The calendar says June, but in a cavernous office basement in Des Plaines, it looks more like December.
Employees are busy preparing Christmas decorations for hundreds of Midwestern offices, restaurants and shopping malls. They are knee deep-make that over their heads-in shiny ornaments, garland, red ribbons, giant Christmas trees and cardboard Santas.
The work at The Grand Event, a firm that produces special events and holiday decor, goes on year-round. With so many halls to deck, it has to.
Take Woodfield Mall, for example, where The Grand Event installed decorations this past holiday season. There are 2.3 million square feet to decorate. Ceilings stretch 72 feet high. The amount of decorations needed would fill 10 average houses from floor to ceiling. Festooning the mall called for months of planning, eight moving vans and two crews of about 20 people working double shifts for three days.
Wide-eyed youngsters watched installers in a cherry picker hang huge gift boxes, bows and garland.
Decorating for the holidays or a party is fun, right? For the people at The Grand Event it is both fun and serious business.
While officials at Woodfield Mall have conceded that decorating for holidays and parties is one chore they`d rather hire someone else to do, so have firms such as Kraft General Foods, Federal Express, Hyatt Hotels and Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.
They`ve turned to The Grand Event for help. And they`re willing to pay anywhere from $5,000 to $35,000 for a single display.
With 16 million shoppers a year traversing the halls of Woodfield Mall, decorations are a major part of marketing, according to James Linowski, Woodfield Mall manager, who says, ”Right after Halloween, we have tour bus companies from out of state calling to know when the Christmas decorations will be up.”
The man who helps make that magic happen, the master marketer, head party decorator of The Grand Event is Mark Zak, a 28-year-old graduate of DePaul University`s MBA program.
Linowski met Zak at a Northwest Suburban Chamber of Commerce and Industry meeting last year. It wasn`t Zak`s good looks or even his fine reputation that caught Linowski`s attention-it was the golf ball head and 10-gallon cowboy hat that Zak was wearing to promote the chamber`s annual golf outing.
So when Linowski went looking for someone with novel ideas to spruce up the mall, he turned to The Grand Event last summer. ”Zak made our Christmas decorations look newer, better and at a better price than we ever had before,” says Linowski. ”It amazes me the work he does.”
Of course, The Grand Event didn`t stop at Christmas. It also installed the mall`s Easter decorations. With exclusive rights to Beatrix Potter`s Peter Rabbit, the mall hopped with bunny tails and plastic jelly beans.
”Vibrant and fresh” is how Charles Senseman, senior visual merchanding analyst for Taubman Malls, which owns 20 malls nationwide, including Woodfield, describes the work of The Grand Event. ”They`re very
enthusiastic.”
Maintaining employee enthusiasm while watching the budget is the fine line Zak walks every day. Success for Zak at The Grand Event has come from his rare mix of creativity and financial aptitude.
Which is one reason for his meteoric climb to the top. ”I`m kind of like a farmer,” says Zak. ”My job is to help employees achieve goals and maintain as much happiness. If you don`t, they simply will not do the job.”
”There`s always room for creativity here,” says Grand Event creative director Sally Hubka as she colored in holiday mockups with vibrant reds and golds. ”Mark acknowledges your ideas and lets you run with them.”
Installation and personnel manager Cheri Cory says she likes coming to work because her boss is receptive to new ideas. ”I get to use my creative abilities. Mark`s good at taking suggestions from people,” she says. ”If I have an idea, he`s willing to listen to it.”
But creative ideas can cost money. ”My job is to let the employees create and still offer a return on investment to the (company) owners. It`s a challenge-a big challenge.”
But if it weren`t fun, he says, he`d quit tomorrow. ”My personal happiness has a lot to do with my staying here,” says Zak. ”You have to listen to what`s going on inside of yourself. I come to work for eight hours or more of entertainment every day.”
Zak was the fourth of five children of David and MaryAnn Zak, and grew up in Elk Grove Village. In 1982, while a senior at St. Viator School in Arlington Heights, Zak started working at The Grand Event, literally sweeping up after the party. After graduation from DePaul, he decided against following his classmates into high finance careers.
The Grand Event, which had been founded as a landscaping business in 1980 by high school students who trimmed lawns for tuition money, had diversified into party and holiday decor to keep busy during the off season. The display end of the business became so profitable that the landscape business was sold off entirely. It was Zak who convinced the owners to concentrate solely on the display business.
”You cannot divide your marketing budget in two separate areas,” says Zak. ”So you sit down and say, `What business are you really in.` When I showed the owners the numbers, there was no opposition.”
Eventually, the three founding high school students sold the business to another group of students. Only one, now an ophthalmologist, has retained partial ownership of the business, with the remainder being taken over by other investors as the need for growth capital arose.
Over the years the investors have let Zak run the show. ”He`s got it down to a T,” says owner Frank Pantel, a general contractor in rental properties. ”He does a pretty good job. He runs things the way he sees fit.” Zak`s way of running things has doubled business every year for the past eight years. Although he won`t disclose sales figures, the company now has hundreds of clients.
