The work combined hospitality, executive support, travel logistics, stakeholder engagement, attendee record management, media coordination, and program coordination to create experiences for employees, board members, investors, funding partners, environmental leaders, water district representatives, and other high-value stakeholders.
Christian coordinated the individual events, sessions, speakers and activities that made up the experience.
Planning and production included:
Christian also produced an employee awards dinner within the company retreat. This included coordinating the internal awards process, gathering employee votes and manager comments, organizing recipient information, designing the physical awards, and coordinating their presentation during the dinner.
Video and photography were integrated into the retreat itself. Christian coordinated photographers around retreat events, guest speakers, sessions, and employee activities so the gathering could create media assets in addition to the in-person experience.
Board engagements included:
Planning included:
A significant part of this work was maintaining continuity across the guest experience. Attendee records captured information such as travel logistics, transportation needs, preferences, dietary restrictions, and other requirements needed to serve guests effectively throughout a trip or gathering.
Christian also partnered with Blue Forest’s External Affairs team to identify, coordinate, and capture stories throughout these experiences based on the attendees participating, the projects being visited, and progress occurring at individual project sites. This allowed the content produced around each gathering to reflect both the people in the room and the work happening on the ground.
The goal was to make complex, multi-day travel feel seamless for attendees while allowing Blue Forest’s leadership and technical teams to focus on the relationships, conversations, and projects themselves. Media coordination extended the value of these investments beyond the people physically in attendance, creating photo and video assets that could share the experience virtually and continue its impact after the gathering ended
“Before Christian took this on, I was personally involved in planning a lot of these trips and retreats. And when you’re the co-founder, you’re also going into those experiences with a very specific set of goals. There are people you need to spend time with, relationships you need to strengthen, and conversations you need to move forward.
It’s hard to do that when you’re also thinking about the schedule, transportation, meals, where everyone needs to be, and whether the whole thing is running the way it should.
Christian became someone I could trust to manage all of that, both in the planning and on the ground. That meant I could actually be present and focus on the reason we brought everyone together in the first place.
And that value became clearer across multiple retreats, board trips, and project site visits. Christian wasn’t just managing logistics. He understood who was attending, what mattered to Blue Forest, and the kind of experience we wanted people to have. Our guests felt taken care of, and when something changed, I trusted him to handle it.”
That gave me and the other executives the ability to stop managing the gathering and actually participate in it.”
– Zach Knight, Co-Founder and CEO, Blue Forest
