Managing Meetings At: Grant Thornton LLP--Accounting For Contracts, Savings

Three years after establishing its first companywide travel and meetings management program, Chicago-based accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP saved more than $800,000 in meetings spending in 2001 and 2002 through centralized and more comprehensive contract negotiations.

Midmarket Grant Thornton, which currently spends about $6 million on U.S. booked air volume and about $2.1 million on domestic meetings, was able to consolidate control over the procurement of group travel of its 50 domestic branches without the issuance of a mandate, said national travel and meetings manager Cheryl Geib.

Additionally, the company has converged its group and transient hotel programs, insisting that preferred individual properties consider group volume when establishing transient room rates.

The roots of Grant Thornton's program extend only to June 2000, when Geib was hired to create the company's first national travel program. At that time, the company's meetings operations largely were held under the confines of its strategic learning division, which accounted for a significant chunk of all face-to-face meetings.

"When I was hired, I started to realize how much of our overall travel was group-driven," she said. "About 50 percent to 60 percent of our T&E spending then was due to client-driven travel, and there wasn't much we could do about that. We also realized that there's negotiating power in the meetings business, especially when it's melded to travel. I'm in purchasing. If you don't work as if it's one commodity, you lose your leverage. Consolidating was an easy sell. It was a strategic procurement decision."

Geib's department took over meetings operations that August and changed the internal meetings reporting structure, with Geib at its top. However, as Grant Thornton is an accounting and consulting firm—with 50 offices in the United States—the company culture is not conducive to mandates and none would be issued for meetings protocol. Geib quickly realized that it was necessary to change the company's culture surrounding the methods in which meetings were sourced and managed.

"We launched a campaign to increase the level of credibility of the meetings staff because they were seen as order-takers and not consultants," Geib said. "They were knowledgeable and experienced, but they were not encouraged to give advice. The atmosphere was prevalent, and it was one in which meetings management was strictly clerical and not strategic."

To convince internal meetings sponsors and administrative assistants to shift control of meetings sourcing to the new travel and meetings department, Geib instituted several new initiatives: An internal Web page, including an automated registration database and information on how to book travel, was created, as was a 12-page internal marketing plan to alert admins to the new tools and assistance—and the resultant time savings—available to them.

"We knew no mandate was possible, so we had to create something in a way that they would have little choice but to see the logic," Geib said. "We created a marketing plan that was based on the objectives of the firm. It was vital. We had to do that to get anything else off the ground." The Grant Thornton travel and meetings department spent nearly one year creating and marketing the necessary tools to further its control of corporate meetings and their contracts before overall economic weakness prompted the company in August 2001 to recommend the avoidance of unnecessary travel and nonessential meetings. Combined with the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2001, the visibility of Geib's department quickly increased.

"People started to call, and we knew the marketing was working," she said. "They needed someone to talk to about this, and my consultants took on that role."

Today, Geib's department annually handles about 75 meetings of fewer than 100 attendees—probably about 75 percent of the company's actual total—and about nine larger meetings.

Gaining control of meeting contracts not only has enabled Geib's department to better negotiate terms on an individual meeting basis, but it also has allowed the company to insert contractual language allowing for the rebooking of canceled events. Both play key factors in the metrics the company employs to determine the effectiveness of its meetings management philosophies.

Geib's department calculates all negotiated savings, including cancellation and attrition fee avoidance and savings on ancillary charges like meeting room rental and audiovisual fees. The company also takes into account the negotiated rebooking of canceled meetings and the avoidance of cancellation fees into its metrics.

According to these metrics, the department saved more than $260,000 in 2002 and more than $544,000 in 2001, the latter number admittedly skewed by the cancellation, and the avoidance of its fee, of Grant Thornton's annual 2001 partners' meeting, its largest of the year, that was canceled in the wake of Sept. 11.

Geib's department also consistently has sought areas in which travel and meetings management could be combined. "We constantly converge, and we created a hotel program based on it," she said. Currently, in the 12 cities that host the most Grant Thornton travel, the company has developed contracts with a preferred individual property in each location with a transient rate that takes into account meetings volume. The company still negotiates meetings contracts on an event-by-event basis.

"There were so many transient rooms booked that were actually booked for meetings that we have to combine both for the full value," Geib said. "Only one property has ever said no to us." In 50 other cities, properties are recommended to Grant Thornton travelers and meetings sponsors as able to meet corporate needs.

Grant Thornton currently does not outsource meetings management function. That could change as the $2.1 million program grows, Geib said. "We may look to automate with a technology company when we get to $3 million, and maybe outsource at $5 million," she said. "Those are our benchmarks."

The company also has a vigorous remote conferencing program in which Geib's departments is atypically heavily involved. Following the cancellation of the 2001 partners' meeting, corporate senior executives used an internal Webconferencing tool supported by San Jose, Calif.-based Webconferencer WebEx Communications. That communication raised the profile of remote conferencing and prompted Geib's department to learn about the tools and when they should be recommended.

"We all became attuned to the technology and its capabilities," she said. "It's been a wonderful marriage."