Queen of the Scene at Your Service w/ Renee Rhinehart

foreign [Music] podcast today we have with us Renee Reinhardt how are you Renee I'm good good morning to you good morning thank you so much for joining us today Happy New Year to you as well so if you don't mind can you just in your own words um describe what you do sure what don't I do no I'm just kidding yes mention it all so I've been an event planner by trade for over 15 years I own events by Renee which is a wedding and event planning company that Services the Philadelphia tri-state area 10 years ago I said there's got to be another path I can take but still stay in the event World um I had clients coming to me saying I know you planned my daughter's big wedding but I need a bartender and I had such a a great Network then from doing years of networking I still do but I was like there's got to be a company that I can start that appeals to more people versus just needing a wedding planner or a high-end event planner so I rolled out party host helpers 10 years ago I thought it would just be a little sister to my first company and now we're Nationwide we service over 30 States we have over 20 000 people that work for us in our system um so we are bartenders servers General helpers registration helpers coat check attendants any type of events everything you need yeah and it's all a la carte um you know we have clients that hire us every single weekend we have clients that hire us once a year so how does it what is the company name again party host helpers party host helpers so is this a website where people can go and just pick what they need and check out yeah so they they choose what they need they well actually they enter their event details and they say we need a bartender or server they provide details but a lot of we're a little bit different than some of our competitors where we really do still have the human touch we have great technology but I have a team of six regional directors who are the in between so if you're hiring someone for a kid's birthday party you're not going to want someone there that doesn't like kids or doesn't have any experience with children right so we really do our best to hand pick and match you with the right person to do the job what kind of party or what kind of event are you guys um mostly known for like who what type of Industry uses you guys I started thinking this would solely be residential like the moms staying around the playground oh my gosh we're having a birth we're having a dinner party um this weekend we need some help but it quickly expanded into two other categories catering so not not us providing food but Caterers especially post coven they need help on their team so I have Caterers Nationwide who might call me and say I need 30 people this weekend so supplementing their teams and then the corporate business I mean we're at festivals we service a lot of great universities on the East Coast especially where they might be having you know presidents dinners or high-end alumni events and they can't necessarily use their cafeteria staff they want a different level of service or their cafeteria staff they have 10 call-outs that week and they need some stuff you know some supplemental staff so it's really across the board obviously we're coming off of a big holiday season where we were able to help a lot of our residential clients which I love hearing that I love hearing from grandmothers and and and parents saying oh we actually could enjoy our holidays because we had someone that helped with the dishes and and put everything away and we woke up to a beautiful clean kitchen thanks to your staff amazing so just to dumb it down for the audience and myself um basically in the pre world right so before your website before your company for example someone is doing a party they would go to Craigslist or they'll go somewhere and and try to find people in Yellow Pages for example or Google people what they need if they need bartenders or hosts or waiters for example um and they'll find someone called people up they'll come for their event right and they don't know who they're bringing in they have no idea what's the background all that kind of stuff in your world now basically they just go to one place they sign up for free I assume um and then they go in and then once they find what they need through the the services that you offer they basically if they want to talk to someone they could talk to someone from your team if they don't want to talk to anyone you guys do the vetting and provide them with the right people at the right time during their event they just show up to the event is it that simple yeah we provide a quote so you know all the bill if they're our company and the helper shows up they get the picture of the helper leading up to the event they get okay good if they want to reach out but many times it's just you know they see what the person looks like they show up they do their job that's awesome so how did you how did you like think of creating a a platform that has everything um you know where someone can just go in a la carte and find what they want and just make the selection and check out was there a story behind this yeah I feel like a lot of people know event planners but there wasn't a big company like this and we do have competitors especially over the last 10 years and sometimes our biggest competitors are someone hiring their neighbor up the street the high school kid to poor drinks you know yeah or or using a mom-and-pop company that's like ours so I think parties helpers is different where we have such the the variety of staff to choose from where professional are our technology is great and um for me the idea of running a company that scaled so quickly via like a spreadsheet like I started the first couple months I luckily I had the first company and had a little bit of capital so I was able to invest in the in parties helpers when I started to create a nice website to get the back end technology that we needed and it's we're we have a SAS platform now which is great and I don't know what we would have done without it and we're really I was actually talking to my team yesterday about this we're so lucky with technology we're such a technology-based