The worst meal of my entire life

And why I hate Salt Lake City

It was the worst meal of my entire life.

It was one of the first field marketing events we threw at G2 in Salt Lake City. I was only 2 months into my role as VP of Demand Generation.

We were hosting a CMO dinner at a high end restaurant. We were expecting 15 CMO’s to show up that morning from a bunch of our tier 1 accounts.

That day we had 4 cancellations come through, which we planned for so we still had 11 lined up.

Our CEO was flying in for it.

Our VP of Sales was flying in for it.

We arrived at the restaurant early to set up the private room.

7:00 show time.

By 7:30 only 3 people had showed.

At 7:45 another person trickled in.

By about 8:00 the manager came over to me, “should we just get started?”.

“I guess so.”

We had 4 people there when we had expected 15.

I could feel the frustration coming from the other side of the table where our CEO sat. The wasted time, the wasted money, the wasted resources…

I powered through the dinner with a pit in my stomach and all I could think was “I’m definitely going to get fired for this”.

When I got back to my hotel room, I turned back on my phone and instantly saw 4 texts pop on my screen from our CEO.

While the first one was about how disappointed he was in the results of the actual dinner, the other ones were all focused on how we could improve the experience going forward and ensure when we do it again it is a massive success.

That’s the thing — mistakes, failures, and flop dinners are inevitable, especially when you are trying new things in Marketing. But the real test is in how you adjust and improve.

He understood that better than me.

And guess what - we came up with a plan and a bunch of strategies to make sure it didn’t happen again and the dinners became a huge part of our overall growth strategy.

But I still hate Salt Lake City.

Thanks for reading,

Adam