Back in the days when I was traveling and doing seminars with The Lovely Marianne, we faced the challenge of getting the meeting planners at various hotels to give us what we wanted. We weren’t asking for anything ridiculous; we just wanted the meeting room to be set a certain way because we knew what worked best for the people who came to my seminars.

At first, when we were still quite wet behind the ears, TLM would call the meeting coordinator at the hotel and explain what we needed. We quickly learned this didn’t work well because most hotels change meeting coordinators faster than Italy changes prime ministers. TLM would get all her ducks in a row with one woman (they always were women), only to call again to confirm everything about a week before our meeting and learn that someone else was now in charge. Oh, and that person knew nothing about our meeting.