I spent part of this week doing cold outreach, and the positive response rates genuinely surprised me.

Cold outreach gets a bad reputation because most people do it wrong. They reach out without a real process or a clear reason why the partnership makes sense for the other person. What actually works is leading with value, showing you've done your research, and keeping the ask small enough that responding feels easy.

That's the approach I've been refining, and this week was a good reminder that when it works, it really works. More on that framework another time.

Let's get started.

I wasn't planning this deep dive, but yesterday I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up on a Nathan Barry Show episode featuring Will Guidara and Brian Canlis. I was maybe ten minutes in before I had my notes app open, writing down connections to B2B events.

Fun fact: For eight years before the pandemic, I ran a hospitality business. I started with pop-up dinners, then did event consulting for food halls and experiential marketing for F&B brands. So when two restaurant guys show up on a podcast for newsletter operators, I was intrigued and thought I could offer a unique perspective related to B2B events.

Quick context on the restaurant guys:

Their thinking, across hospitality, intentionality, and curiosity, maps directly onto the Audience, Design, and Execution components of my GARDEN framework.

Let’s make the connections.

Will and Brian organize their thinking into three tiers: one-size-fits-all, one-size-fits-some, one-size-fits-one.

Brian built a ritual at Canlis around this. Guests could drink from a rare barrel of Scotch, completely free, but only if they shared out loud how they hoped to grow as a person. What started as a staff tradition became something guests would call ahead to experience. It worked because Brian understood that people weren't just coming for the food. They were coming to feel connected to something. He designed around that insight.

The standard I find most useful: not just who is coming, but why they're actually coming. What do they need from this room that they can't get anywhere else? When you know that, the design decisions start to make themselves.

The Canlis example that stayed with me is the coat check. They'd already built a system to remember guests' cars without a valet ticket. Someone eventually asked: if we can do that for a car, why are we still handing out coat check numbers? So they built a new system. Heated coats waiting at the door, timed to the moment a table gets up. Car pulling around as they walk out.

No budget required but a lot intentionality. Guests almost always bring up the coats and the car when they talk about the experience. The “peak-end rule” resonates with me since people remember endings most vividly. I've started asking myself about every event I work on: am I as deliberate about the last twenty minutes as I am about the first?

Will is very clear that none of what feels like magic at 11 Madison Park was improvised. It was designed in advance, built into a system, and deployed consistently.

The Chewy example is the clearest illustration. When a customer cancels their dog food subscription because their pet died, Chewy's response is the same every time. Cancel the order, refund the last shipment, send flowers. Sometimes a hand-painted portrait of the pet. Someone identified a pattern, a painful and recurring human moment, decided what the response should look like, and built it into the system.

Every event has its own version of that moment. The first-time attendee who doesn't know anyone. The networking break that goes quiet. The person who traveled far and leaves without a useful connection. These are predictable. The question is whether we've designed a response for them, or we're hoping someone figures it out on the day.

Will puts it simply: "People think it's a magic trick. It's not. It's a system we've built."

None of what Will and Brian describe requires a massive venue or a big budget. It requires curiosity. The habit of asking whether something can be a little more human, a little more memorable, a little more worth showing up for. And then the discipline to build systems around the answers.

That's a standard I want to hold my own work to.