Proximity is a skill that decays when unused, and it cannot be acquired later at a higher title.At twenty-two, Erwin turned down investment banking and management consulting, calling both work performed from outside the business rather than inside it. His reasoning: he wanted to be in the middle of the fight, and that seat is not available from outside it. Twenty-five years later, running a thirteen-thousand-person company, he still works the trade show aisle himself rather than the head office, arguing an afternoon on the floor delivers more intelligence than any report reaching his desk. The lesson generalizes past his own career: proximity to the actual work is a discipline that must be practiced continuously, since rank alone does not restore it once lost.For executives who assume seniority automatically preserves access to what is actually happening on the ground.
A functioning business protects itself from the very changes it needs.Erwin became CEO in August 2020 with the company effectively dark, monthly revenue down from a two and a half billion dollar run rate to single millions. He calls the timing an advantage rather than a setback: leading a healthy business at a healthy moment breeds paralysis, because every instinct says don't touch what is working. Catastrophe removed that fear entirely, since there was nothing left to protect. The principle extends past his own situation: an organization waiting for calm before it remakes itself will wait indefinitely, because the calm itself is what prevents the change from happening.For leaders inheriting a stable organization who wonder why bold moves keep getting deferred.
When there is no financial argument to make, presence and honesty are the only currency left.In 2020, Erwin was asking a workforce to stay on roughly half their take-home pay, in an industry the pandemic had shut down entirely. He made no financial case, because none existed. What he offered instead was the plain fact of where the company stood and a commitment to show up every day while it found out what came next. Eleven thousand people stayed. The mechanism was not incentive; it was sustained presence combined with a refusal to dress up the situation. That combination, held long enough to be believed, functioned as compensation when actual compensation could not.For leaders managing a team through a period with no good news and no budget to soften it.
The most common advice a team can give a client is also the least technical: start talking sooner.Erwin's operations teams report the same recommendation more than any other, and it has nothing to do with equipment or staging. It is to begin the conversation about what an event is actually trying to accomplish long before the budget and the run of show are locked. He treats rehearsal the same way, as a forcing function that surfaces unresolved questions about purpose rather than a line item billed by the hour. Most of what looks like an execution failure on the day traces back to a conversation that happened too late to change anything. Timing the conversation is itself the strategy.For teams that treat planning conversations as a formality to clear before the real production work starts.
Close every conversation by asking what you can do for the other person.Erwin ends nearly every meeting, call, and one-on-one with the same question, and he is aware his team finds it funny. He also describes how its meaning shifts across a career: early on it solves someone's immediate problem, in the middle it signals the relationship is not purely self-interested, and from the top it sets the actual terms of what a leadership job is for. The technique is not the question itself but the repetition. Performed consistently enough, a single habit becomes the visible shape of how an organization treats people, without needing to be written down anywhere.For leaders looking for one repeatable habit that compounds into culture.
Place staff inside the client's building before the event has a shape.Encore's acquisition of the agency FIRST puts more than eight hundred people inside client offices rather than at venues, present while an event is still an idea and before the city, venue, or format has been chosen. For a company that had spent eighty-nine years arriving only after the consequential decisions were made, this buys a seat at the moment those decisions actually happen. The technique generalizes beyond this one deal: influence over an outcome is largest before the outcome has a name, and the way to capture that influence is physical positioning inside the room where the naming happens, not better service after the fact.For any vendor relationship structured to begin after the client's key decisions are already locked.
Let a client's experience travel with them instead of restarting at every location.A network of 2,200 venues does not, by default, remember anyone; each property starts from zero with every new client. Erwin's answer is a system where what a client wanted last time, in a different city and a different building, arrives with the next team automatically. He frames the untapped value in the business in one sentence: if Encore only knew what Encore knew. The technique treats four hundred fifty thousand events a year as one dataset rather than four hundred fifty thousand disconnected transactions, and turns institutional memory from something a single loyal employee carries into something the whole network carries.For any multi-location business where every branch effectively meets each customer for the first time.
