OUR STORY
This is where our story began. In 1998. With passion, with a track-record and with the drive to disrupt the typical event planning experience.
Aspire Meetings & Events’ founder, Heather Sampson, began her career in the events industry in 1998. While pursuing a degree from Johnson & Wales University, she built her career from the ground up as an intern in the Trade Show & Special Events department for an international jewelry manufacturing association.
Over the next six years, she honed her trade show management skills by working on a thriving trade show, a struggling trade show, and launching two brand-new trade shows – while also managing registration, pre-conference programs, trade show operations and all the association’s special events. She immediately fell in love with the association world and the trade shows/events industry, and the breadth of experience gained prepared her well for the rest of her career.
In the years since, she has planned hundreds of annual workshops and conferences for educators and school administrators, managed CME/CNE-accredited medical meetings and conventions, grew exhibit and sponsorship sales to new levels, and produced a TSNN (Trade Show News Network) Top 250 Trade Show. But along the way, her goal was to ultimately launch her own planning and consulting business.
In 2016, an opportunity to finally pursue that dream presented itself – and Aspire Meetings & Events was born.
Since the launch of Aspire Meetings & Events, we have been blessed to work with amazing clients who are all trailblazers in their own right. From managing the speakers and conference programming for newly launched trade shows and conferences, to coordinating medical training programs with didactic and hands-on training components, to producing an international scientific congress for 2,500 attendees from 84 countries and livestreaming sessions to their colleagues across the globe, we have shared in the success of each program produced.
What’s most rewarding to us is collaborating with our clients to create the vision and the strategy for their program, identifying creative opportunities to enhance the attendee experience, and being tasked with solving a problem or challenge that they face. We have always viewed challenges as opportunities in disguise…you just need to dig a little deeper into data and history to understand the root of the problem, while also thinking a bit “outside the box” to uncover the best opportunity to pursue.