Owner Fred Adams, a controller for a cleaning and maintenance company in Des Plaines, says it is Zak`s marketing approach that is responsible for the
”higher than expected” growth rate the company has enjoyed. ”He`s very sophisticated in how he markets the service,” says Adams. ”He knows how to bring in new customers and how to keep them.”
For customers, it is the company`s attention to detail and ability to deliver as promised that keeps them coming back.
”They`re all the things you look for in a business,” says Kevin Brown, a managing partner with Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. Brown oversees Oprah Winfrey`s restaurant, The Eccentric, and Shaw`s Crab House in Chicago, and hires The Grand Event for all the holiday decorating.
”Zak is honest, straightforward and he delivers,” says Brown. ”He`s not afraid to say no when he can`t do it and he`s not afraid to quote you a price.”
Brown adds, that the decorations are festive, without being overpowering.”That`s not easy to do. ”He`s got a passion for what he does. I think he`s the best.”
Accommodating clients is ”the most important thing,” says Zak. ”We don`t say we only do displays at x number of dollars and if they can`t afford it, too bad. We start with their budget and look at their facilities. Then we want to know about their goals. If a client can`t afford an entire decor program, we`ll rent it to them or we put them on a program where they buy it over several years.”
Jim Earley, general manager of Ala Carte Entertainment, which, among other things, owns Excalibur and the Alumni Club in Chicago, has used The Grand Event in its restaurants for several years. ”They introduced us to decorations that can be used repeatedly. Zak upgraded our decorations and reduced our costs. You can`t help but like a guy like that,” says Earley.
Earley also enjoys the company`s creativity and sense of humor. For the holidays, they put a cowboy hat on Santa and Italian lights on a giant cactus at the Cadillac Ranch in Bartlett.
At Christmas time, the installation staff increases from seven full-timers to 30, many of whom are used on an as-needed basis throughout the year working on other projects, just like in the firm`s early days. ”We believe that execution is 90 percent of success-getting it to look just right,” says Zak.
All of this goes on from The Grand Event headquarters in the basement of a dental office building on Oakton Street in Des Plaines that houses the orthodontia practice of Zak`s father. There are no windows, carpeting or even office furniture. There are hundreds of square feet of storage for such props as 20-foot champagne bottles, Christmas trees, cardboard cactuses and miles of garland.
Zak`s office is nothing more than a storeroom with added lighting. A single-seat convent pew (a birthday gift from a friend) serves as the only chair for infrequent visitors. A painted sign from the Fullerton Avenue ”L” Station and banners from the Chicago Jazz Festival and Field Museum`s Egypt exhibit hide utility meters. A child`s sled mounted on the wall serves as a shelf for rolled up papers. ”It`s not much, but the price is right and the utilities are very reasonable,” says Zak. ”Our clients never come here. We go to them.”
Zak`s association with The Grand Event has been somewhat symbiotic. Every time he earned a diploma or degree, he was given a promotion and an opportunity to put into practice what he learned in the classroom. ”I was in a very unusual position in that everything I learned in college and graduate school I immediately turned around and applied on the job,” says Zak, who has a quick smile coupled with a habit of saying ”thank you” at every imaginable opportunity.
As the knowledge came, he was given more responsibilities. ”They said to me, `Well, you know about this so you`re going to handle that.` ”
Zak went from display builder (in-house work) to display manager, which put him out in the field to install and oversee display builders. With increased customer contact, he could do on-the-spot market research to find out if customers were satisfied with the work. He also became responsible for hiring and training the crews.
Later, he turned to the more creative side-developing the displays-but soon realized that his talents were misdirected. ”I`m not an art student; I don`t have the ability.” So he hired creative director Hubka, who, Zak says, ”is 10 times better than I am.”
Eventually, he was given the financial responsibilities of finding venture capital to ”grow” the company and in formulating budgets so that the company would continue to make a profit.
It became clear that some changes had to be made. ”I soon realized that the only way we were going to move ahead in this company is if we custom design our own stuff and have it made for us.” So the company began designing its own product, with Zak traveling to Hong Kong and Thailand to have it made. These days, Zak serves as The Grand Event`s general manager, leaving execution of details to other managers, though he retains the title of marketing manager. ”We`re not into titles around here,” says owner Adams.
”To the customers that`s what he is-a marketing manager.”
For relaxation, Zak plays the harp at his Elk Grove Village home. He also is active in the Catholic Church, the church he was raised in, administering the Eucharist on Sundays to hospital-bound parishioners. He volunteers with the Roy Joel Humanitarian Effort, collecting used chalk boards and desks from closed Chicago Catholic schools and shipping them to the Dominican Republic where they are sorely needed.
”God puts talents in our hearts; we are supposed to use them to earn a living and to help others as best we can,” says Zak, who also volunteers with Alexian Brothers Health System in Elk Grove Village.
