For transportation, she was encouraged to "love the bus" and was blown away by Chicago's dedicated bus lane that shuttles guests 2.5 miles across town to the convention center in 8 minutes.
Designing tour programs allowed her to open herself up to experiential creativity being able to offer the best of her beloved native city and share with thousands of guests whether on an architectural cruise for hundreds or a private kitchen cooking class of 8 with a world-renowned chef – creating moments became a calling card of her design style.
As her event planning ability grew in new areas so did her size and scope of corporate events. From multi-day events with guest counts "that had a comma in the number" that included a 3-day celebration of a corporation's 75th anniversary of 2,700 guests that included a private event with Elton John as the entertainment in Millennium Park with a fireworks finally. With less than one months' notice Diane and team planned an event that surrounded Buckingham Fountain for 3,500 guests that included rolling a red carpet two city blocks leading guests to a concert and a luggage pull for their guests that were staying at 11 hotels within a six-hour window of time the next day.
To the honor of working with convention and city leaders, world renowned artists and union labor leadership to design and produce the inaugural event of the Skyline Ballroom in McCormick Place's West Building where she negotiated sponsorship of over 1-million dollars in donations of goods and services in what was then the largest ballroom in North America.
Diane took on a new challenge by working for a highly esteemed event design firm where its internal capabilities of event design let her creativity flourish for her corporate clients. In the role of New Business Development, Diane maintained the balance of business acumen and artistic vision. In addition, she started to cultivate her network on a national level by traveling to other top markets to introduce her firm’s services and designing events out of Chicago. It was this network growth that had her knocking on doors (literally and metaphorically) that opened her to clients with multi-year six figure events.
Her events became even more elaborate as her clients fully trusted and ultimately benefited from her expertise. Also during this time Diane earned national praise as the recipient of BizBash’s National Event Style Awards for winning “Best Event Decor” and became a contributing writer to MPI’s Monthly publication.
Diane is making her path by working on projects for top production firms, corporate planners as an independent innovator, creator and event expert.
Career Overivew
Diane (Dickinson) Brisk started her event career in 2000 when she turned a simple informational interview at a respected Chicago event decor company into her first position in the industry. Her interior design background served her well in regards to event design. Her very first event was to create, script and produce a “Let’s Make a Deal” game show. She tirelessly dedicated herself to learning all she could about the meetings and events industry.
After three years of sales and production of corporate events, that included building dynamic relationships with vendors, a strong reputation for reliability with clients and colleagues and actively participating in industry organization, Diane wanted to take on more.
Diane worked for and grew her sales, planning, and logistical skills by diving into, learning and conducting all scopes of Destination Management services.