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00:00:01
Heather Odendaal
55 Plays9 days ago
Thanks for listening to our episode with Heather Odendaal.
To keep up with or connect with Heather:
✨Heather’s Website: https://www.wnorthconnect.com
✨Heather’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherodendaal/
✨Heather’s Upcoming Events: https://wnorthconnect.com/wnorth-events/
To stay in touch with Meredith and Medbury:
Follow Meredith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-farley/
Follow Medbury on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/medbury_agency/
Subscribe to the Medbury newsletter: https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
Email Meredith: Meredith@MedburyAgency.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:03
Speaker
Heather, hi. Hi, Meredith. How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for doing this conversation with me. I'm excited to get to chat with you for a little bit. Me as well.
00:00:16
Speaker
For folks who aren't familiar with you, can you say who you are and what you do? So I am a Canadian conference founder and entrepreneur.
00:00:27
Speaker
I started the WNorth Conference in 2015 to elevate women in the leadership pipeline.
00:00:34
Speaker
And how did you end up here? Tell us about your career journey up till now. I know it's probably comprehensive and long and winding. I imagine most folks are.
00:00:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I have always been in the events industry. i was in marketing as well, but I started my career had a very, i would say fabulous 24-year-old job. I was in the sponsorship department for the largest ski resort in North America, which is Whistler, which is located in British Columbia, Canada.
00:01:08
Speaker
And that was a really cool gig. I was flying in helicopters. I was supervising photo shoots. I was doing all sorts of cool things. and what was supposed to be one year in a ski resort has turned into a 21-year career.
00:01:24
Speaker
career with various changes and moves to Vancouver, which is our closest city. But I have moved through various roles, leadership roles in events like the ah Vancouver 2010 Olympics and the Whistler Film Festival.
00:01:41
Speaker
And I also had a stint at YPO, which is the Young Presidents Organization and Membership Community for Executive Leaders around the world.
Motivation for WNorth Conference
00:01:51
Speaker
And in 2014, I found myself working as a remote employee for a Fortune 500 company.
00:02:00
Speaker
And I was looking to elevate to the next level of leadership. I was in mid-management, and I wanted to get to director level. And what I found from my experience working at that organization was that there was limited opportunities for growth, for one, for people who were remote employees.
00:02:19
Speaker
This was also 2014. And the second piece was there was limited training and development and executive coaching opportunities for mid-management professionals. And so a lot of the funding for executive coaching was limited to people who are already in executive roles or in leadership director roles.
00:02:43
Speaker
So i looked inward and I said, there's got to be a better way. And I also was seeking a conference to get myself to that next level, leadership development, opportunities, high-level networking. And I went out looking for that space. And when I couldn't find it, I put on my event planner hat and I started the first WNorth conference in 2015.
00:03:09
Speaker
That's incredible. I have so much to dig into about what you're doing now, but you mentioned Olympics. What did you do for the Olympics when you were your 20s? That's so cool. So I had two roles. One was on brand side. i worked for Molson Coors, which is the official was the official beer partner.
00:03:26
Speaker
And for a year leading up to the Olympics, I was – managing brand activations to promote their involvement with the Olympics. I was giving away tickets to the Olympics through customer promotions.
00:03:39
Speaker
It was a super cool job, especially in your 20s. And leading into the actual games itself, I transitioned into a role managing the executive suite at the hockey arena. So the area where all of the IOC executives and the dignitaries were coming in for the hockey games. So that was fun.
00:04:02
Speaker
Wow. And previous to that, you were at the Whistler role, which helicopters when you're 24, like very cool, very
Career Development Journey
00:04:10
Speaker
glamorous. how What was your undergrad in college? And What skill sets, it seems, i imagine you have some innate skill sets when it comes to this type of event planning work because it was so early in your career. like What do you think is natural to you that you were a great fit for this type of role?
00:04:27
Speaker
No, it's a great question because I know there are a lot of young people out there trying to figure out what to study and what to pursue in order to land a job like those.
00:04:38
Speaker
And i will be honest with you, i didn't know going into college what I wanted to do. and I took on a general arts degree at University of British Columbia on the other side of the country from where I grew up. I grew up in Ontario.
