Lee Gimpel

About Lee Gimpel

I help organizations improve their meetings and conferences - in-person or online. This may be reducing the time or number of meetings, making them more effective and actionable, generating better ideas, or improving collaboration.I provide meeting facilitation services for team meetings as well as conferences, retreats, and offsites. In addition, I offer meeting training courses to improve meeting skills for employees and managers. These meeting management workshops include Basic Meeting Skills, Successful Virtual & Online Meetings, Getting Innovative Ideas, Leading Meetings for New Managers, Fixing Board & Staff Meetings, Refreshing Your Conference, and Group Facilitation Training. Finally, I consult on meeting design, be it fixing weekly staff meetings or the agenda and elements of a conference. Based in Washington, DC, I work with corporations, non-profits, government and associations.Much of my career has been built on the pillars of increasing engagement, reducing complexity, and synthesizing information. My facilitation and meeting design style is collaborative, participatory, and co-creative. I strive to help organizations improve their culture with effective meetings that are efficient, engaging – and even fun.My meeting facilitation work is most heavily influenced by my decade as Director of Development with LifeWise Strategies, an education/training company. There, I helped a range of organizations improve their classes, workshops, and client sessions through consulting, training, curriculum development and gamification, and hands-on learning tools. I also oversaw the development of the company’s online assessment tool. Clients included large banks and credit unions to non-profits like Habitat for Humanity, to universities, and government agencies, including the US Army and Marine Corps. Previously, I worked in Capital One’s knowledgebase department within the training and development organization. I also wrote professionally as a journalist, interviewing thought-leaders and covering business, entrepreneurship, and technology for publications like Inc, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek and Washington Post. I started my career at a large commercial general contracting company and then as a product manager for a mobile/wireless software company, managing B2B and B2C products. Very early on, I spent formative time at the Center for Creative Leadership and the creative consulting agency, Play.All these experiences come together with Better Meetings where I’m on a modest quest to rid the world of bad meetings.

Experience

1. Founder and Principal

   Better Meetings

   Jul 2019 — Present · Washington, DC, US

   I founded Better Meetings with a mission of improving meetings; to make them more productive, effective, engaging–and even fun. Better Meetings works with organizations in three ways:• Meeting Facilitation: Preparing and running meetings. This includes as an on-site or online meeting facilitator for conference sessions, board & corporate retreats, innovation/brainstorming, strategic planning sessions, and company offsites.• Meeting Training: Teaching employees how to run more effective meetings. Despite the hundreds of hours of meetings in a year–and thousands in a career–most employees never get any training in how to run productive meetings. A few hours of professional development can pay huge dividends; meeting skills can be used immediately with real results. Meeting training offerings include meeting agendas, facilitation skills, new manager training, running online meetings, etc.• Meeting Design & Coaching: Consultative meeting design engagements restructure the format and flow of meetings to make them more effective. This may be refreshing your staff meeting, using new tools in an online meeting, or redesigning a virtual conference agenda to make it more interactive and engaging.Better Meetings works with corporations, non-profits, associations, and government on in-person or online meetings:• Team Meetings: Typically a room of people meeting on a problem/project. Including: board meetings, staff meetings, committee meetings, planning meetings, status meetings, brainstorming, and decision & action meetings.• Conferences: Larger meetings, including offsites, expos, online events, presentations, webinars, conventions, and startup pitch events.• Networking Events: Often attached to conferences or industry/corporate gatherings, in-person or online networking events link participants in a way that’s productive and natural–and so the right people connect on the right issues.I also produced the Conference Organizers Summit, a best-practices industry event.

Education

• University of Richmond

  BSBA, Marketing

  1995 — 1999

• University of Richmond - Robins School of Business

  BSBA, International Business, Marketing

  1995 — 1999

Skills

• Copywriting
• Segmentation
• SEO
• Business Analysis
• Marketing Communications
• Email Marketing
• Financial Services
• Copy Editing
• Credit Cards
• Strategy
• Direct Marketing
• Marketing Strategy
• Public Speaking
• Analytics
• Social Media
• Business Strategy
• Writing
• Project Management