NEW YORK CITY— Melinda Cragan Lindland recently joined the global creative house Spring Studios as Managing Director, North America.
Trade Show Executive connected with Cragan Lindland to learn about her career journey and new role, success strategies and advice for up-and-coming professionals.
ANDREW: How did you start working in the events industry?
MELINDA: I was desperate to work in advertising in New York City, because I believed firmly that was my destiny. However, I couldn’t get any attention as I was sending out resumes for internships.
My father was often speaking on stage as an IBM executive and a company called Caribiner was producing those meetings (or industrials as they were called). He connected me with their Head of Growth, who made an internship available for me in the creative department coordinating proposals. I fell deep in love with the industry and its amazing people during that internship.
Worth noting that I was also a ballet dancer — and when you think about it, the work that we do in experiential is about moving somebody to think or act differently through a blend of theater and marketing. It was a perfect fit.
ANDREW: Could you describe the beginning of your professional career?
MELINDA: My very first role after college was at an integrated PR and advertising firm with a B2B focus. I liked it, but felt restless after 2 years. I looked at the NY Times classifieds at lunch — and there were exactly two ads that day for marketing jobs. One was something in media. The other was a post to join the IBM account team at Caribiner. It was fate.
That Caribiner role was my entrée into sales. I had an amazing, brilliant boss who taught me the vital selling basics: How to identify the right customers, decode their needs, and play those back in a winning event proposal. I was still quite junior so I was hardly doing that work solo — but could not have asked for better early career exposure.
When I was ready to stretch my legs a bit, I took a bigger role at a smaller shop which meant lots of hands-on outreach and pitching. That company was Cubic B’s Productions — a boutique with a stronghold in fashion, fragrance and cosmetic work. Two years later, I followed one of the Partners as he formed his own company, Caffeine Media — one of those dream moves where at a relatively young age, I was able to imprint on the office space, brand, marketing, and build out of the team as the overall Sales and Operations lead. I had a boss who believed I couldn’t fail. That was an amazing gift and an accelerant for my professional confidence. We had an amazing five year run and built up an amazing book of beauty and consumer clients.
ANDREW: How did your career progress from there?
MELINDA: I got to a point where I was ready to be a bigger fish in a bigger pond and I went to TBA Global, which was a mid-sized, global agency that blended destination management with that creative and production piece. The offering was more expansive, therefore the clients were larger and the proposals much more complex. I had an opportunity to learn more about learning + performance, employee engagement and branded entertainment.
During that period, I focused on getting a better handle on how to be credible with bigger clients with bigger budgets and learning how different that type of sale is from a more boutique, niche type of a thing.
Then, I moved on to Jack Morton … I was the Group Account Director and New Business Lead in New York and eventually the Director of New Biz in the U.S. … That then led me to Freeman.
I spent five years as one of many minds helping Freeman to think differently about their offering, growing their portfolio of corporate clients and eventually running their New York agency operation — an awesome career chapter that prepared me to rejoin Jack Morton post-pandemic — chasing a fun new challenge to launch a specialized healthcare offering.
I ran the Jack Health practice area for its first two years, and when that had gone well, I was proud to be promoted to EVP Head of Growth for Jack Morton.
Fun fact: Caribiner merged with Jack Morton along the way — which meant that as Head of Growth, I was now running the function that I once supported as an intern. How cool is that?
And it was a blast closing some very memorable deals in that role. Buzzworthy wins that helped elevate the agency, and had Spring seek out a leader from Jack for this role. Joining Spring completely aggregates my experience — trade show, global production, boutique creative teams — and puts it all together in a multidisciplinary, Managing Director role that knits together everything that I’ve learned.
ANDREW: Were mentors vital to your success?
MELINDA: Absolutely. Janet Dell at Freeman has been a role model and mentor for just about a decade. She is a wonderful source for truth as a female leader and an advocate, always making sure that I am pushing myself and our teams. “Goals only go up!” she always says. As I transitioned from Freeman into Jack Morton, she was a sounding board and helped me really think about how I was going to be successful.
Before Janet, Jim Cavanaugh and I worked together at both TBA Global and Jack Morton, and he has probably been my biggest supporter and believer overall … He always gave me that extra bit of fuel to have the courage to go further. And excellent advice, always.
Related. Power Lunch Executives of 2024 Share Their Predictions and Insights on What’s to Come in 2025
ANDREW: What would you describe as one of your key skills?
MELINDA: I’m a great business planner. It’s served me really well to write a plan, kick the tires with smart people, make sure that it reflects all of our vulnerabilities and all of our strengths, and then live by it.