00:04:52
Speaker
And that was a big move in and itself. But once I got there, my original plan was to move into commerce. But once I was in the programs, I realized that I needed a wider breadth to what type of courses I could take because I still was very unsure.
00:05:10
Speaker
But one thing that I did was I took on an extracurricular role as a lead student. executive at the university's ski and snowboard club, which sounds a little bit just off the cuff, but what ended up happening, we were part of a team that launched this student seasons pass program.
00:05:33
Speaker
And we were the first university to partner with them. And that university program ended up being spread across the country. And I was one of the original team members with that launch.
00:05:44
Speaker
And so when I was getting close to graduation, I took my contacts that were working both at the head office of the, it was called Introwess at the time. Now Vail Resorts owns the ski resorts. But I went and I said, I really want to work with you. And i created a co-op opportunity out of nothing, essentially because I just kept pounding the door down. And so i did a co-op opportunity for six months, which eventually turned into entry-level marketing role.
00:06:16
Speaker
moving to Whistler, not knowing anybody, not having anywhere to live for the first few months, and eventually being in that role for five years. Wow. You are brave and you are bold and you create stuff out of nothing is what I'm getting from the first six minutes of this conversation. That's so incredible.
00:06:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I think it's important. I love sharing
Work-Life Balance and Community Building
00:06:39
Speaker
that story because I think so many people put so much onus on your degree. And although that is very important and it is very important to have a degree, I think that we can create some of these opportunities. And a lot of the times they're not where you expect them.
00:06:54
Speaker
That is so interesting. and I'm having a lot of thoughts about It seems like you you're very powerful, creative person. You create these incredible events. You create these opportunities. Okay, lots more questions for you. What does a day in your life look like right like right now? And I know it's probably hard, but the average-ish day for you.
00:07:13
Speaker
So currently i am spending a lot of time on my computer. We are about five weeks away from our 11th annual conference. So it is truly crunch time.
00:07:24
Speaker
I have two kids, a seven-year-old and a 10-year-old. The first two hours of the day are pretty much dedicated to getting them out the door, which is a ah ah ah pretty full-on job for me and my husband.
00:07:37
Speaker
And then a series of meetings, Zooms, It's so interesting because I am completely remote and our team is completely remote, but I am an extrovert Gemini who just dies to be in front of people. So I'll give you an example. it had been like two weeks since I'd been and at an event and I got an invitation to go to Vancouver on Tuesday. And I think on Monday night, I just decided to go and it's a two hour drive. So two hours to Vancouver, go to the event, two hours back.
00:08:08
Speaker
But those are the types of things that I need to do to keep myself really motivated and excited because not everyone is the personality that you can sit in front of a Zoom all day. okay So that's my every day. do also throughout the year travel, have the great opportunity of traveling a lot. And a few weeks ago, I was... At South by Southwest, I was speaking at a couple of events and I'm very privileged to have the opportunity to be able to go to these events and spread the word about the work I'm doing in women's leadership.
00:08:42
Speaker
Are you a really early morning riser or is that kind of atypical? It depends. I am starting to become more of an early riser because i get stuff done in that time. And it's not easy. But then again, i went to bed with my kids last night at eight o'clock. So I got a good night's sleep.
00:09:04
Speaker
doesn't always happen that way. i would say it's a new trend I'm trying out. All right. To switch gears a bit and talk about your work a little more, what do you think that you and your team are especially uniquely really good at?
00:09:21
Speaker
So I think that one of the things we're really good at is creating a sense of belonging amongst our community. And i I think I mentioned a cup about six weeks ago, I was in Abu Dhabi for a global events conference, actually doing a talk on creating a sense of belonging at your conference. wow And some of the things that I introduced that we have in community ecosystem that creates that sense of belonging is one, we started our membership in 2018. After three years of doing the conference, we felt that there needed to be that year round connection and that year round opportunity where people could see those familiar faces again. And it wasn't just a one off. And so that membership community, not everybody who attends the conference is a member, I'd say 50%, but it creates that familiarity, creates that sense of we're supporting one another on our leadership journey and we will do things to lift up each other.
