Ever wonder what it must’ve been like to be a professional party planner when the global pandemic made it impossible for people to get together?
Sherryln Thompson doesn’t have to use her imagination. The long-time party planner experienced the immediate downturn in business firsthand.
“When you’re in the business of events and everybody is locked to their house, business completely tanks,” said Thompson, owner of Highly Favored Events and Travel.
She ended up taking a traditional 9-to-5 job with one of her clients to help pay her family’s bills. Now almost four years later, event planners and the people who hire them are making up for lost time.
”Business now is even better now than it was pre-Covid,” said Thompson. “Stuff is really picking up,” so much that Thompson may need to leave her full-time work to give more time to her business.
Thompson credits the boom in business to the pent-up demand caused by the pandemic.
"Now everyone is in the season of, ‘I was locked up, and I was trapped for 2, 3 years, and I need to get out,’” she said. “Events are coming back full-force.”
"Covid really did something for a lot of people,” said Thompson, an introvert who didn’t mind being at home behind the computer. She realizes the pandemic was much harder on others.
“People just kinda got tired of being by themselves for so many years, and now that we can get out in the world again, they want to be out in the world as much as possible.”
Government statistics underscore the growing demand for meeting, convention and event planners. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment for planners is expected to grow 8% between 2022 to 2032. That adds up to 15,200 planner openings each year over the next decade.
This is welcome news to planners like Thompson, whose mother tells stories about how her little girl loved planning, even before she started elementary school.
“If you’ve seen the movie, Soul Food, that was our family on Sundays,” recalled Thompson. “My mom said that I would always plan out what we were going to do and what we were going to have, plan the shopping trip.”
Thompson’s mom used to get annoyed when her daughter made her spell out every item on the shopping list.
“That was my job,” laughed Thompson.
Years later, Thompson is still a perfectionist who loves attending to the details. This past weekend, she made sure the Monitors Foundation Holiday Gala went off without a hitch. Last month it was Black Men Teach Twin Cities’ big event.
Thompson can’t remember the family gatherings she helped throw as a preschooler, but she knows what it feels like to deliver the goods now. She smiles when she recalls how pleased Monitors members were after their gala fundraiser.
“To see how happy they were with the way it looked and the amount of work and stress that was taken off of them really made me feel good that I was able to help them,” she said.