By Elizabeth Cloutman
Creative Planning organizes special events, meetings and incentive programs
“The devil is in the details,” warns a familiar adage. However, Peter Miller said that by using his service, Creative Planning, businesses can be spared the innumerable details of planning corporate meetings, special events and employee incentive programs. It’s a service he enjoys providing.
Miller, a Los Altos resident, has spent the past 17 years helping clients by coordinating all the arrangements for corporate events - from recommending sites and themes and negotiating vendor contracts to post-event billing reconciliation. “I do all the research, I give my two cents as to what I recommend, but the ultimate decision is up to them … The most important thing to me is whatever it takes to serve my customers, that’s what I’m going to do,” Miller said.
Coordinating employee incentive programs - corporations rewarding outstanding employees with group trips - makes up about 60 percent of Miller’s business. The remainder of his time is divided evenly between planning corporate events and meetings. He has both regular and one-time clients.
As a student taking courses at Foothill College and the College of San Mateo in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Miller had envisioned a career in television production. However, he was hesitant to leave Los Altos, where he had lived since the age of 16 months, to move to Los Angeles. Instead, he found a job with a small Mountain View TV station. Then, in 1983, he found a position with a firm that did corporate event planning, a new concept at the time.
In 1991, when the firm suddenly closed down one Monday morning, he decided to begin Creative Planning. “In less than 72 hours, I was up and running: the fictitious business name, cards printed, money in the bank from my customers.”
Miller said the skills he acquired in his television production class translate well into event planning.
“It may sound strange, but from the inside, they’re the same. You have to know everything from the beginning to the ending,” he said. “Both jobs entail a great deal of detail. Your flexibility is always put to the test. No day is ever the same.”
Incentive program planning is what Miller said he finds the most creative.
He has coordinated trips to locations as near as Spanish Bay and as far as Marrakech, Morocco.
Details may include site inspection, arranging plane and hotel reservations, arranging ground transportation, planning group meals and entertainment, and sometimes even individual gifts. Miller, leaving nothing to chance, even prepares travel checklists for individual participants.
Even local corporate events can involve complicated logistics, such as contracting to reserve an entire restaurant for an evening and arranging group transportation to the site, Miller noted.
Miller does much of his planning using the Internet for research. He communicates via e-mail with both clients and regular vendors in various localities rather than traveling extensively.
“With my wife and young children, the least interesting part for me is the long travel. I travel eight weeks a year in total,” he said.
Miller said he found he could even use the Internet to locate U.S. State Department travel advisories online after a terrorist bombing of a tour bus in Cairo in 1996. Thus, he could quickly assure his client that the corporate excursion on the Nile that he’d coordinated would be safe.
In spite of - or maybe because of - its challenges, Miller thoroughly enjoys his career. “There’s never been a day in 17 years when I have said, ‘I really don’t want to go to work.’”
For more information, logon to www.creative-planning.com.