company and all the changes and improvements every I mean we use lots of different formats and platforms and it's it's how we could scale this if I didn't have technology I would not have been able to scale like this yeah technology is wonderful especially when it works uh but creating yeah we've been through years where it doesn't work too we have you know yeah it makes you you could definitely scale with technology right so this is wonderful um can you uh let us know like as growing up as a child or growing up and you know in school for example did you always have a drive for entrepreneurship so I don't know if it was a drive for entrepreneurship back then I think it was a drive for I had passion and it took me a while to figure out where it needed to go right like what was my passion about in theater I did in high school I did theater I really liked the idea of of leading up to the performance for practicing making it a beautiful production which to me is kind of like of that planning I didn't realize it then but I love the lead up and the planning and then it's over and you're like oh man but then I'm on to the next day so I studied public relations and Communications in college and back then I mean I'm not that old but I'm 41 so I didn't my eyes weren't open then to hospitality programs at large universities I went to a small liberal arts school so there weren't a lot of learning about events planning opportunities in front of me so I got internships so I could learn more about events we live outside of Philadelphia so the biggest mall on the east coast is the King of Prussia Mall so I got an internship there and I helped them doing events and I worked at different charities and I just sort of immersed myself in anything events related and I think what happened was I kind of just you know I I was hitting my head at my first job out of college there wasn't much more I could do I knew I wanted to do something on my own and I'm trying to remember back then it was like 2007. I think just the idea of doing this myself I I think 2007 was when more women empowerment movements were starting I mean I never felt and I still don't feel that I don't have the same opportunities in my industry but I think you know I was seeing more women starting companies and I had a few friends that were entrepreneurs that were males and I saw the flexibility and the excitement that they had and I think that I got bit by that bug a little bit and I said well I can just do this myself so I started events by Renee with a friend since then obviously we've split it was just our own companies but the recession hit in 2008 so I had one year of business under my belt and then the recession hit so um I think that's when I really put myself in high gear to be an entrepreneur because I'm like all right this is really what I want because I was so upset when I had to go back to babysitting working public relations jobs finding more stability but I always knew that I would get here I just had to realize that it took patience and time so I always I just I did what I had to do to keep food on the table to keep money coming in I was a single woman you know trying to make ends meet but you know I'd be in the parking lot of my day job talking to my Brides that I was working with that weekend so I think that once I figured out what I wanted there was no stopping me there I don't know if there was a turning point when I decided to be an entrepreneur I think it was more about wanting to be flexible with my my life knowing I want to eventually be a mom and have you know the flexibility of taking a heart of story time or going on a class trip we're not there yet but yeah no rain is uh it's the time and and money freedom you know that gets everyone into the into the entrepreneurship or most of us you know um or our emergency sometimes we sorry or just our aversion to being told what to do but then then we have then we have a lot a lot more a lot more um people telling us what to do when it comes to customers right so yes yeah that's true yeah exactly you know and um you know it's great that you you you took this leap and you continued to to push yourself towards making this a success because the more people we have uh doing entrepreneurship the better it is you know I have to be just love the the fact that you coming up with creativity and bringing that creativity to the world right so it's very important especially um the people that are doing this you know the people that are actually taking the risk and taking the steps is uh you know it's a different type of breed I think when it comes to entrepreneurship but um when you were actually running this business and you saw you know that you were expanding was there anything specific that you were doing when you were expanding the business and making it grow into different states anything that can help our audience uh with your journey that could help them yes absolutely so it was a big turning point for me when I started party host helpers because you have to remember I was eight years trying to grow events by Renee eight years of having jobs babysitting but still running my company and I want entrepreneurs to know that it's not going to happen overnight unless you're super lucky and it takes time it takes networking it takes grit so be patient with the process and I was for eight years and the turning point for me was in 2015 when I had enough events by RNA business on the books that I thought that I could get rid of my 30 hour job 30 hour a week job as a public relations person associate whatever working for the man and I think that gave me the confidence that when I quickly after that launched party host helpers that I felt Unstoppable like I can do this let's keep going let's not take risks I spent eight years developing myself professionally developing my brand developing this company here's another company that seems like it's gonna just blow up it's a no-brainer that this is going to do well and I just think that that I had that confidence from eight years of struggle the belief and belief so when I thought okay party host helpers will just be a side business for events by Renee I don't know what told me to do this I don't know if someone told me or if I told