Episode 23 — What You Don't Understand About Your Event Budget

Guest: Alyson Strickler-Vazquez, Head of Strategic Events at Webflow

In this episode we’re talking with the Head of Strategic Events at Webflow, Alyson Strickler-Vazquez. Alyson creates experiences that resonate and deliver measurable impact. She excels in designing strategies that fuse creativity with precision, using insights and analytics to maximize ROI and deliver measurable success. In this episode, she breaks down how to budget to maximize your impact, and how to negotiate to save your event thousands and thousands of dollars. This episode is filled with actionable takeaways, so hit the download button, screw your headphones on tight, and get ready to take notes.

Read the transcript below and listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Show Notes

Our Guest

Alyson Strickler-Vazquez is an award-winning event marketing powerhouse with 15+ years of experience spanning Fortune 200 manufacturing, global travel management, and high-velocity tech. She’s built a career turning events into high-impact brand moments—scaling global meeting teams, owning multi-million-dollar portfolios, and delivering bold, immersive experiences that move audiences and the bottom line.

As Head of Strategic Events at Webflow, Alyson leads the company’s flagship conference and external experience strategy, transforming creativity and storytelling into a measurable competitive advantage.

Recognized as a 2024 Event Marketer Changemaker and Budget Warrior and winner of the 2025 EX Award for Best Meeting Experience, Alyson blends imaginative design with data-driven precision. She architects large-scale conferences, trade shows, activations, incentive programs, and sales kickoffs that captivate audiences and accelerate revenue. Beyond the stage, she builds enduring brand ecosystems—elevating companies globally, saving them millions through innovative strategy, and mentoring the next generation of event talent.

Credits

Hosted and Written by Jeremy Dobrish
Produced by Bethany Potter
Theme Music by Mike Mancini
Logo design by Shraddha Maharjan
Special thanks to Dossie McCraw

Transcript

Episode Transcript

Guest: Alyson Strickler-Vazquez

ALYSON: I spend the money, whatever company I'm working for, like those pennies are my pennies. I get so excited when I'm able to either save us money, or get us a better deal, or a better product for the same price.

JEREMY: Hey there, thanks for tuning in. I'm Jeremy Dobrish, and this is the ProCast, brought to you by Proscenium Events in New York City. It's a podcast about corporate events. Each month, we take a bite-sized look at how to make corporate events, conferences, programs, and shows even more effective and impactful.

Today we're talking about budgets with Alyson Strickler-Vazquez, the Head of Strategic Events at Webflow. Alyson was recognized as a 2024 Event Marketer Changemaker and Budget Warrior, and she really knows what she's talking about when it comes to budgets and negotiating the best deal for your event. Talking to her was like sitting at the feet of a negotiating ninja. If you're intrigued and ready to have a budget bomb of knowledge blow your mind, then stand by for cue one of the ProCast. Cue one, let's go.

JEREMY: So I'm here with Alyson Strickler-Vazquez, the Head of Strategic Events at Webflow. To dive right in: lots of people make budgets, and lots of people think they know how to make budgets. What is it about you? Give me just two or three things from your past. Why should we trust you? Why are you an expert on budgeting?

ALYSON: I appreciate you having me here to talk about it. It's probably one of the areas I'm most passionate about. I always tell everybody I was extremely lucky in my career. Right out of college, I was hired by BCD Travel, and basically within six months I was really running their global team. I could personally sign up to $2 million on a contract, and BCD Travel had a document that went out that said, unless they're agreeing to all these things, you're not signing. And you can say that when you have "BCD Travel Meetings and Events" next to your title. I always had the opinion of, if they can do it, why can't every other company? So my goal, at any company I've come into and any company that's invited me in to speak about this, is: if they can get it, so can you. And I've proven that through the last 20 years of my career, where I've been able to maintain a status quo no matter how large or small the company I've been at.

JEREMY: Wow, I love that. Okay, you've got me. I trust you. Now I want to get into the questions about budgeting. Lots of people do budgets, but obviously they're making some mistakes. What are they getting wrong about budgets? What is it they don't understand that, if they understood it, they could do better?

