Inside a 90-day meeting makeover. Embracing people-first design helped 2026 Visionary Awards finalist Mindy Grubb reimagine eXp Realty's 5,000-person flagship annual event in just three months. In partnership with Freeman, eXp completely reimagined their Expo Hall to be more central to the attendee journey. The Business Event Strategist of the Year category at the Visionary Awards recognizes professionals who lead business events with clear strategic intent, aligning vision, execution, and measurable outcomes to simultaneously further organizational goals and elevate the attendee experience. 2026 finalist Mindy Grubb, CMP, vice president of events at eXp Realty, manages the company's $12-million global events portfolio. Last year, she redesigned the attendee journey for her organization's annual meeting just 90 days ahead of the event. eXpcon Miami 2025 took place Oct. 19-23 at the Miami Beach Convention Center for agents, brokers, and staff, and ushered in a shift to "people-first design" for eXp events. "eXpcon Miami followed immediately after eXpcon Canada and eXpcon International, so as a team we moved straight into our 5,000-person flagship event with roughly 90 days to make a meaningful impact," Grubb told Convene. A dip in Net Promoter Score was a signal to the planning team that the event experience wasn't translating into loyalty or advocacy, so they set to work reinventing eXpcon Miami. "The first thing we focused on was the friction points. Where were we losing energy? Where were we creating congestion? Why were sponsors feeling like add-ons instead of partners? The compressed timeline forced clarity. Every change had to matter," she said. Grubb and her team worked with Freeman to make bold changes in the months leading up to the meeting, embracing people-first design principles as they considered various tweaks to the event's physical layout and educational programming. "In partnership with Freeman, we studied traffic flow and rebuilt the floor intentionally," Grubb said. "But layout alone wasn't enough. People-first design means walking the event like an attendee. We mapped the full journey: registration, entry points, breakout transitions, expo traffic. We looked for congestion, confusion, and energy drop-offs." One of the most effective changes at eXpcon 2025 was making Expo Hall take a more central role over the five days of the event. "We programmed energy into the space with games, food activations, and built-in networking moments," she said. "The pickleball court was constantly buzzing. The Expo Hall stopped being a pass-through and became a destination." Embracing a people-first design approach also inspired a range of minor tweaks, Grubb said, but those "few strategic adjustments made a real difference: removing hallway sponsor tables that created bottlenecks and consolidating breakout sessions into strategic clusters instead of spreading them across the entire convention center." She and her team also rebooted the education program, focusing most of their efforts on the general session, which had previously "leaned heavily on traditional panel discussions. There's a place for that, but it wasn't creating momentum," Grubb said. "We elevated the general session into a true production. We brought in keynote voices like [entrepreneur, author, and rapper] Jesse Itzler and [restaurateur] Will Guidara and layered in music, entertainment, and intentional transitions that kept the room engaged from start to finish. Run-of-show was tightened. Narrative flow mattered. We treated the stage like an experience, not just a sequence of sessions." In the wake of these changes, eXpcon's revenue stayed steady - but stakeholder sentiment improved dramatically. "Sponsors shared this was one of the best experiences they had at any event all year and most secured 2026 commitments before leaving," Grubb said. "The biggest shift wasn't physical. It was philosophical. Sponsors are partners in the experience, not transactional placements." The impact of the changes were immediately observable in the post-event survey data: eXpcon's NPS jumped from -45 in 2024 to 83 for the 2025 show. Kate Mulcrone is Convene's digital managing editor March 26, 2026

Freeman Blue Echo leverages 3D venue visualization to aid organizers, designers and brands in planning. MADDY RYLEY, MANAGING EDITOR * March 26, 2026 DALLAS - Today, Freeman launched its new AI-powered 3D venue visualization platform, Freeman Blue Echo, which uses scans of convention centers to create fully navigable environments to plan, visualize and experience an event's design before getting onsite. The new tool aims to provide designers, organizers and brands the ability to explore floor layouts, activations and attendee journeys in a 3D photorealistic version of venues. This means partners can test layouts and sponsorship placements to help make smarter, more effective investments. "Our goal with the Blue Echo project was to create a special intelligence library, and what that means is going out and actually capturing all these convention spaces in a way where we can have an interactive digital twin that we can operate within for what we deliver to our clients," said Kedar Deshpande, Vice President of Innovation at Freeman. "Our planners, our designers, our brand managers, each have a different perspective to look at these environments to move the same event forward." The new digital entities can show not only all the branding and sponsorship opportunities, like banners and LED walls available in the venue, but they can also show what those offerings look like with the real event materials and show graphics that would be used onsite at the show. Designers can also place their exhibit into the environment to see how it will look against its surroundings, giving insight into aspects like sightlines, potential traffic patterns and other things that are hard to convey via 2D floor plans. "One benefit that we do have is being able to have this interactive space. While we're having conversations with the clients in the past, an account member would have a conversation. They would go back to the design team and convey that information, then they translate it and come up with a new render. A few days later, here we go," Deshpande said. "The goal here is really to compress all of that work and not lose any of the benefits of a partnership, extending visual communications and making decisions faster." From an internal perspective, these environments also show rigging points, dimensions, loading bay areas and other operational information that creates a more efficient move-in and move-out experience. All of these usages can also lead to better problem-solving, as issues from the year prior can be tested and fixed in the 3D environment, and future potential issues resolved before even stepping foot in the convention center. Taking Inspiration from Outside Industries The technology that Freeman Blue Echo runs on is only a few years old, and has been mainly used in the entertainment and media industry to create holograms. According to Deshpande, another example of this kind of technology being used was at the latest Winter Olympics in skating events to determine who crossed the finish line first. "The Olympics were a great advertisement for what this could do," Deshpande said. "It is surprising how few industries are really taking advantage of this, but the ones that know how environments work or the value of visual communications are the ones really jumping into it. I think Freeman is one of the first to do it within the space of convention centers because we know the value of visual communications and the process that we work in with our clients, and we know it's going to make a huge difference." Currently, Freeman is using the technology to scan 20 convention centers, including Chicago's McCormick Place, the Las Vegas Convention Center and San Francisco's Moscone Center. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *