Meet Erica Spoor of Impact Point Group in Washington Park Neighborhood


Today we’d like to introduce you to Erica Spoor.

Erica, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?

If you’d told me as a bright-eyed, idealistic journalist student that I’d end up running my own event strategy company, I’d have said you were crazy. I honestly thought I’d be traveling the world, covering nature’s dramatic moments for National Geographic with my photo-journalist boyfriend in tow.

While it didn’t quite turn out that way, after graduating in 1994, I did immediately land a position at the Denver Post. I was really grateful to be employed in journalism and I learned a lot. To this day, I hold sacred the role of objective news reporting. But I found the newspaper model antiquated and the environment really constrictive. I’m originally from Northern California, where the tech sector was exploding at that time. I made a quick pivot and parlayed my journalism experience into a career in corporate communications and marketing in the high tech sector. It was there I found my way into events. I was drawn to the energy that comes from live audience engagement at events and saw how intentionally curated in-person experiences could have a significant impact on an audience and subsequently, their behavior and decisions. I quickly learned events fueled both my creative and strategic interests.

The fact I had no traditional training in event planning, led me to embrace a journalistic approach toward events from the get-go. I started with what I knew–the old-school “5 why’s” of reporting (who, what, where, when, why). It has always been fundamentally illogical to me to dive into picking a venue, food, entertainment or starting to design the experience before you know why you’re doing the event and what you expect to achieve. But people do it all the time, and often times its executive leaders within a company who are the worst offenders. Getting them aligned on the strategy can be one of the toughest barriers.

In those early years, I found myself working with many different event agency partners to help me try to scale and implement this strategic approach. I found most event agencies were solely focused on the creative design, production, and logistics planning. They offered value in the experiential aspect of events but could offer no proven frameworks for developing an event strategic plan or any methodologies for building consensus among executive leadership stakeholders on the business priorities and outcomes we expected to achieve through events, let alone standardizing event measurement. That’s when I decided to build it.

I founded the Impact Point Group in 2007 to focus on my passion for designing innovative events that deliver measurable audience and business impact. I believe event strategy is a blend of art and science. The art of inventive, creative experience design and the science of proven strategic planning, measurement and design methodologies and frameworks.

And the more digital the world gets, the more we crave human connection. Events are unique in that they provide a direct, immediate and personal connection to the company. Now more than ever, events have the potential to be powerful cornerstones of the brand, customer and employee experience and be a differentiator for your company.


Has it been a smooth road? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?

The saying “she believed she could and so she did” is a great way to describe my approach to launching Impact Point. At the time, we had young babies at home and I knew I was ready to strike out on my own. Before I even had a company entity, I reached out to trusted colleagues who knew my work and philosophy on event strategy and was able to secure some initial contracts with a few established, well-known technology companies.

When I established Impact Point in 2007, I intentionally created it as a corporation because I knew that entity would give me more options down the road when I was ready to grow. But I honestly didn’t set out to be a CEO or to be a business owner. I’ve come by that experience the hard way.

I’ve definitely had some challenges and bumps along the way… including how to scale and from a brand based on “me” to a brand based on a team, or “we,” model. Another hard lesson was recognizing the people who started with you may not be the ones that grow with you. And I hate all things related to accounting and finance so I’ve learned to hire advisors who are willing to speak my language and not make me try to learn theirs.

Most importantly, I have learned what defines me as a leader and entrepreneur. A key for me has never been apologizing for having a bold vision, even if people around you take a little time to get on board. Trust your instincts and don’t let the naysayers dissuade you. When it comes to people, I can get caught up in my aspiration for people, so I’ve learned the hard way to listen to what people say, but trust and believe what they do. And lastly, “hustle, breathe, repeat,” because at the end of the day being an entrepreneur is about determination and resilience. Most small businesses fail simply because the founder gets fatigued. So I try to hustle, take time to play and restore, and then get back at it before too long.


Please tell us about Impact Point Group.

We are an event strategy consulting company focused on blending the art of innovative, creative thinking, and design with the science of strategic planning and measurement to help our client’s design experiences that deliver audience and business impact. We provide strategic planning, program design and management, speaker strategy and management, and measurement consulting and facilitation services to corporate marketing and event leaders in the technology sector. We also offer a personality profile called iMAP, and high performance teaming services, to help event and marketing teams operate more efficiently and with greater productivity.

Facilitated workshops are a key component of our consulting solutions and we embed them across all of our service lines to help teams get aligned and move work forward faster.

The secret sauce we are known for is our ability to blend the art and science of events—we pair our passion for inventive, out-of-the-box thinking with a commitment to proven consulting methods. We work collaboratively with our clients to solve problems and translate ideas into actionable event strategies and plans with a focus on delivering solutions and achieving results, to get the impact they want from their people, programs and events.


Below are some of our recent highlights from 2019:

-We’re really proud to have received our women-owned business certification from The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the largest certifier of women-owned businesses in the U.S.

-We are also a Member of the Denver Chapter of the Women Presidents Organization, open to only the top 3% of women-owned businesses in the U.S.

-Some of our most exciting client engagements in the past year included the Cisco Systems, Cisco Live conference, Capital One’s activation at The SxSW conference, ServiceNow’s CIO Decisions program, and strategy and measurement engagements with DocuSign and Atlassian.

-We have also grown our team, adding two event strategists, and now have five trained facilitators, amongst us to lead our workshops.

-And we moved into a great, dog-friendly new office at 1091 S. Gaylord in the Wash Park neighborhood to accommodate our growing team!


What were you like growing up? Personality-wise, interest wise, etc.

My parents used to complain that I was “always burning the candle at both ends,” and that hasn’t really changed about me. I thrive on variety and have always had a lot of different irons in the fire.

As a kid, I probably would have said I was an athlete first. My favorite high school sport was volleyball, but I also played basketball and tennis. Later I skied on the competitive freestyle club team at CU Boulder before it was a sanctioned collegiate sport. In high school, I found my passion for journalism working for the school newspaper and was also active in student government. In fact, my former high school principal is now in a book club with my dad and he still comments today about how outspoken I was as class president, always advocating for something or other–longer lunch periods, new volleyball jerseys, hosting dances on ferry boats in the San Francisco Bay and not in the school gym. It was always something!

I would also describe myself as a creative “dabbler.” As a teenager I was frustrated by having a strong, athletic body that didn’t fit into the clothes off the rack — so I made my own simple dress pattern, with the curves in all the right places, and sewed myself five different dresses all in comfortable stretch knit fabric that fit me perfectly. Those became the staple of my wardrobe. I still don’t have a singular creative outlet. I’ve tried sewing, knitting, painting, writing and love to cook and work in the garden. Reading is an escape for me. I usually have both a fiction and non-fiction book going. My guilty pleasure is a mystery or suspense thriller full of plot twists that I can get totally lost in.

The other constant about me is that I’ve never shied away from taking the lead and have never really minded that pressure — I planned a lot of our high school dances and was a coordinator for trips abroad to Latin America, so I guess that’s probably where I got my first taste of events and the power of experiential marketing. I’m always looking for ways to connect the dots and connect people. I think that’s also a theme that I’ve carried through since I was a kid. I come back to that inclination all the time… it’s come in handy as a journalist, in corporate communications and event marketing, and now as a CEO and founder.


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