ALYSON: The first thing is setting themselves up for success: having a realistic idea of what the budget is going to need to be, sharing that with your executive team, and getting buy-in. We can't make money magically appear, so what is a realistic cost? What I can do is show you how to spend it the best way. If you know you have a million dollars, how are you going to best utilize that spend to get as close to the goal? The first thing I do is divide my money into three buckets. I have my fixed bucket, which is things like the hotel, sleeping rooms, possibly venues. That's not going to move anywhere. Then I have my variable costs: food and drink, transportation, things where you have a little wiggle room, so that bucket can flow as you're building out the event. Then I have my wow budget, which is the last bucket I tell everybody to spend. It's always the first bucket everybody wants to spend, and it's always my last bucket that you will spend. That's the money I have left over that I can utilize in a smart way. What you don't want is, "Oh, I've got $30,000 in my wow budget, I'm going to hire a big-name act." Your event's four days. That's not a great way to spend $30,000. The reason I push it off to last is, one, you need to have a contingency. And two, you really do have the ability to say, "I have $30,000, I have to spread this across four days. How do I do it in a way that ties from one end to the other and makes sense?" I know I need at least three wow moments, so I'm not going to spend all $30,000 on one thing. The other reason is you don't usually have a really good handle on your event until much closer, you're waiting on the theme for the keynote, or waiting to hear back from the product team about what they're releasing. A lot of times people put that money up front, and by the time you're there eight months later, it no longer makes sense with the event you've built. So that should always be your last bucket. And then I always leave a contingency budget. It changes based on the range. A great example: going into a million-dollar event, I'm going to have probably $75,000 to $100,000 in the bank. It depends on the event, how many days, and so on, but I really don't like to ever go under $100,000 in the bank, and sometimes I even allot $200,000 to $250,000. I just really like to be able to cover myself. I've had some crazy things happen the last few years. I had a snowstorm in Las Vegas in February. I thought a building was burning down, I thought it was ash on the ground, I'm looking for a fire, and the hotel people were like, "No, that's snow." So we were going to have to bring in all these rentals we didn't originally expect, because our evening event was outside. I've run into that with massive rain in California too. So it's really making sure you have that backup.

JEREMY: I love what you're saying about thinking about when to spend the different buckets of money based on how the event is coming together. I was a theater director and a playwright, and I always used to say, when we were coming up with budgets with producers, "Look, if you want to do Romeo and Juliet, you could do it for $10 million, or you could do it for a hundred dollars." And there's nothing even to say the $10 million version will be better. It'll just be different.

ALYSON: The one thing I find hard, and it's really funny, is even convincing your finance team or the executive team. They see very big numbers when it comes to AV production. The easiest way to justify that, I don't care where you work, is this: if we're bringing all these people in, mostly from around the world, or even from around the United States, if we're bringing all these people to a place to see something and to learn, because that's primarily what they're there to do, then I'm going to put the money up front toward the thing that's actually needed for them to leave there having learned what we needed them to learn. Production, to me, is key on that, because I can throw fancy dinners all day, but that's not giving me ROI. Those people aren't leaving with an education if they can't see the screen, if they can't hear the audio, or if the screen isn't great and it's fuzzy and they're having problems gauging what's happening because the room's so large and it's not set correctly. It affects their experience and their education, but even just navigating a building: do you have enough digital screens? Can they see them? Because otherwise they're going to miss the start of something. AV, to me, plays the biggest part of the ROI I'm going to walk away with for any event. So when I do have to maneuver money, that's the area I don't mind maneuvering it to, and the easiest area for me to justify on a spend point.

JEREMY: That's a great point. People think about spending money on the ancillary stuff, but in fact the most important thing you have to do is tell this story, and there's a cost to that. You've got to get people in a room, set up the room, put the person on the stage, and you've got to be able to see them and hear them. Putting your money toward that is your first responsibility. It's really key, and then you can start talking about some of the other stuff. So talk me through the negotiating process a little bit. You've said several times, "I'm not paying this, I'm not paying that, I've never paid for this." If I'm listening and I think, "Okay, I'm good at making budgets, but I don't feel comfortable negotiating. This is what the venue charges. If I tell them I'm not going to pay it, they'll just find someone else to give the space to." So talk me through how you do that negotiating, and how you win.

