The company Meridian Hostesses is a hostess agency with a long history and hundreds of congresses and events held, which has become what it is today, thanks to the perseverance and strength of a great entrepreneur.
Elizabeth Rodriguez is currently Managing Director of Meridiana Azafatas: “My role in the agency at the moment is focused on commercial management. We have a great team that is in charge of managing the logistics, administration and human resources. I love this job because no two days are the same, there are always new challenges”.
To start the day, the attending entrepreneurs shared, and in the form of elevator pitch, what their project consists of and they were able to leave their professional card. So that, in this way, after finishing the session they could network and generate synergies between all of them more effectively.
Isabel told us how she left her job to dedicate herself to her passion, initially she had the support of her family to set up her company, until she gradually consolidated, locally in Seville, as a benchmark in event management. For personal reasons, he moved to Madrid where he found the help and support of the network of business incubators of the Madrid City Council, consolidates its business model and establishes Meridiana Azafatas.
He also told us about his expansion process: “We grew and I saw the need to hire staff. Right now we are 10 people and we are involved in a strategic consulting process to improve the company's processes and productivity. Our expansion plan includes opening an office and starting events in Barcelona. Our main strategy is to sell more to clients we already have and not just look for new clients”.
He emphasized that they are currently pivoting their business model slightly “We evaluate staff based on performance and attitude. We are going from being a hostess agency to a talent agency, in order to provide qualified and motivated staff in the events we manage”.
Regarding the core of her business, personnel management, Isabel tells us how: “The emotional part of your staff is very important. How do we get people to be happy and not leave? How do we retain talent? Treating people how you want them to treat you, and always their feedback and opinion continuously.
Speaking of the business and how we must differentiate ourselves from the competition: "We must know what our differential value is, in the case of Meridiana Azafatas it is that we make an evaluation of each person that we make available to the event so that in one or two days we are capable of accurately billing an event”.
Asking Isabel about the issue of work-life balance: "Family life work-life balance is not easy, I think we have superpowers and we can all do a lot during the day (being productive and organizing)"
By way of conclusion, she ended her speech by pointing out that: “You are marking your own path, I always try to make both myself and the people I work with like what we do. I do this because it makes me happy and because it gives me a lot of freedom.”
Once the exhibition was over, the attendees shared a coffee and a session of networking in the common area Carabanchel business incubator.
The event was broadcast live on our Facebook page, you can check the session video.
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