Name: Garry Phillips, President and Founder
Company Name: Visionary Golf Events
Founded: 2006
How have you changed your business in response to COVID-19?
As a San Diego resident, managing events in San Diego, and throughout the country, I have a unique perspective on how each city is addressing safety concerns. My key takeaway is while our golf course partners are critical to our event success, the protocols in assuring a safe environment is now more important than ever. It is imperative that you have partners who can properly institute new plans and protocols to ensure a safe and successful event with the ability to communicate changes quickly. Every city is dealing with the pandemic as the state and local municipalities dictate and that includes golf courses. Your golf course partners need to have a clear vision statement regarding COVID-19 inclusive of caring for their associates, guests and vendor partners. We have requested those vision statements from our partners to better communicate the standards of the course with our clientele base. This is a critical step for Visionary to assure a successful and safe event for our clients, their guests and vendor partners in this COVID-19 season.
What keeps you hopeful?
What keeps me hopeful is my personal faith and the faith in our hospitality industry leaders in San Diego and throughout the country. From personal experience and extensive work history in the hospitality industry in San Diego, I have an abundance of confidence in the skill set, experience, and creativity of our professionals to get us through this current challenge. History speaks volumes of our industry’s tenacity in overcoming national and economic challenges and we as an industry will succeed. We all play a part in assuring a great comeback.
What is your advice to other companies?
My greatest advice is to do your due diligence so you can select trusted partners in your events. It can be the difference between your event’s success or your event’s failure. At Visionary, empathy is critical to understanding a great partnership. Many have stories during this COVID-19 season, and listening will help build an enduring bridge of trust.
What is the one thing you are looking forward to doing when things return to normal-ish?
As we say, “Vision is not seeing things as they are, but as they will be.” Zoom is fine for now, but I can’t wait to get off Zoom calls and meet hotel and hospitality partners, face to face again. It will be refreshing to see smiles without a mask, discuss their excitement for their events, and help support their dreams and visions for their guests and clients. I really miss that human connection.
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