ALYSON: This was one of the questions I got when I spoke at my last conference. A woman asked me, "I don't feel comfortable, I feel like I'm being too pushy." I really find that to be something, unfortunately, I see a lot more with women than with the men, being afraid to go in and ask for what they should be asking for. We want to be kind, we want to be smiley, we want to be very pleasant to work with. I absolutely want to be all of those things, but I also have to be an advocate for the company I'm there to support, and I'm doing the business on their behalf. So you really have to keep in the back of your head that this is not you, this is what the industry allows. You're not being pushy, you're asking for what you deserve. I think this goes to multiple aspects of our lives, but especially in your everyday job. I spend the money like, whatever company I'm working for, those pennies are my pennies. I get so excited when I'm able to save us money, or get us a better deal, or a better product for the same price, because at the end of the day, that's a company that's supporting me and keeping me employed. I'm really there to make sure my company's money is spent smartly and we're not being taken advantage of. Now, you also can't go in with rose-colored glasses and say, "I'm going to Phoenix in February and I'm going to get all this stuff." If you box yourself into a hotel that currently has high demand, peak season, you're absolutely not going to get to demand all these things. But if you cast a wider net, say we have a 500-person event, we know it needs to be East Coast or West Coast but we prefer East Coast, and if you have some flexibility, I always like to do an entire nationwide search, or sometimes I'll take it outside and add Canada or Mexico. What I want is to see what my national reps bring back to me, and to find hotels that have a hole. That's how you get peak season. If there's a peak-season, amazing property, and they've got a three- or four-day window they haven't sold, and they know it's difficult because it's selling between two large programs, you can go right in and snap that up for nothing. I just did this in Maui a few years ago. But you have to cast the wide net. The other option is to look at your dates, or where you're willing to go. Hotels that aren't hitting peak season, or are coming right out of it, or haven't quite gone into it yet, are going to be a lot more flexible. The biggest thing I can suggest to anybody is you need to go in with national reps.

BETHANY: This is behind-the-scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. Large hotel chains have national reps that work directly with major corporations and their procurement departments. They can negotiate rates for their properties and assist those corporations in finding the right space for their event and getting the best rates.

ALYSON: They are going to be the people to go into battle with. They're going to have your back. They're going to put pressure on the property, on the GM, and even if it's not a property they own, if it's just a flag, I still get the same results. They're able to provide results from previous programs, which has really helped me. I've had GMs come and say, "We want this program here because it got press." A lot of times I spend a lot more than what you're going to see on my contracts. I'm meant to be doing that. I don't want to over-contract us, but I know I'm going to spend more. So if I can bring in receipts and show them ahead of time, "Look what her program has done in the past," a lot of times hotels get excited and understand there's probably a lot more to make here than what they're putting on the contract, and they'll be more willing to play ball. But you should never sign a venue contract unless you have that AV dialed in, because after that, it's a feeding frenzy. You have no leverage over them. You can still put a little pressure on, but it's not the same as when the hotel's going to lose an entire contract because of the rates they're giving or their unwillingness to negotiate. That's where you have the most strength coming into any negotiation. I don't even think most people know what to ask for, to be honest. I still work with production companies telling me, "You're not going to get free wifi." I just had somebody the other day on a contract say, "There's no world you're getting this." And I said, "Watch me." Two weeks later I brought it back, and I actually sent a little screenshot of it. They're still in disbelief. But we'll get there, as long as you're willing to play ball with them and to show yourself as a valuable client. Maybe you have other programs coming through, or you're upping your food and beverage. Food and beverage is a great way to not pay for something that isn't tangible. "Okay, you want this? I know I'm going to spend more, so up my food and beverage by another $50,000, I'll spend it." But that $50,000 is going through something tangible that's going to make my program better and benefit the people attending. It's not me just throwing $50,000 in the air and saying, "Oh, we have wifi." So there are a lot of areas, and it's being creative and really not being afraid to stand up for yourself. If the person who can give you the answer is not in the room, you're not talking to the right person. I have walked myself up to a GM multiple times, I just did it a couple weeks ago, and said, "This is what I need from you, and you can give it to me, or we're going to walk across the street. There's a beautiful Westin, and we'll just sign that contract." So you have to be willing to ask for what you want. Sometimes that means demanding it, and you have to know what your threshold is: can I actually walk away? Make sure not to limit yourself, because the more boxed in you are, the less you have to negotiate with.