myself but instead of having a local number for party host helpers I had a 1-800 number well two months into starting party host helpers we got a call from a client in Los Angeles because they got they got our name confused with a company's name in Los Angeles that was similar to ours so maybe the old me would have said sorry we don't Service Los Angeles here's some people that do instead I said yeah we can help you no problem oh we didn't have a team out there I had one colleague out there that I called I said hey I need someone to make mojitos in Hollywood for this private party this woman really wants to make it nice he did he did a great job um a look um a Philadelphia newspaper a couple years ago did a business story on me and she put that picture of him in the Hollywood Hills pouring the Mojitos because that was really the launch of opening my eyes to not just my region realizing that I could scale this and then just figuring out how the heck I could scale it and not being scared hmm yeah it's the you know it's um something happened something happened within when you got that contact right and you you know we we there's that moment where you went ahead and you actually said you know what let's just figure this out instead of saying hey you know what I'm not available in your local area right so exactly there's something that happened it made a huge difference didn't it to your business yes it did and I will remember where I was I was in Texas I was working for events by Renee but it was a corporate gig that I was helping with registration for pharmaceutical meetings that week I was sitting in my hotel room at the Westin in Dallas and the call came through and I was like all right I can do it I can do it let's do it so that's great and since then it just kept expanding in different rooms did you actually start promoting in different states than from that point on you know back then the marketing that I did was very natural the biggest decisions that I had to make were where do I want to hire a regional director to manage territories and really the customers told me where they wanted party host helpers you know we opened up we kept adding SEO to our website it just that we don't have a lot of competitors like us or we didn't back then and calls and emails were naturally coming in for business I mean I get can I get Canadian inquiries all the time and I have to say but you know I never thought we'd do business in Seattle Portland I've never been to Portland but I knew someone who lived there who wanted to help me launch it she jumped in and launched it um it's it's kind of that's how I've I know it's not very strategic but it's I listen to where the needs were and started building out territories from there and then finding the staff to work it and then our biggest cities right now that we focus a lot of time on marketing and where I have people on the ground are obviously the Philadelphia tri-state area obviously the New York City metro area which includes the Hamptons North Jersey Chicago La DC Arizona so the big cities are definitely where a lot of our business is but you know we have events in places like Ohio and we just did our first event in Hawaii a couple weeks ago nice yeah yeah so did you find like during this entire Journey with the company um were you dealing with a lot of Doubt or were you with a lot of faith like did you feel within that you know what I got this Renee like I'm I'm doing this like there's you got a little hiccups here and there about how to did it derail you like can you give us a picture of what was going on in your inner world I think that it happens so quickly that I didn't have time to be scared of Faith yeah I had faith and I was pleasantly surprised by the numbers and the business and how it was unfolding that I didn't think negatively at all so yeah now I mean 10 years right what kind of pickups yeah it's like what's gonna happen this week but it's really and I tell my team this too it's about how we handle the hiccups and it's about how we make them right customer facing business is not always rainbows and sunshine especially when you have 20 000 people working under you yeah that's actually that's a huge number and I I definitely have to congratulate you on reaching the heights that you reached thank you um you know for me for me that was a biggest switch um you know in the business world uh from when I actually believed in something and had faith and did the work and when I doubted and worried and I did the work there was a huge difference in results so that's why I wanted to kind of get in there and and find out more about you and what was going on right so that's great thank you so much for sharing yeah would you mind kind of sharing with us what your innermost superpower is that got you to this point sure I think my people skills I think my people skills a lot of people told me that I can walk in a room and talk to a billionaire the same way that I would talk to someone that's pouring the drinks I think that I find that I'm very relatable I love people they tend to be drawn to me I don't know why no just and I think that that's helped me with client relations colleague colleagues being a leader in my company as well as networking that I do no that's excellent excellent thank you so much for sharing that Renee appreciate you taking the time to come on our show love hearing these stories love the fact that I'm able to share your story with others thank you uh yeah thanks again for coming on the show and audience appreciate you as always thank you so much for coming to our our show again today uh with Renee her information as always we'll be in the show notes check out her website if you're planning an event if you're doing any kind of a party check out what she has to offer you know and uh definitely it's it's something when we support fellow entrepreneurs in their businesses it brings in a lot more growth into our world as well as just everything is connected and it's just it just feels good when we support each other and definitely um I love the fact that you you guys support us as well in the show and sharing these episodes and the comments the reviews appreciate you as always thank you again and thank you Renee [Music]