The Experiential Strategist with Jenny Howard-Maxwell

Ready Is a Lie: What 500,000 Impressions and My Grandfather Taught Me This Week

You are never going to feel ready. Not for the certification, not for the career move, not for the conversation you've been avoiding. This week, one comment on a post that reached over 500,000 people asked Jenny the question everyone is afraid to ask out loud: "How do I know if I'm ready?" Her answer didn't come from a marketing playbook. It came from watching her 89-year-old grandfather, one of the founding fathers of Geographic Information Systems, live out the hardest lesson of all: nobody waits until they're ready. They just decide. In this episode, Jenny connects that truth to two ideas at the center of her work: the language gap keeping talented event and experiential professionals stuck, and the five-pillar blueprint she built years ago to stop one broken microphone from defining an entire event's success. If something in you has been asking "am I ready," this episode is your answer.

The Metric Nobody Trained You On

Most event professionals can tell you attendance numbers. Almost none of them can tell you what an event actually made people feel, and whether that feeling was designed on purpose or just left to chance. In this episode, Jenny shares what came out of an unplanned fifteen minute call with Liz Lathan of Club Ichi, and why that conversation led her straight to return on emotion, the measurable framework behind acceptance, activity, adventure, hope, and motivation. She breaks down the difference between leaders with high emotional intelligence and leaders without it, why that difference shows up in your culture events whether you track it or not, and how to start proving what your internal events actually produced instead of just hoping people had a good time.

It was Never About the Pink Couch

Every experience produces an emotion whether you planned it or not. Eight years ago I planned a memorial service for a woman named Mindy who chose me for a job when nobody else in that room wanted me there. I did not know it then but every decision I made that day was the framework I would spend the next eight years building. The pink couch. The world map with pins from every city her guests traveled from. The champagne with her logo on it. The jazz lounge. None of it was decoration. All of it was intentional emotional design before I had a name for any of it. This episode is the origin story of the pink couch, a tribute to the woman who gave me everything, and the moment I realized that what I do as an experiential strategist has always been about one thing. Making people feel something so specific and so intentional that it changes what they do next. This one is personal. And it might be the most important episode I have recorded.

The Vacuum Effect and it Ain't Pretty

This one is personal. Jenny spent a year planning a football-themed Mitzvah. Custom turf dance floor. Stenciled logo. A smoke-filled entrance moment that made her client cry. Every detail intentional, every element designed to land. And it did. Then the caterer was late. And just like that, everything Jenny built disappeared. Not physically — but emotionally. The tears at the door were gone. The dance floor stopped mattering. The client rewrote the story in real time, and Jenny was left holding the outcome of decisions that were never hers to make. This is called the vacuum effect. When one thing goes wrong in a live experience, it pulls every positive emotion right out of the room. And the finger always points at you. In this episode Jenny shares the raw truth of what happened, what she should have done differently, and the one conversation that would have protected her work before the first vendor was ever booked. This is an expensive lesson. She is sharing it so you do not have to learn it the same way. In this episode: * What the vacuum effect is and why it will come for your work too * Why even a flawless experience can be rewritten by one vendor failure * The three questions to answer with your client before a single vendor is booked * Why defining success in advance is your only real protection Get the workbook: amazon.com Learn more about CPES: edgucationinstitute.com

Matthew Barney: Design for the Emotion and the ROI Takes Care of Itself

Matthew Barney left the Coast Guard, bought a one way ticket to Seattle, signed a lease on an apartment he never saw, and built a career producing experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world including AWS, Delta, and Microsoft. He describes himself as a creative person who became operationally dangerous. The moment I read that I knew we had to talk. In this conversation Matthew and I go deep on emotional design, why the gap between the event floor and the sales team is the most expensive gap in this industry, how he uses intentional gifting to create memories that last years, and what it actually takes to earn a seat at the table with C suite executives. If you have ever wondered whether creativity or strategy matters more in experiential, this episode will change how you think about that question entirely. The Proof Problem Masterclass is free and linked in the show notes. Watch it before you plan your next activation.