Read where the senior people physically stand on an ordinary day, not the org chart.At twenty-four, watching an energy company come apart from the inside, Erwin's takeaway was spatial rather than ethical: the people who had built the business were never anywhere near where the actual business happened. He has since made a habit of applying the same test to any organization he wants to understand, including his own, by checking whether leadership spends its time where the work occurs or where the work is merely reported on. The technique is diagnostic rather than moral: it treats physical location as a more reliable signal of an organization's real priorities than its stated structure.For anyone assessing whether a company's leadership is actually engaged with its core operation.
Leadership is an observable fact of followership, not a title.Erwin uses the word constantly inside his company and defines it entirely outside the org chart: the credibility that comes from soft skills, storytelling, authenticity, trust, and building something people believe in that is bigger than themselves. He locates the origin of this instinct in his own childhood as the oldest of four boys, describing the job of getting four different personalities to meet shared expectations as his first management role, formed long before any formal title existed. The observation is that leadership instincts are typically set before anyone's first direct report, in rooms that never appear on a resume.For understanding where a leader's actual management instincts were formed, as distinct from where they were credentialed.
The person who grants permission cannot be the person who benefits from the outcome.Asked to name the star of his company, Erwin points to the AV technician who mics up a nervous speaker ninety seconds before she walks on stage. The meeting planner and the chief marketing officer both want something from that speaker, which is exactly why neither of them can give her what she needs in that moment. A stranger with no stake in the outcome can hand her permission to be looked at; someone with a stake cannot. The observation identifies a structural fact about trust: reassurance is only usable when it comes from someone who has nothing riding on the response.For understanding why a disinterested party can sometimes do what an invested one cannot.
A shared ordeal produces an asset that cannot be purchased afterward.Erwin describes his workforce during 2020 as a crew caught on a rock face when the weather turned, an experience nobody would choose but one that leaves behind a relationship money cannot recreate once the storm has passed. He connects this directly to an operational outcome: regrowing the company required the muscle memory of the people who had lived through the shutdown together, not simply rehiring to the same headcount. The observation is that organizations which endured a genuine crisis together retain a form of capital that organizations which merely avoided one, or scattered during one, have to rebuild from nothing.For comparing organizations that stayed intact through a crisis against those that dispersed.
Rising revenue per event alongside a falling event count signals where the market is actually moving.Encore's public filing shows revenue per event up nearly 88 percent since 2019 while total event volume has slipped, a combination that describes a market before any executive has to say so out loud. Fewer, larger, more expensive gatherings absorb budget that used to be spread across more frequent, smaller meetings, and those smaller meetings are migrating to spaces a venue-based network never touches. The observation is that a single ratio in a financial filing, revenue divided by event count, can reveal a structural shift in how an entire industry gathers well before it shows up in anyone's strategy deck.For reading what an industry's own numbers say about where volume is actually headed.
Infrastructure remembers a building. A relationship remembers a customer.A venue-based service network is built to serve whoever walks into a given room on a given day, which means it defaults to knowing the building rather than the person. Erwin is trying to invert that default so that what a client wanted last time follows them to the next property instead of disappearing at the door. The distinction matters because the two models produce different businesses: one collects revenue transaction by transaction from whoever the room happens to serve, the other compounds value by accumulating what it knows about a specific relationship over time. Choosing which one you are building determines what data is worth capturing at all.For any multi-location business deciding whether it is organized around locations or around customers.
A vendor is something you select. Infrastructure is something you encounter.Venue exclusivity means a meeting planner inherits a production provider she never chose, at rates she cannot audit, in the only ballroom that fits her attendees, the same way she encounters the loading dock or the ceiling height. That is a different relationship than the one a customer has with a vendor she actively selected and can replace. The distinction explains why an infrastructure company faces a trust problem a chosen vendor does not, since nobody feels loyalty to plumbing. The strategic question for a company built this way is whether it can earn, after the fact, the kind of relationship a chosen vendor gets to start with.For distinguishing how customers relate to companies they picked versus companies imposed on them by circumstance.