Using this skill has been an overarching strategy throughout my career: being very clear and objective in a needs assessment, how we address each of those things, declaring where we are trying to grow, setting a path, correcting if we need to and then (truly) living by that plan.
ANDREW: What is a challenge that you have encountered and how have you mitigated it?
MELINDA: It is hard to prioritize in these roles. There is so much that comes at us during the day that’s not already in the book and prioritizing the things that are in the book is complex.
It’s even harder now that technology is so fluid — even when you try to block off times for productivity or to keep your attention highly focused, that’s a challening thing to preserve.
I have learned that I have times of the day when I’m the most productive at writing and thinking, and that’s typically the front half of the day. I try to keep that as my working time.
Then, the back half of the day is better for me to do meetings and 1:1s, and to leave some flex time for the unexpected. But if we are being really honest, it’s critical to give yourself some grace. Not every single day will have the same level of order and productivity. And that’s okay.
ANDREW: What else drew you to Spring Studios?
MELINDA: Spring does some of the most beautiful work in the industry and it’s all so culturally centric. Our clients are icons of fashion, beauty, entertainment. Corporate giants and industry greats. And for those clients, we have the ability to use physical, beautiful space that we own as a backdrop for shoots, experiences and events with exceptionally well-executed content and film. It’s a total win.
What was exciting for me about the role was that it pushed me out of my comfort zone. I had been occupying somewhat similar roles for the last three or four chapters of my career where I was mostly a Head of Growth, Head of Sales or manager of a sales team … I wanted to take that knowledge and go towards something that is very much on the forefront of culture, and still attractive to my professional network. The great news is that just about every brand and every business aspires to tell their story beautifully. And beautiful work is our sweet spot.
So I loved the notion of putting those things all together and going into the deep end of the pool – and playing with entrepreneurial skills that I hadn’t been able to use in a while.
ANDREW: What do you expect this new role to entail?
MELINDA: I’m principally attached to three business lines in the Spring Studios model. The Managing Director role manages all of the disciplines that service those three business lines.
One is the management of the venue that is in Tribeca in New York City, which is an exceptionally gorgeous and very-large event space … very-high ceilings with breathtaking views and pillar-free areas where clients can execute any type of program is extraordinary.
A large part of my role is keeping that building filled with tier-one programs or the VIP events that coincide with the big shows at Javits Center.
Then, there is an experiential team out of that location that services North America. We’re able to do work right in house … if somebody does not want to choose an experiential partner and would rather use more of a boutique, we’re able to put that support together for them.
Lastly, the piece that is probably the longest and most established is the content and creative studios. The stunning film and campaigns you see on our website. Our difference in the U.S. is that we have that big flagship building and we get to bring creative studio work into this environment that allows it to then scale way up to be more experiential.
ANDREW: What do you appreciate about the events industry?
MELINDA: One of the really interesting aspects of our business is ‘coopetition.’
We are all highly dependent on each other as agencies, venues, general contractors, equipment providers and exhibit houses.
We all have to co-exist in these environments, whether it’s a major convention center or a huge conference where there’s five big companies coming together … not only do we have to all play well together, but we have to avoid inappropriate turf grabs. There is something really remarkable about how we’ve all developed an unspoken code of conduct. All boats rise in this business if we do it well.
Let’s understand that yes, it’s still a competition, we’re still trying to grow our businesses, but let’s help each other too. I think that there’s this great spirit of that in this business that is very special and anybody reading this dialogue can hopefully look for the moments in which they can create greater connection and greater connective tissue between all of us as partners in this business.
That’s certainly how I’ve approached it and even though I’m at this new role, my first ten meetings are going to probably all be friends at experiential agencies, making sure that we all look for those opportunities to have synergy together.
ANDREW: What advice would you give an up-and-coming events professional?
MELINDA: The single best thing to do is make sure you understand the industry mechanically. Understand how providers make money, how exhibitors use that as part of their channel and how they need to sometimes defend the choice to invest in the channel to acquire sales leads or further their business relationships or whatever their aspirations may be.
If you step into an entry level job and only master the comings and goings of that one job, whether it’s admin, ticket writing or whatever it is that you happen to be doing, that’s not enough. You will not ascend.
You need to be aware of how any of your vendor partners make money, how your company makes money and how your exhibiting clients make money. If you are the exhibitor, you should know how you’re going to amplify the success of your program to continue to get investment in it.
You won’t know all of this overnight, but you need to be listening for those things and if you have the opportunity to talk to mentors or senior people, those are the best questions to ask: break it down for me and tell me exactly how this whole thing works and where I can add the most value.
This post was originally published on here
