Winning Project Definition by a Millennial Startup Founder

Jose Garcia-Aguarod is a teacher, speaker, entrepreneur and a polyglot (he speaks 7 languages), aside from being the founder of the leading Spanish Event Directory, Grupo Eventoplus. He shares the important factors in his perception of a winning event in the below interview...How does your job relate to the event industry?I founded Grupo eventoplus, the largest event-related media group in Spain, together with 2 friends in 2000. We started with eventoplus.com, as an Internet start-up when everything was still to be written on the web, and created the first event portal in Europe at the time. As we grew larger, we added-on more and more activities to our portfolio and launched Eventos Magazine and other paper publications both in Spanish and English, the eventoplus Awards, the trade show evento Days and the Meetings & Incentive Summit, and Event Innovation Summit.How do you describe your work style?We were born at the beginning of the present century at a time when young entrepreneurs would set a start-up in a garage. Grupo eventoplus started like that, as a dot com entrepreneurial venture and even though along the years we have developed a number of other initiatives (always event and MICE related), the garage start-up spirit is still with us. We are very reactive to change, eager to collaborate with others, keen to experiment and innovate always. We love to think that after almost 15 years in the market, Grupo eventoplus still has some pioneer spirit, some garage force that leaves its mark in everything we do.What motivates you to judge Eventex Awards?I believe that initiatives like Eventex Awards help create a sense of global community inthe event industry, which on the other hand, tends to be very local, national at its best. The opportunity to evaluate events from very different countries, addressing different publics, and seeing how they try to reach their objectives in different countries is very enriching. Judging events at the Eventex Awards is not only an honor, but also a fantastic opportunity to learn from the best.How do you recognize a winner?To me, a winning event is the one that not only reaches the objectives for which it was planned to, but also the one that has a deep impact in the attendant. I have taken part in the Jury of a number of Awards, and when you see a winning project, something hits you inside; the creativity, the deploy of technical means, the humor, the human side of the event… It can be one or many of these factors, but definitely, winning projects have something special and unique that hits you.What do you find unforgivable in an application?I know that preparing an application for a contest like this is complicated and time-demanding, but I think that the lack of fundamental information, i.e. the objective of the event, the budget, some good audiovisual material (video), makes it very complicated for the judges to evaluate a project, even when we realize that the project is very good.Your advice to contestants?Following my previous point, I would advise contestants to prepare carefully their applications, give accurate information and make us live the event as closely as possible to the reality. A good video makes a good application in practical terms.What aspect of event planning inspires you the most?I think that all parts of planning are fundamental but, the thinking part of it, the initial phase in which we are facing a problem and debate on whether an event can be the right way to address it, is fascinating.