00:10:23
Speaker
Another piece is we talk about horseshoes over circles, which is this idea that in any networking event or scenario, you should always leave a space for somebody else to join the conversation.
00:10:39
Speaker
And that is an e like it's an ethos that we really try to share amongst our membership and anyone who's new to the event.
00:10:49
Speaker
And a third piece that we do at our conference is our connect dinners. So I've always hated the idea and the concept of these fly in fly out speakers that just come, they do their talk and then they're gone. And so a big piece of our conference is the speakers themselves host private dinners of a ratio of one speaker to 10 people. Wow. And our attendees get to pick which speaker they want to sit and have dinner with. And that is truly an incredible opportunity for them to have FaceTime and to connect with some incredible leaders that they may not otherwise have the opportunity to do.
00:11:28
Speaker
That sounds amazing. I do hate that when you go to an event and someone comes in, they like helicopter in and then they're boom, they're poof, they're out. That sounds cool. When you're talking about the horseshoe, can you say more about that when you say create space for someone else to join? Is that in so far as just conversational dynamics or something else a little more, a little different?
00:11:47
Speaker
It's literally from a physical perspective, making sure that you are the circle of which you are huddled in and having a conversation, that it's not closed off. It's not shoulder to shoulder. It's not, there is always a gap in the sense of if there is somebody that, and I witnessed this at the event on Tuesday, i was very cognizant of it keeping that circle open. And someone walked right up. They had heard, overheard the word whistler.
00:12:16
Speaker
And our conversation, and she lived in Squamish, which is right near Whistler. So she came up and said, oh, I just happened to overhear that you said Whistler. And then she became a kind of part of the conversation. And I think that if we had been closed circle, yeah you would have not felt as compelled to walk into that conversation.
00:12:38
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. Okay. What is something about your work or events and like event planning work in general that you all do that you feel like people misunderstand or perhaps have a lack of knowledge around?
Challenges and Adaptations in Events Industry
00:12:55
Speaker
There are many things, but the one thing that stands out in the events industry specifically is the cost of production. The cost of putting these events on have increased by 35 to 40% over the last 10 years.
00:13:09
Speaker
That is fascinating. What do you think is driving that increase? Yeah, so the increase in cost is being mainly driven to all of the the increase in cost to goods that we're used to. As an example, the cost of labor.
00:13:23
Speaker
Most people wouldn't fully understand that. and I'll break it down in sort of a conference sense. So the number of people and the number of staff that go into producing the conference isn't just limited to who works on my team. It's the people who work for the hotel. It's the people who work for the AV company. It's the people who work behind the cameras for the the videography and the photography teams.
00:13:47
Speaker
All of their hourlies have gone up significantly. The cost of the venue has gone up for a number of reasons. The cost of hotel has gone up for a number of reasons and the cost of food. So a lot of the reasons, the things that we see in everyday life that are already affecting our lives are compounded in some senses in the cost of event production because we have so many people going in to create these experiences.
00:14:16
Speaker
Oh my gosh, that's fascinating. How has your thinking about your work in industry changed over time? You've had such a long career from Whistler when you were 24 to now I imagine your mentality around it has evolved a bit or changed.
00:14:32
Speaker
Or maybe not. i don't know. Yeah. Well, I think that my mentality around the industry hasn't, at well, has it has shifted. i mean, a lot has changed in this industry. And the fact that the last 10 years, we went from two years of it, we couldn't even gather. It was not a cool job to be an event planner in 2020. I'll tell you that much. But I've stayed the course and I've stayed in this industry we...
00:14:56
Speaker
we The one thing that I love about this moment right now is is events and gatherings are having a moment. is They've come back. We've come back. We've realized how important they are.