JEREMY: For sure. This is such great advice, and you really are an expert on this. I know you've given talks on this, and I was going through some of your materials, and I came across this phrase that really stood out to me: "Budget doesn't mean basic." When you say that, what does it mean? I think the typical feeling would be, "I don't have a lot of money, so there's not a lot I can do, and I'll just do my best."

ALYSON: There are a couple of great things to focus on here. First is, how can you get creative? It doesn't cost anything for a Spotify playlist and a QR code to launch it to your attendees. Be creative about how you're spending your money, and make sure the visuals you're putting out have an impact. Creativity is free. The brand awareness I'm going to gain from what my creative team builds for me doesn't cost me, that's internal. We're able to put something out, especially imagery-wise, that speaks to the event and tells a story. That's such a big part of what people are going to leave thinking about, and it doesn't cost me anything. Then there's the other portion of this, which is who you choose as your vendor. Vendors are the most important part, because there have been many times a vendor has walked up to me and said, "Hey, you're doing this, it's $20,000, but we can give you a better result for $10,000 that's going to save you money and you're still going to love it more. Or there's a cheaper option for $2,000, but you're probably not going to be excited about it." If your vendor is not bringing you ways to save money and make your event better, they're not the vendor for you. If they're just constantly saying, "We need more to do this, we need more to do that," that vendor, I don't feel, has your back. It should be a two-way street, of you asking them to help with pricing, but them also freely coming to you and saying, "We think we can do this better for less money." That happened a few years ago when projection mapping really became big. We were putting a lot of money into visuals and things that were going to cost us, especially from a set-design perspective, having to build out a lot of custom items. And what came to me was, "We can do all this in white. It's going to cut the cost in half, and we already have projectors up there. We're going to projection map, not the entire room, but we're also going to switch it every day, so every single day you're going to have a completely different look." It not only saved me money, it gave us a much better experience for the attendee. I didn't ask for that, they came up with a great idea, treating my money like their money, which is what I appreciate the most. I've worked with some exceptional vendors. I had one literally throw in lighting for an entire outdoor street party, which was like $80,000, because they had a contact and a local concert was happening, so they brought it over for us. They knew our budget had gotten cut. The people you partner with are the ones who give you the best ideas and the best ways to save money, and that's really how you separate yourself from being basic. It doesn't have to just be a screen and a projector. How can you make a white wall stand out? There are lots of ways to do that.

JEREMY: It's such a great feeling. I can feel it coming from you, that sense of when you find a creative way to save money on a contract, it feels so good. And from the creative perspective, it's the same thing. When you come up with a creative idea that actually saves money, and it might even be a better idea, it's so gratifying. All right, I'd love to move on to our lightning round. These are three quick questions we ask all our guests. The first: who's your biggest get? By that I mean a guest speaker, an entertainer, or a subject matter expert, anyone you would absolutely love to see at a live event.

ALYSON: Everybody's going to say Taylor Swift, that's the easy one, she's the queen. Honestly, if my reasoning is different: I'm more excited to understand how she does the Easter eggs three or four years in advance. If you want to perform, great, but I want to know, from a marketing standpoint, how her mind works and how she gets a team to execute it so far in advance. That's absolutely one of my big gets. I also want Bozoma Saint John. I'm coming for her. I watch her on Housewives. I want her to attend, I want her to speak on a panel. She recently did that TV show with Jimmy Fallon where they ran their own marketing agency and people competed to win a spot at Cannes Lions.

