In partnership with Freeman, eXp completely reimagined their Expo Hall to be more central to the attendee journey.

The Business Event Strategist of the Year category at the Visionary Awards recognizes professionals who lead business events with clear strategic intent, aligning vision, execution, and measurable outcomes to simultaneously further organizational goals and elevate the attendee experience. 2026 finalist Mindy Grubb, CMP, vice president of events at eXp Realty, manages the company’s $12-million global events portfolio. Last year, she redesigned the attendee journey for her organization’s annual meeting just 90 days ahead of the event. eXpcon Miami 2025 took place Oct. 19-23 at the Miami Beach Convention Center for agents, brokers, and staff, and ushered in a shift to “people-first design” for eXp events.

Mindy Grubb, CMP

“eXpcon Miami followed immediately after eXpcon Canada and eXpcon International, so as a team we moved straight into our 5,000-person flagship event with roughly 90 days to make a meaningful impact,” Grubb told Convene. A dip in Net Promoter Score was a signal to the planning team that the event experience wasn’t translating into loyalty or advocacy, so they set to work reinventing eXpcon Miami. “The first thing we focused on was the friction points. Where were we losing energy? Where were we creating congestion? Why were sponsors feeling like add-ons instead of partners? The compressed timeline forced clarity. Every change had to matter,” she said.

Grubb and her team worked with Freeman to make bold changes in the months leading up to the meeting, embracing people-first design principles as they considered various tweaks to the event’s physical layout and educational programming. “In partnership with Freeman, we studied traffic flow and rebuilt the floor intentionally,” Grubb said. “But layout alone wasn’t enough. People-first design means walking the event like an attendee. We mapped the full journey: registration, entry points, breakout transitions, expo traffic. We looked for congestion, confusion, and energy drop-offs.”

One of the most effective changes at eXpcon 2025 was making Expo Hall take a more central role over the five days of the event. “We programmed energy into the space with games, food activations, and built-in networking moments,” she said. “The pickleball court was constantly buzzing. The Expo Hall stopped being a pass-through and became a destination.”

Embracing a people-first design approach also inspired a range of minor tweaks, Grubb said, but those “few strategic adjustments made a real difference: removing hallway sponsor tables that created bottlenecks and consolidating breakout sessions into strategic clusters instead of spreading them across the entire convention center.”

She and her team also rebooted the education program, focusing most of their efforts on the general session, which had previously “leaned heavily on traditional panel discussions. There’s a place for that, but it wasn’t creating momentum,” Grubb said. “We elevated the general session into a true production. We brought in keynote voices like [entrepreneur, author, and rapper] Jesse Itzler and [restaurateur] Will Guidara and layered in music, entertainment, and intentional transitions that kept the room engaged from start to finish. Run-of-show was tightened. Narrative flow mattered. We treated the stage like an experience, not just a sequence of sessions.”

In the wake of these changes, eXpcon’s revenue stayed steady — but stakeholder sentiment improved dramatically. “Sponsors shared this was one of the best experiences they had at any event all year and most secured 2026 commitments before leaving,” Grubb said. “The biggest shift wasn’t physical. It was philosophical. Sponsors are partners in the experience, not transactional placements.” The impact of the changes were immediately observable in the post-event survey data: eXpcon’s NPS jumped from -45 in 2024 to 83 for the 2025 show.

Kate Mulcrone is Convene’s digital managing editor