The People Behind Every Great Event

Contents

The Frontline Team Is the Product
What Scaling High-Growth Teams Teaches You
Investing in People Is a Business Strategy
The Standard We're Setting at Pinnacle Live

Kenneth Preston

Chief Human Resources Officer

There's a moment at the end of a great event — when the last speaker wraps, the lights come up, and the room fills with the sound of applause or conversation — where nobody is thinking about the people who made it possible.

Nobody is thinking about the technician who arrived at 5 a.m. to run the cable. The producer who caught the audio feedback issue during soundcheck and fixed it before anyone noticed. The team lead who held the room's energy together when the speaker ran long and the schedule had to be rebuilt on the fly.

That invisibility is, in a strange way, the mark of a job done exceptionally well. And it's what drew me to this industry.

After more than two decades leading HR in high-growth, high-stakes environments, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what separates organizations that consistently perform from those that don't. The answer, in virtually every case, comes back to the same thing: the people on the ground, and whether the organization has truly invested in them.

The Frontline Team Is the Product

In most industries, there's some distance between the people who build a product and the customers who experience it. In live events, that distance doesn't exist. The team on the floor is the product. Every interaction a meeting planner or attendee has — from the setup walk-through the morning of the event to the teardown conversation at the end of the night — is a direct reflection of the people Pinnacle Live puts in that room.

This is what makes talent strategy in hospitality and live events so consequential, and so underappreciated. When companies in this space think about competitive differentiation, they tend to focus on technology, pricing, or portfolio size. Those things matter. But they're easier to replicate than a team of people who are well-trained, well-supported, and genuinely invested in making every event great.

You can't copy culture. You can't copy the judgment of a seasoned technician who knows when to escalate and when to solve it quietly. You can't copy the trust that builds between a Pinnacle Live team and the hotel staff they work alongside every day. Those things are built over time, through deliberate investment in people.

What Scaling High-Growth Teams Teaches You

Over the course of my career, I've had the opportunity to support some of the most ambitious growth initiatives in business — teams that were scaling fast, operating in high-stakes environments, and expected to deliver consistently under pressure. What I've learned is that the organizations that scale well aren't the ones that hire the most people the fastest. They're the ones that are most intentional about who they hire, how they onboard them, and what kind of environment they build around them.

Speed without intentionality creates fragility. You end up with teams that perform when conditions are perfect and struggle when they aren't. The teams that hold up under pressure are the ones where every person understands the mission, believes in the culture, and has been given the tools to succeed.

That principle translates directly to what we're building at Pinnacle Live. As we grow, the question isn't just how many people we can bring on — it's how we ensure that the person running audio at a conference in Charlotte and the crew setting up for a gala in Phoenix are both operating with the same standard of excellence, the same sense of ownership, and the same commitment to the client.

Investing in People Is a Business Strategy

I want to challenge a framing that's common in our industry — and in business broadly — that treats people investment as a cost center. Training budgets get cut first. Compensation benchmarking happens reactively, not proactively. Career development is something managers talk about in annual reviews and rarely return to.

That approach is expensive, even when it looks cheap. Turnover in frontline hospitality roles is notoriously high, and the cost of replacing someone — recruiting, onboarding, the ramp time before they're operating at full effectiveness — is consistently underestimated. More importantly, there's a quality cost that never shows up cleanly on a spreadsheet: the event that went fine instead of great because the technician was new and still finding their footing.

The organizations that understand people investment as a growth strategy — not a cost — are the ones that build genuine competitive advantage. Lower turnover means more experienced teams. More experienced teams mean better events. Better events mean planners and hotel partners who trust you with their most important moments, year after year.

The Standard We're Setting at Pinnacle Live

When I joined Pinnacle Live, what struck me wasn't just the company's growth trajectory — it was the culture I walked into. There is a genuine pride here in doing the work well. A sense of ownership at every level of the organization that you can't manufacture through a values statement on a wall.

My job is to build the infrastructure that protects and grows that culture as we scale. That means being thoughtful about who we bring in and how we develop them. It means creating career paths that reward the people who are exceptional at their craft, not just the ones who want to move into management. It means making sure that the technician who has been with Pinnacle Live for five years feels as invested in the company's success as the executive team does.

Because the next time a room full of attendees stands up and applauds at the end of a great event, they're applauding the work of the people nobody's thinking about. I think those people deserve an organization that thinks about them — deeply, deliberately, and all the time.

That's what we're building.