specific needs.
Ardis envisions his planners taking courses covering topics such as budgeting, business acumen, creative writing and making presentations.
“We offer these type of courses in our company, and we want our planners to be proficient in these areas so senior management realizes their professional value.”
Facing Challenges
Even though Ardis emphasizes staff training, the department still faces challenges. Chief among them, he says, is growth in Amway’s business, which means his department is planning more meetings. To do that, he has concentrated on separating the work out a little differently, putting processes in place to make the department operate more efficiently, involving more of Amway’s corporate affiliate staff and looking at what he outsources and what he keeps in-house.
“We plan a great deal of our meetings in-house, but we outsource some stuff—and we have a strategy in place to outsource more if our business grows instead of hiring people. There are a lot of independent planners out there who can come in and plan for you, and you can manage that very well.”
Ardis often uses companies that handle destination management, transportation and audiovisual services. He also likes to use trip directors, professionals who support his staff on site by handling responsibilities such as transportation, activities and other meeting logistics.
“That way, I don’t have to send all my staff to a meeting site,” he said. “Instead, I have a meeting planner there to oversee the trip directors.”
When Ardis needs the help of these directors, he turns to a stable of about 30 who already understand Amway’s culture and who know many of the company’s attendees. But they’re not necessarily local, and often must travel to the meeting site.
“Using these professionals helps with our budget and with managing peaks and valleys,” he said. “But we always outsource a la carte, rather than have someone do everything for us. We ask, ‘What can we manage, and what can they do for us?’”
Software Solutions
As another way to operate his department more efficiently, Ardis has been working with an outside company to design and develop a meeting-planning software program specifically for Amway. The program, which is being installed now, will standardize the company’s RFP model and numerous other aspects of the meetings department’s operation.
“It will record the budgets, the spend and the invoices—and we’ll get reports and be able to gather that data.”
The software will also be used by Amway affiliates outside the meetings department who plan some of their own meetings, so Ardis and his staff will have more control over what’s done outside their department.
Since Ardis is responsible for planning hundreds of meetings throughout the world each year, his department will undoubtedly benefit from a software
program that helps standardize the work. But the program will only complement the skills and experience of Ardis and staff. He and his team of seasoned planners will remain the real backbone of Amway’s meetings. TMP
DON NICHOLS is a freelance writer based in Dallas, Texas.
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Sidebar: Craig Ardis, CMM
As director of global special events for Amway Corp., Craig Ardis, CMM, is the top-ranking officer in the company’s meetings and events department. It’s his job to lead a 26-member staff that plans about 300 meetings worldwide each year, some for as many as 6,000 people. Ardis, an MPI member since 1994, now serves on the association’s International Board of Directors.
Ardis first joined the company in 1985 and worked for five years in the distributor relations department.
“Working in that department, which is now called sales, gives you a feel of the whole company because you understand the field organization, and you understand the Amway business and the people who work in it,” he said.
Before joining Amway, Ardis worked in the hospitality industry selling and setting up tours in North America. That experience impressed a manager who asked him to transfer to the meetings department in 1990 when a managerial position became available. Since joining the department, he has been promoted twice—to senior manager in 1991 and director in 1994.
Amway is one of a handful of companies operated by Alticor Inc. A group of six executives report directly to Alticor’s chairman and president, and Ardis reports to one of the executives. He’s considered a member of Alticor’s senior management team, an elite group of that conducts high-level strategic planning.