Travis Reedy of TRAVIS Inc. is currently designing, planning, and executing TD Ameritrade‘s national conference. It’s a large event accommodating 3,000 attendees, 50 rooms, and multiple sessions. The dynamic stage is 100 feet wide and is accentuated by combining sophisticated LED technology with old-fashioned carpentry. The whole event took his team 8 months to plan.
But, he says he does much more than event planning and management – it’s corporate theater. Reedy holds a degree in Theater with a focus on Staging Design, which means he executes every event with the creative flair of an artist and the exacting precision of stage director.
This year TRAVIS Inc. will be celebrating 20 years as a leader in event execution and corporate theater industry. Fortune 500 companies hire TRAVIS Inc. to handle every step in the event planning process, from event design and messaging, to audiovisual and lighting equipment, to stage production, to hiring speakers and onstage talent, to handling all the details the day of the event.
He helps organizations put on sales conferences, product launches, award galas and more. As a full-service technical production company, the staff takes clients such as Walmart, Heineken and Harley-Davidson from the event design to the execution stage.
“We try to keep everything turnkey for our clients,” said Travis.
It’s that dedication to his clients that earned him the prestigious 2015 Best Supplier Award from Illinois Meetings + Events Magazine. Travis says he will everything to make a client’s vision a reality – even when they want to replicate an idea they saw at the Academy Awards without Hollywood’s budget.
“We’ll definitely try and make it happen for them,” said Travis.
He can see his visions come to life through carefully crafted staging, sophisticated technology, visuals, and decorative details – but the challenge is always the intricate logistics of executing high-caliber events for Fortune 500 companies.
The logistics, Travis says, is where Flex comes in handy.
“There is a lot of planning that goes on into putting on these events, always a lot going on, we’re using Flex to keep us organized,” said Reedy, “it’s why we’re so happy with Flex, we can do everything from the discovery phase, to messaging, to the pre-production phase.”
He says he has been using Flex for over four years now, and although he has used others – like Intellievent and Rental Point – he said no one can compare to Flex’s extensibility, customization opportunities, and reliability.
“It’s one thing that has really helped us out a lot, Flex has a really good ear to listening to what people want in the software and making it happen, there has never been an instance where they’ve said ‘No, we can’t do that’ and if a request doesn’t merit a global feature update, they’ll customize it for you, many competitors just said ‘That can’t be done,'” said Reedy.
He likens it to making the perfect cookie.
“It’s kind of like a cookie recipe, you want to make sure the cookie is baked to perfection, you need to carefully manage the process step by step, all the way to post event, that can be a challenge, the great thing about Flex is that it really removes all those challenges,” he said.
