Venue: Disney Yacht and Beach Club, Orlando, Florida
Attendees: 450 current and prospective Deluxe Corporation clients
Rental company: Martin Bastian Productions
Entertainment: Kevin Kling
Audio-visual and lighting: Martin Bastian Productions
Event planner: Amy Oriani, Martin Bastian Productions
“At each Expo, we’ve strived to start the day by setting the audience a little off balance—starting things off in an unexpected way,” says Amy Oriani, vice president of production and creative services at Martin Bastian, an event production company in Minneapolis. Since 2002, Martin Bastian has worked with Deluxe Financial Services, a banking services company in St. Paul, to create the expo, which is a one-day event that, this year, focused on small-business customers.
Last January’s Deluxe Knowledge Expo began at 8 a.m. in the ballroom at the Disney Yacht and Beach Club. With attendees in their seats, the room went dark, and then a spotlight onstage revealed Minnesota storyteller and playwright Kevin Kling, who treated the audience to a story about growing up in Minnesota. Oriani says his story was seemingly unrelated to a business message, “but, since one of Deluxe’s [product] offerings stresses the importance of getting to know the stories behind your customers, a storyteller made perfect sense as the day unfolded.”
Doug Hall, founder of Eureka Ranch, a management consulting company based in Cincinnati, followed Kling’s story with a presentation about creativity and innovation. Luann Widener, president of Deluxe Financial Services, rounded out the early-morning session by discussing the importance of listening to financial-institution customer stories, and the company’s mission: to be a model partner for clients.
The theme for the expo—“that customer vibe”—was expressed in the décor. In the hallway leading to the ballroom, attendees passed four six-by-eight-foot photos of small-business owners in their work environment. These images also appeared as a backdrop on the stage that could change position. However, as the presentations began in the morning, the backdrop panels were assembled in such a way that the images were unrecognizable and abstract. As the day progressed, attendees learned more about each of the small-business owners depicted in the images and finally, at the end of the day, during Widener’s closing speech, the images on stage were reassembled as the images that the audience had seen in the hallway.
Next on the agenda were breakout sessions on topics such as “The first 90 days of a new account,” and “Who are today’s small businesses, and what do they want from their financial institution?”
Kling made another brief appearance to conclude his storytelling, followed by an interactive working session led by Hall. Attendees had a chance to work and brainstorm together and came away with ideas for engaging customers.
