Rebecca Grinnals and Kathryn Arce, wedding industry veterans of more than 20 years, met in the early ’90s while working at The Walt Disney World Resort, where they grew Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings to a $100 million per year operation. “It was a little bit like lightning in a bottle the first time that we had the chance to work together,” Grinnals tells Entrepreneur. “We had the chance to collaborate on some really cool projects, and it was a really formative time.”
Image Credit: Courtesy of Engage! Summits. Kathryn Arce, left, and Rebecca Grinnals, right.
After Disney, Grinnals and Arce started consulting, helping hotels, resorts and tourism boards around the world develop their wedding and honeymoon businesses. That’s how the duo discovered a significant gap in the industry: There wasn’t an event that brought together different buyers, suppliers and vendors focused on luxury weddings.
Related: 7 Business Lessons I Learned From Planning My Daughter’s Wedding
What if we were able to put everybody together in a room and have these really incredible, meaningful conversations to help support the entrepreneurs and small businesses that power the wedding industry? The co-founders thought.
So Grinnals and Arce established a conference to do just that: Engage! Summits, now a multimillion-dollar brand.
Image Credit: Corbin Gurkin. Engage! in Paris, 2023.
It was April 2008 when the co-founders decided to move forward with their idea for Engage! Summits — and their first conference would be that June. With just six weeks to pull off the one-day event at Orlando’s Celebration Hotel, Grinnals and Arce got to work and leaned on their industry contacts. Seventy-five people attended.
“We were able to invite [celebrity wedding planners] Preston Bailey and Marcy Blum to be our VIP speakers,” Arce recalls. “We also invited Harmony Walton, founder of The Bridal Bar, to come and provide some insight on the trends that she was seeing. And then an editor from Destination Weddings & Honeymoons.”
Related: 5 Tips to Networking at Conferences as an Introvert
The event was a hit. Bailey and Blum opened up about building their own successful businesses over the years and the challenges along the way — relatable experiences for everyone in attendance. The morning after the conference, an attendee blogged about how valuable it was and said that she couldn’t wait to attend again.
That’s when Grinnals and Arce knew they were on the right track. They continued with their consulting work and built Engage! Summits as a sort of “side hustle” for the next decade, hosting one or two events each year before going full-time with their brand in 2018.
“In many cases, [we had one business] serve the other in a very organic and natural way.”
Naturally, the co-founders leaned on their industry experience, taking advantage of crossover opportunities wherever possible to grow Engage! Summits into the powerhouse it is today. For example, the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism was a long-time consulting client, and they’ve hosted Engage! Summits in the Cayman Islands five times.
“In many cases, [we had one business] serve the other in a very organic and natural way,” Grinnals explains. “I think a lot of people who have their own businesses find ways to do that so they’re not totally divergent but are able to converge and support each other.”
Related: How to Build and Sustain Deep, Meaningful Business Relationships (and Why It’s the Key to Long-Lasting Success)
Following events hosted in Mexico and the Caribbean, Engage! Summits put on its first Europe-based event in Puglia, Italy, in 2016, which drew its most international audience up to that point and kicked off years of hosting across the globe. Engage! Summit’s upcoming event in Tuscany will mark its 48th, and the brand will celebrate its 50th in London this July.
Throughout its 17-year run to date, Engage! Summits has hosted 43 sold-out events at 50 five-star luxury properties, with more than 7,500 attendees from 45 states and 35 countries. The brand also boasts more than 100 million social media and media impressions.
Image Credit: Anya Kernes. Engage! in Boca Raton, 2023.
“Fundamentally, small business owners and entrepreneurs need community.”
The conferences continue to cultivate an environment where business owners can connect in person, an opportunity that can be hard to come by in today’s digital-first world. Virtual connections and social media relationships can be useful networking tools, but they are no replacement for those in-person conversations, particularly for entrepreneurs, the co-founders say.
“Being an entrepreneur is really exciting but can also be very isolating,” Grinnals says, “especially when you’re sitting in your office all day on Zoom, it’s so easy to think that everybody else is doing better than you are or nobody else struggles. Fundamentally, small business owners and entrepreneurs need community. They need the ability to be in a safe space without clients to share best practices.”
Related: 7 Things I’ve Learned In 7 Years of Entrepreneurship
An Engage! Summits event in Tuscany might host vendors from 22 different countries, bringing them together in one place to talk through challenges and support each other. Because no matter a business owner’s particular area of expertise, they share one goal: serving their couples as best they can.
“Being able to run through different scenarios in person with [other business owners is something] we have found you can’t replicate and is really invaluable in building successful and strong profitable businesses,” Grinnals adds.
“We wanted to dream bigger and better with each event.”
The co-founders encourage aspiring entrepreneurs who have an idea for their own event-based business to keep chasing their big ambitions, even if they seem daunting in the early days.
“ We weren’t afraid to ask for things,” Arce says. “We wanted to dream bigger and better with each event. If you have an idea, map it out to the best of your ability and see how things go. Keep learning, making changes and moving forward. Surround yourself with love and positive people who believe in what you’re doing. There’s no limit to anything you can create and dream.”
Related: Dream Big: 3 Ways to Fight Off Doubt and Build the Business You’ve Always Wanted
Grinnals agrees and adds that networking to establish informal “advisory councils or boards of directors” outside of your specific business can help you level up as an entrepreneur.
“It’s easy to stay really laser-focused on the person who’s doing your type of business,” Grinnals explains, “but it’s really powerful to create a network of different people who understand the nuances of your business but also do it in a different way and understand [the industry-specific challenges]. Find people to be a sounding board, giving and getting advice from each other, and having that small group of people you can call [on] and trust.”
This article is part of our ongoing Women Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of running a business as a woman
