Event leadership programs

Training by document

It started with a gap. As a manager at Red Bull, I went an extended stretch without a director above me, and part of filling that role was training the people around me. I had no way to bring everyone together, so I wrote the training down.

The Red Bull Event Guidelines followed an event from idea to recap. They covered what makes an event worth doing, how a concept earns approval, and how to build the budget and the team. They walked through working with partnerships, production, risk and legal, ticketing and data, brand marketing and digital, and ended on running the day and capturing what the next team should know. The guide went through six versions. It was a way to train people without a room to train them in, and it prepared me for what came next.

Into the room

I returned to Red Bull in September 2021 as Director of Sports Events. By the following spring I had hired nine of the twelve event managers on the team. They were new to the company and new to each other, and they would soon be running events of their own.

In late March 2022 I brought them to Florida for three days. The guide became a presentation and the backbone of the first two days. The people who ran legal, risk, IT and partnerships came and presented their own sections. On the Saturday we toured a live event to see it all first hand, then closed with a debrief on what we'd seen. Plane Swap was a few weeks away.

A program that kept growing

Gaming Specialist workshop, 2022. Later that year, I built a full day on project leadership for our gaming specialists. Each part of the day ended in practice. Teams set targets and tested the feasibility, milestones and budget of a deliberately unusual brief, a gaming event in a subway, and then dealt with a curveball. We also rebuilt a recent project on paper with clearer roles to see what would have changed. Everyone left with the tools we'd used: a kickoff deck, a target-setting document, a project workbook, a budget tracker and org chart templates.

Project Leadership Summit, 2023. I proposed it, secured the backing and the collaborators across Sports, Brand, Culture and On-Premise Marketing, built most of the program, and co-hosted it with four colleagues. It brought 120 people from all 12 regions to Santa Monica: event managers, athlete marketers, gaming specialists, brand and culture marketers, artist bookers and on-premise teams. The program set out shared principles for leading a project, showed what excellent execution looks like, and put people from different teams to work on problems together. Guests from Legal, Risk, IT, Direct-to-Consumer and the Red Bull Media Network showed participants the support around them and who to call. Our summary afterwards called it a new model for cross-functional collaboration.

Global edition, 2024. Red Bull's global events team held an edition of its event leadership workshop at Red Bull Rampage. I co-hosted, provided the host event, and took part in the program.

Built to outlast me

In March 2025, before I left Red Bull, I spent one of my last days in the office recording the full event leadership fundamentals program for the company's internal learning platform. It runs about six hours across modules, all presented by me. It covers why events matter to the business, how each marketing team uses them, and what it takes to lead a project from business planning through to recap. I recorded it so the training would keep running after I'd gone.

Since then, I've rebuilt that material into a modular onboarding intensive for new event leads. It's designed to run as a full day or two half-days. Participants bring a live project, apply each module to it, and leave with a 90-day plan.

How I design learning

Across all of it, a few principles held.

People learn leadership by practicing decisions on work that looks like theirs. So the exercises use real or realistic projects, the plan can change partway through, and where possible we go and see the work happen.

I bring the people participants will need later into the room. Contributors from legal and partnerships present their own part of the picture, so the session also builds working relationships.

People leave with tools and a plan they can use on their own projects, supported by material they can return to as the work develops.

What it's for

The strongest teams I've worked with didn't depend on one person knowing everything. They had practiced making decisions together and made that learning available to others, so it kept working when someone left or the plan changed. That's what I build with clients now: programs and tools a team keeps using after I've left the room.