Executive dinner production, San Antonio
Clandestine Events + Experiences
Executive dinner production, San Antonio
01 / Who We Are
Clandestine operates from New Orleans, where culture permeates from the ground up, built from what's actually there and evoking a feeling that cannot be manufactured or replicated. We approach our work the same way.
Our founder, Kelley Troia, established the Marketing Operations practice at both Walmart and Whole Foods. That role lives where creative, project management and business finance intersect. It taught us what a brand team owns when stakes are real, and it is what we do now, scaled for brevity. Events should evoke feeling, just as culture does. That means reading what a place needs, what a brand owes to a space, what holds weight and what doesn't.
We work from New Orleans and Austin, and we produce nationally.
They blew the effing doors off. There is not a curved ball they cannot catch.
Richard Weston-Smith, Global Director of Events, Teleflex02 / Why This Work
You are building an insurance pipeline alongside ten conferences on your roadmap, with dinners filling in around them. Of everything on that plan, the dinners have the highest ceiling per dollar. They also carry the one variable that cannot be solved from a spreadsheet: who actually shows up.
That is the whole game. A table of fifteen of the right carrier and broker executives is one of the most efficient nights a company can buy. The same table with six is an expensive evening. What separates those two outcomes gets decided four to six weeks before anyone sits down, and it has almost nothing to do with the restaurant.
You named the other piece on our call. The conference-adjacent nights get dicey, because every vendor in the category is chasing the same executives on the same three evenings in the same market. Carriers and brokers in Hartford and New York are not short of dinner invitations that week. They are short of reasons to accept one. That is a solvable problem, and it gets solved in the invitation, not the menu.
It also compounds. The first table is the hardest one you will ever have to fill. Once there is a night behind you that the market noticed, the second invitation is no longer asking someone to take a chance on an unknown evening. It is referencing a known one. That is the argument for building this as a program rather than a single night, and it is why we would rather produce one room that stands well above the crowd than four that blend into it.
03 / The Approach
We design backwards from the conversation you want to be having two weeks later, then build the room that makes that conversation the natural next step rather than an ask.
What that means in practice, without giving away the machinery:
You asked about the pre-event work. It is the part that decides whether the evening works, so we own it.
Once you provide your invitee list, we design the invitation and the registration page, run the outreach sequence through confirmation, and reconfirm every guest in the days before. Ten confirmed guests is the benchmark. We'll flag early and honestly if acceptance rates are trending weak so you have time to adjust the list or approach before we lock the date.
04 / Selected Work
Most notably, the following.
Gainbridge, Group 1001, Delaware Life, Farmers Insurance, Delta Dental, Root Insurance
Google, Woflow, Pacific Content
Teleflex, GammaTile
Aramco, Orano, Hyosung
NBA, IndyCar, Formula 1
LVMH
05 / Scope of Work
06 / The Investment
| The New York pilot | The four-market program Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | One dinner, New York, September | Four dinners, four insurance markets, September through Q1 |
| Guests | Up to 15 per room | Up to 15 per room |
| Market strategy | Single market | Sequenced against your conference roadmap, so the dinners land where your team already is |
| Guest intelligence | Built for one room | Compounds across markets. Declines in one city become invitations in the next |
| Format | Designed for the night | Designed once, then run four times and sharpened after each |
| Fee | $22,500 | $78,000 |
The fee buys six to eight weeks of work, not one night. Guest dossiers and strategy, the invitation campaign run through confirmation, venue negotiation and contracting, room and menu design, seating plan with conversation openers, and producing on the day. It is not billed hourly and it does not change when the work gets harder.
Production is sourced, contracted, and billed through Clandestine, separate from the fee. For fifteen guests in a private Manhattan room in September, venue and production typically run $35,000 to $45,000. We'll confirm the final number with venue contracts before you approve the engagement.
The program is not a discount on four pilots. It is a different piece of work. The format gets built once, the guest list compounds, and the markets get chosen against your conference calendar instead of booked one at a time against whatever is still available.
Once confirmed guests are locked, we recommend budgeting $10,000 to $25,000 for a single moment that creates conversation. It might be a live musician or performer, a sommelier-led tasting experience, a live artist working during the room, or something specific to your audience and industry. The point is not spectacle. The point is the thing people reference when the next invitation lands. It is why one dinner fills and the next one is easier to sell.
This is optional and flexible, scaled to your budget and built once we know the room, not locked into the proposal. But every dinner we've produced that landed as invitation-demand-creating got this element right.
If it helps when you take this internally, the comparison that tends to land is not against the cost of a dinner. It is against what a booth at one of those ten conferences costs, and how many named, qualified conversations it returns.
You have both of those numbers. Put them next to this one.
07 / Payment Schedule
On the program, the fee is billed per market on the same schedule, so you are never paying for a dinner that is more than one quarter out.
08 / Next Steps