Everything you need to know about working with Gold Standard Events Consulting, before we even get on a call.
Gold Standard Events Consulting is a boutique strategic event and venue consulting firm founded by Jennifer Jones. With 28 years of experience spanning New York City, Northern California, and Southern California, Jennifer brings a rare combination of corporate event planning expertise and deep restaurant and hospitality venue knowledge to every engagement.
The firm serves two distinct client types: corporate meeting planners who need a trusted strategic partner or boutique DMC advisor, and restaurants, event venues, and hospitality properties looking to build, rebuild, or grow their private events programs.
Most event planners focus on logistics. Gold Standard Events Consulting focuses on strategy first, then execution. Jennifer doesn't just coordinate vendors and timelines. She builds the business case behind your event, aligns it with measurable goals, and brings 28 years of relationships, market knowledge, and on-the-ground expertise to ensure the outcome is exceptional.
For corporate clients, that means operating as a true strategic partner rather than another vendor. For venues, it means rebuilding or building the entire events revenue operation from the ground up, not just offering advice.
Jennifer is based in Southern California and has deep roots across three markets: New York City, Northern California (wine country and Bay Area), and Southern California (Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego). She serves clients nationally and internationally for corporate event strategy engagements, and serves the Southern California market as a primary focus for venue consulting work.
By design, Gold Standard Events Consulting works with a select number of clients each year, typically 4 to 5. This is intentional. Jennifer is not a high-volume agency. She is a high-touch strategic partner, and that requires genuine capacity and attention. Working with fewer clients means every engagement gets the full depth of her expertise, relationships, and energy.
Event Strategy Consulting is Jennifer's corporate-facing service. She acts as a strategic advisor and boutique DMC partner for corporate meeting planners, helping them design and execute programs that deliver real business outcomes. Services include:
Venue Consulting is Jennifer's hospitality-facing service, where she steps in as an outsourced Director of Events for restaurants, event venues, and hospitality properties. This is a comprehensive engagement that may include:
Yes. Jennifer operates as a boutique Destination Management Company advisor, particularly for corporate clients bringing groups into Southern California or other markets where she has established vendor relationships. Rather than functioning as a traditional DMC with large overhead and markup structures, she acts as a strategic DMC partner: curating the right vendor ecosystem, negotiating on your behalf, and overseeing execution, while you contract directly with vendors for full financial transparency.
No, and this is by design. Gold Standard Events Consulting operates as a pure consulting and advisory firm. Clients contract directly with vendors and pay them directly. This eliminates the traditional DMC markup (typically 20 to 30%), keeps your corporate procurement process clean and transparent, and ensures there is no financial liability or middleman overhead layered into your event budget.
Jennifer handles the strategy, vendor relationships, negotiation oversight, and execution management. Your finance team works directly with the vendors.
Every engagement follows the same foundational approach:
It depends on the type of engagement. Corporate event strategy projects typically run from initial scoping through post-event debrief, which can range from 6 weeks to 6 months depending on event complexity. Venue consulting engagements are often structured as longer-term retainers, since building or rebuilding an events department requires sustained effort, typically 3 to 12 months depending on scope.
You don't need to have everything figured out. That's part of what the discovery call is for. It helps to have a general sense of:
Jennifer will guide the conversation from there.
Pricing is structured as a flat consulting retainer, not an hourly rate or a percentage of vendor spend. This keeps the financial relationship clean and aligned: Jennifer's incentive is to deliver the best possible strategy and outcome for you, not to inflate vendor spend.
Retainer fees vary based on the scope, complexity, and duration of the engagement. Specific pricing is discussed during the discovery call after Jennifer understands your needs.
Gold Standard Events Consulting is best suited for corporate events and hospitality projects with meaningful production budgets. For corporate events, this typically means total event spends starting around $75,000 and scaling significantly from there. For venue consulting, the investment depends on the scope of the operational build and the current state of the program.
If you are not sure whether your project is the right fit, the best first step is simply a conversation.
Yes, and this is one of the most compelling reasons corporate meeting planners choose to work with Jennifer. Traditional DMC firms typically layer a 20 to 30% management markup on top of all vendor invoices. Because Gold Standard Events Consulting operates as a pure advisory firm where clients contract directly with vendors, that markup disappears entirely. You pay Jennifer a flat consulting fee, and every vendor dollar goes directly to your event, not through an agency margin.
Internal teams are great at what they know. But most corporate events teams face at least one of these challenges: limited bandwidth during peak planning periods, limited local knowledge when events go to unfamiliar markets, limited vendor relationships outside their usual roster, or difficulty elevating production quality without ballooning the budget.
Jennifer steps in as a seamless extension of your existing team, filling exactly those gaps without adding headcount, overhead, or the institutional friction of bringing in a large agency.
Traditional DMCs provide value, but they also come with a significant cost structure and a vested interest in steering you toward their preferred vendors and packages. Jennifer's model is entirely advisory. She has no inventory to sell, no markup to protect, and no vendor exclusivity agreements. Her only incentive is to build the best possible program for your goals and budget. This is a structurally different relationship than a traditional DMC.
Yes. Jennifer serves clients nationally and internationally for corporate event strategy engagements. While her deepest on-the-ground relationships are in Southern California, the New York City metro area, and Northern California, her strategic advisory work extends well beyond these markets. She has experience supporting programs in destinations across the country and internationally.
This is exactly the client Jennifer works with most often. Many restaurants and venues have the space, the team, and the demand, but they lack the systems, the sales discipline, and the strategic infrastructure to capture what they are capable of. Jennifer has rebuilt departments like this multiple times, with results that include 200% revenue increases and generating over $550K in catering and event revenue within six months of a hotel's re-opening.
Yes. Jennifer has built private events programs and departments from the ground up, including defining the role structure, writing job descriptions, assisting with hiring, implementing CRM and booking systems, developing sales scripts and rate cards, and creating the operational SOPs that allow a team to run independently. If you are starting from zero, she can get you from zero to operational.
Yes. Sales training and performance coaching for event sales teams is one of the most impactful things Jennifer does for venue clients. She works with teams on inquiry response, site visit presentation, proposal strategy, objection handling, follow-up cadence, and closing techniques, all specifically tailored to the private events and private dining sales environment.
The best way to find out is a 30-minute discovery call. Gold Standard Events Consulting is selective, and Jennifer is honest about fit. If your project, timeline, or budget isn't aligned with what she can deliver at the highest level, she will tell you, and she may be able to point you in a better direction. There is no pressure and no obligation from a discovery conversation.
Fill out the inquiry form on the Contact page or email Jennifer directly at jennifer@gsevents.co. She responds to all inquiries within 1 to 2 business days and will schedule a discovery call at a time that works for you.
Send your question directly to jennifer@gsevents.co and Jennifer will personally respond. At Gold Standard Events Consulting, you are always speaking with Jennifer, not a team member or assistant.
A 30-minute discovery call costs nothing and answers everything. Jennifer personally responds to every inquiry within 1 to 2 business days.
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