Managing Meetings At: American 20th Century - Merger Yields Streamlining

Louise Felsher, a planner with a 10-year track record as an international planner and marketing expert, has laid the groundwork for a more consolidated approach to meetings purchases in a newly merged financial services company responsible for more than $54 billion in combined assets annually.

The restructuring of meetings services--positioned within the 100-person marketing group--occurred in the aftermath of the 1995 merger of 20th Century Mutual Funds and Benham Group. Felsher took the position at the company, now called American 20th Century Investments, in December 1996. Post-merger, the company, with offices in Kansas City and Mountain View, Calif., has become the fourth-largest no-load mutual fund organization in the United States, serving 2 million shareholders through direct marketing.

With an international perspective gained at Cortext, a medical training institute, Felsher has helped to shape a policy and has guided the meeting planning department's new agenda, which is to plan seminars and run internal meetings more cost effectively.

The company also has restructured service delivery by using teams of specialists to plan trade shows, seminars and "priority shareholder events." Instead of a single planner handling a variety of meeting types, the department is divided so that someone handles only seminars, another planner deals only with board meetings and someone else oversees cookie-cutter meetings.

Felsher was part of a group of marketing and human resources personnel that helped to blend two "very disparate corporate cultures"--at least with respect to influencing seminar planning, which takes up most of her time and is the company's lifeline to its public. In doing so, she already has managed to put her own managerial stamp on the financial company's operations, saving it about 25 percent of its 1996 hotel budget and about one-third of its audiovisual costs in her first few months on the job.

The situation that Felsher inherited was that of a half-consolidated company with two very different styles of purchasing meeting services.

Benham, which is generally viewed by the financial community as more aggressive in terms of its approach and offerings, had a more structured approach to planning as an extension of its regularly scheduled financial information seminars held for the general public. 20th Century represents a collection of funds that is viewed as more traditional than Benham's.

Felsher estimated that before the merger, Benham spent $250,000 on air and $700,000 on hotels and conference centers for about 20 trade shows, 30 seminars and 300 to 500 estimated internal meetings that include retreats, town hall gatherings and board meetings.

Although it relied upon the expertise of Maritz Travel for its transient travel negotiation and management, as well as limited handling of some group events and incentive trips, the company had little idea of the volume of its expenditures or who was doing the planning.

Now that will change. Felsher has spent the past few months evaluating the Benham operations to determine who does what and at what cost.

Her first area of focus was seminar planning, a program developed by James Benham when he started the business. "We were trying to identify costs and aid in planning during a period of extreme turnover in the organization," she said. "We had a lot of new employees coming in. There was also the ushering in of this whole new team approach, which touched on all departments. It was a very exciting and hectic period."

She already has made a decision to make an investment in new projectors and Power Point presentation systems, which will require a cash outlay initially but will result in significant savings as the development of customized charts and graphs from outside vendors are eliminated. In addition, Felsher has determined that use of suburban properties will replace downtown venues, saving on meeting room costs and incidentals such as parking.

Felsher also has begun initiating an orchestrated group buy for hotel services, although previous efforts to work with the national sales office at a major chain failed to enable leveraging of the company's significant volume. Still, Felsher is hopeful that tenacious negotiating will bring the hotel in line or attract another player.

Next, she will develop a policy that will slowly coax the organization--which has about 3,000 employees in the marketing, operations, management information systems, portfolio management and customer service divisions--into cost-effective submission when it comes to spending on hotels and food and beverage services, for non-seminar meetings as well.

"We want a common agenda and style of execution," she said. "Basically, we want to build on the efforts we began this year and get a bigger cross-section of the organization relying upon us as a partner."

She and her team also intend to evaluate technology solutions, which she hopes to have in place by 1998. Currently, the group uses PC-based software to track post-event expenditures.

"We will be very cautious and thorough in our investigation before we even think about making an investment that substantial," she said. No decisions have yet been made about a vendor.

Also on Felsher's agenda is putting policies in place to register all the meetings throughout the organization, not just the more consolidated Benham half; and evaluating expenditures for corporate retreats, management meetings and other events--again, with an eye toward partnering with existing administrative staff to help them make informed choices.

Although she would like to develop a preferred supplier program, nothing official is on the drawing board yet.

Concurrently, Felsher will choose a planner to represent the organization at its Kansas City headquarters. The planner will have the challenging job of "presenting the Mountain View office's position" to personnel not used to dealing with an additional planning layer.

As part of the marketing function, planning retains a service-oriented approach.

"Even as we expand our reach within the company, there won't be mandates or hard sells," Felsher said. "We are hoping to simply let our internal clients know we're here and that we can assist them. We hope to register all meetings and make suggestions for cost savings with greater frequency as the program continues to roll out."

While the group will talk softly, it will gradually take on more of a hands-on role. Instead of usurping logistical responsibilities from administrative assistants, Felsher wants to get a very systematic sense of the costs and savings opportunities.

"We want them to partner with us, pick up the phone and tell us what their intentions are, and we can get back to them with a few alternatives and let them decide how the program will be handled--what venue will be used, for example," she said. "But at least they will be able to rely on low-cost options.