00:15:09
Speaker
And so for me, I will continue to... be in this industry for as long as I know. The one thing that may change is eyes as I get older, i may shift what i'm what I'm doing a little bit more because you know I don't want to be a 65-year-old event planner running around. So I will be working, and i already am, working with some clients more strategically on planning out you know, as an example, the next five years of their locations and sourcing their venues and deciding on which countries they're going to take their conference. Because in addition to doing w b North conference and the W North membership community, i have my own event consulting and planning company called Bluebird. And so with that, I'm consulting with global companies on
00:16:01
Speaker
how to plan their conference, where to go And that's a piece of it that I'm super passionate about right now. And it has allowed me the opportunity to travel more and think more globally about production.
00:16:18
Speaker
What were you doing in 2020? How did you react and what happened for you when everything shut down? Unlike what a lot of people think where lot of people were like, oh, you must have been had lots of time on your hands.
00:16:32
Speaker
We were losing six figures a month trying to stay afloat. and trying to keep our staff so that we could get through this.
00:16:45
Speaker
We pivoted. We were actually five four weeks away from doing our conference in Whistler when everything shut down. Our conference was in April that year, and we had to cancel it.
00:16:59
Speaker
And we couldn't afford to give people their money back. And so we had already paid the vendors. It was too close for comfort. But what we did do was we had built our community.
00:17:11
Speaker
Membership community was already online, which was great. We had been doing virtual training and virtual workshops for two years prior. So that piece was fairly easy for us. And we just doubled down on that. And we moved into a cadence of doing weekly events, a couple of virtual summits a year. And we ended up executing on our conference completely virtually in October, 2020, putting together incredible gift boxes that we shipped to everybody. We created a six week course in about four weeks that we allowed everybody to leadership course that we allowed everybody to utilize. So we,
00:17:48
Speaker
provided as much value to those ticket ticket holders as we could. And we remained online for almost two years after that. And although it wasn't the best best revenue making years, it was from a brand awareness perspective, the biggest growth that we saw. Wow.
00:18:07
Speaker
Incredible. That's wild. all
Future Plans and Women's Leadership Focus
00:18:10
Speaker
right. One thing I want to ask, you've hinted at some things, but I was going to ask what you are focused on right now. So we have, through our journey of launching our membership, we went into being a chapter model.
00:18:25
Speaker
We were producing almost 80 to 100 events a year for a while there. And what we've really doubled down on, and we will continue to focus on in the next 18 months to two years, is curating destination women's leadership gatherings. so these are opportunities for women to travel to a different location, be it the conference in Whistler, which is coming up May 6th to 8th, or another experience that we are doing for the second year is we are doing a leadership delegation to London. So a cohort of 20 leaders who apply to participate
00:19:06
Speaker
from North America will fly over to London in early December this year and participate in a leadership summit that we do at the Canadian Embassy. And they will participate and in a series of other experiences with this cohort.
00:19:22
Speaker
And those are the types of moments and the types of development opportunities that we are seeing that are really moving the needle for getting women to that next level of leadership and also keeping them motivated to stay in the game because there's a lot of...
00:19:40
Speaker
distraction and there's a lot of pull for executive women to leave the workforce right now. And we see it as our obligation to support these women and keep them so keep them in the game.
00:19:54
Speaker
I have a few questions off the back of that and it's resonating with me. When you say thing I'm curious about when you're doing so much program planning and I presume like being responsive to what the women that you're supporting want to hear, like what are some of the themes that you're hearing that they want more guidance, development and support around?
00:20:14
Speaker
So i think an interesting development over the last year is a lot of women are looking for more purpose in their corporate roles. And so the idea of conversations around social impact keep coming to the surface. And so we've had quite a few speakers and a lot of content around social impact. Yeah.
00:20:36
Speaker
A little bit maybe also on the personal side is angel investing. And these are women who a lot of people have a preconceived notion that you need to have $100K or $200,000 to be an angel investor. But the reality is you can be an angel investor with as little as $5,000 to $10,000. And so this is an opportunity that a lot of women don't realize is rather than they feel like they're their revenue or their personal growth from a salary perspective is limited to just their corporate role and that they have to start a side hustle to develop that extra revenue on the side. The reality is there's a lot of businesses out there that are looking for angel investment and angel investment and is actually a really good route as a quote unquote side hustle for women to make extra money and revenue on the side.