BETHANY: This is behind-the-scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. Not only did Bozoma provide marketing tips to contestants on On Brand with Jimmy Fallon, but her marketing work with brands like PepsiCo, Uber, Apple, and Netflix got her into the Marketing Hall of Fame in 2022.

JEREMY: Okay, second question. You've seen dozens, maybe hundreds, of corporate executives up on stage giving presentations. What is one thing you wish these presenters did more of, or, I suppose, less of?

ALYSON: I would really love them to turn in their presentations on time. That never happens, very rarely. And there are two other things. One, send me a photo, an actual headshot in the right resolution. Don't send me a thumbnail, I don't want a screenshot from LinkedIn. There's nothing that irritates me more, and it happens all the time. I've gotten people who sent me their eHarmony profile photos, I'm not even joking. This one guy had a leather hat on, he was in front of a tree, and I'm just like, "What is happening?" The other thing is, a lot of them are really scared to talk about certain topics, they don't want to push it too far, and the audience is the opposite. The audience wants to hear the nitty-gritty. So I really hope they feel empowered to get up there and share something that, while it might not be the something everybody really wants to hear, is the thing everybody needs to hear, the truth. Basically, be the narrator for the story we've already told ourselves. We're just looking for somebody else to say, "You're absolutely thinking in the right way." That really helps them connect to the audience, because the audience gives them instant reliability, they automatically buy in, because it's, "Yes, I also think that, but I haven't been able to say it out loud."

JEREMY: I love that. Sometimes people think they don't want to say something because it seems so obvious, everyone in the room's already thinking it. But if you get up there and say it and call it out, it's going to make a big difference, and it's going to establish a connection between you and them that then springboards everything else you want to talk about. Okay, last question. What is something, a book, a movie, a song, whatever you like, that was a big influence on you, or especially on your career?

ALYSON: One of the first books my mentor had me read was Crossing the Chasm. One of the things it does is split your buyer into four profiles: innovators, early adopters, early majority, and late majority. I've started really using that to put my attendees into specific categories. Innovators are the ones who are going to be excited about what you're bringing in that's new, that's hot, that they haven't seen before. Early adopters are a little more excited to do things that are safe, that they've seen before but maybe haven't had a chance to try, and they still have that excitement. Then you get into the majority, and they're the ones who want to know it's safe, it's reliable, so we need to focus on specific topics that really talk to them. The book inspired me to start placing different types of attendees into those categories and thinking, "Okay, how does this event affect all four of these areas?"

JEREMY: That sounds really interesting. We'll link to that in the show notes, and I will definitely be reading that book. Alyson, thank you so much. It's been delightful talking to you. I feel like a student at your knee, just soaking up these bits of wisdom. It's incredible that you know these things, and even more incredible that you're willing to share them. I think the people listening will really get a lot out of this. I appreciate you coming on the show.

ALYSON: Absolutely, thank you so much. It's been fun. I could talk budgets and negotiations all day and be happy.

JEREMY: Well, that was super interesting, talking to Alyson about budgets and negotiating. For me, there were tons of takeaways, but these are the four tops. Number four: don't settle for what's presented to you in a contract. You can negotiate your way into saving some serious money. There are tons of fees and intangibles you can get waived, you just need to know what to demand. Number three: part of creativity involves finding ways to do things for less money and spending your money differently, like upping your food and beverage spend in exchange for free wifi. Number two: spend your wow money last, and spread it out over the course of the whole event. Number one: spending money on AV is critical, because if the audience can't see or hear the presenters, the rest of your spend is not going to matter.

JEREMY: But look, I could talk about this stuff all day, and if you want to talk to us about budgets and negotiating, or anything about live events, check out our show notes for more info. There's lots of fun stuff in there. Or go to proscenium.com and drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you, because at Proscenium, we help presenters do their best in front of their most important audiences. As we like to say, we help brands perform, and I have a sneaking suspicion we can help your brand perform. If you want to get in touch with Alyson, you'll find her contact info in the show notes.