00:21:33
Speaker
Fascinating. I feel like you really, it's funny when you were talking about, now i want to ask you about what you think some of the forces are that are somewhat pushing women out of, you didn't say pushing women out the workforce, but that some women in exec roles are feeling Like, I don't know if this is where I want to be right now. Can you say more about that? What are those forces shaping that decision?
00:21:57
Speaker
For sure. So there's ah ah there a very solid, there's very solid evidence that I see on the daily in our community that the systems around corporate leadership are still not working for women.
00:22:10
Speaker
There's the, obviously the daycare and the childcare struggle is real. And it's not something that anyone that I need to go into detail on. Everybody's aware of it, but there's also, there's other elements and there's other life stages that women are going through where they're struggling. And some of it's menopause and having health challenges as related to menopause.
00:22:34
Speaker
Some of it's getting to a life stage where you've got teenagers that really demand a lot of their time. And that time is very precious to these women because they see them struggling through personal issues and things that they want to be able to have time with their children.
00:22:53
Speaker
And that key time is like between three and five or three and six when those kids get home from high school. Yeah. And yeah there are a lot of organizations that provide flexibility, but oftentimes as soon as your kids get old enough to look after themselves, there is a lot of stigma around this idea of leaving the office early to look after or to tend to teenage children.
00:23:19
Speaker
Because they are needed in a different way. And so I think some of these, the some of these nuances that are happening and lack of resources sometimes in the high schools and the education system. So the parents have to be there to be the resource for them.
00:23:36
Speaker
They're having to make decisions between their children's health and their children's outlook and their business. And so i think there are a number of different life stages that are not always considered and a number of different shifts that happen, not just in women's lives, but in men as well. And it's just parenthood in general.
00:23:55
Speaker
And then the other aspect I would say, going back to that comment around social impact, is some women are just leaving the workforce because they are feeling like their job is not making an impact. And they are craving an opportunity and they'll take a salary cut if they have to in order to make and more of an impact with their time.
00:24:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for outlining all of that. That's incredibly interesting. Let's see. i know we don't have too much time left. I want to ask one slightly more playful question, which is when you were a kid, do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up?
Personal Reflection and Invitation
00:24:36
Speaker
So i This question comes up and I always think back to, we always did a lot of plays as children. And I know i remember i wanted to set the stage. Like I was in charge of putting where the furniture was and like making sure the microphone, like the imaginary microphone was in the right spot. And where's the sound system? And I want to pick the music. And so there were early signs of yeah wanting to be an event planner. I think at one point,
00:25:10
Speaker
I thought that I was going to be an interior designer. and I don't know what that moment was because I am like, that is not my jam anymore. and I would not recommend a renovation to anybody. but Have we just gone through one?
00:25:24
Speaker
But I've always wanted to and be in a position that I'm bringing people together. it's just And I've always been – I was a social convener in high school, which basically means I planned the prom. I planned the dances. I planned the open mic nights. So as early as high school, it was pretty evident I was going to be an a event planner.
00:25:45
Speaker
That's so interesting. It's not what I expected you just say for some reason. I don't know what I expected, but, man, it seems like it's been in you from the jump, whatever that is. All right. For people who are listening and they're interested to join – They just want to follow you.
00:26:00
Speaker
Where can we send them? And we'll throw all this in the show notes too. For sure So they can find more information about the membership at our website, which is wnorthconnect.com.
00:26:11
Speaker
And some of our leadership gatherings are a great way to get connected with this community. Our conference is coming up in May at the Four Seasons in Whistler. And I would also say, follow me on LinkedIn, drop me a line. I'm super open and I try to get back. I'm more responsive, it seems, on my LinkedIn inbox than I am on regular inbox. So come say hi.
00:26:34
Speaker
All right. Shout out LinkedIn. Okay. We'll throw all that in there. You're such an incredible interview. I'm really grateful for your time and I'm so happy that we got to have this conversation. Appreciate it. Thanks, Meredith. I appreciate the opportunity.
00:26:46
Speaker
was great chatting. All right. Thanks.