We recently connected with Liz Lathan and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Liz, thanks for joining us today. What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My dad was an international business man so every summer he took me and my with him on a business trip to another continent. While he worked, we’d explore the city, often with a spouse of his work colleagues as our guide. I learned so much about hospitality and culture and why feeling welcome matters so much. I carry that into every event experience I create.

Liz, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Liz Lathan, a 20-plus-year veteran of B2B event marketing and the co-founder of Club Ichi — a private membership-based community and media platform for event and field marketers. We’re basically a social club for people who do cool shit and love to share how they did it.

I started in the event world the way many do, running logistics, managing budgets, and making things happen. Over the years, I moved from “just getting it done” to building event strategies that drive business growth and human connection. Along my journey, I discovered that the most memorable events aren’t about perfect run-of-show scripts, but more about conversations, co-creation, and shared moments that bond people and brands.

That’s why at Club Ichi, we design and host conversation-driven, high-impact experiences from Spontaneous Think Tanks™ (crowdsourced problem-solving sessions) to Barefoot Business Retreats and our Secret Family Reunion mystery trips. We also produce content like The Engaged Attendee newsletter, the Barefoot Business podcast, and other gatherings to keep our members ahead of trends.

For clients and sponsors (from global tech giants to hospitality and lifestyle brands) we solve the challenge of getting the right people in the room and creating moments they’ll never forget. We focus most of our efforts on our community and rarely take on clients now, and in doing so are able to help brands stand out and actually connect with members for relationships that transcend business.

What sets me apart is my mix of strategist + connector + creative instigator. I’m obsessed with turning “safe and predictable” into “playful and powerful.” I believe every event should earn its keep, not just in leads and pipeline, but in loyalty, advocacy, and belonging.

I’m most proud of building Club Ichi into a thriving, pay-it-forward community where event professionals help each other grow, land jobs, master AI, and innovate faster than the industry norm. We’ve created an ecosystem that’s reshaping how event marketers learn, network, and build careers.

If you’re a potential client, sponsor, or fellow event pro, here’s what to know: we don’t do boring. We create experiences that spark conversation, connection, and meaningful ROI.

Have you ever had to pivot?

We launched The Community Factory in 2022 as a consultancy helping companies bring more community into their events. Our proprietary Spontaneous Think Tank™ format and engagement strategy sessions were designed to make corporate gatherings less about sitting through sessions and more about solving real problems together.

But something unexpected happened. The very people who had attended our events started saying, “We don’t just want you to help companies, we want a community for us.”

So, we pivoted. Instead of building communities for clients, we became our own client and poured our energy into building what would become Club Ichi. We started small (a free Slack group and some monthly supper clubs) and it exploded. In less than two years, we’ve grown to 11,000+ free members and nearly 500 paying Insiders.

Now, we only take on outside clients when the project excites us or aligns deeply with our mission. That pivot from consultancy to thriving membership community was scary but transformative. It turned us from service providers into the leaders of a movement that’s redefining how event professionals learn, connect, and grow.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

Funny that this entire community came from a Side Hustle I had in 2017. I was working at IBM and was tired of the boring industry events that I went to every year. I wanted a different way to engage with my peers.

So I launched a passion project with some friends: Haute Dokimazo. It was the anti-conference before “unconference” was trendy. A fully crowd-sourced experience where the agenda was built live by the people in the room. No passive audiences. No long-winded panels. Just smart event pros talking about the things that mattered that day and helping each other solve real challenges.

It resonated. What started as a small, scrappy experiment grew fast. People left saying it was the first time they’d felt truly connected and inspired at an industry gathering.

As demand grew, Haute Dokimazo evolved into Haute, an experiential agency for brands who wanted to create meaningful moments. We had Fortune 50 clients and helped make their marketing and events more human and more effective, and we produced our own innovative gatherings like the Secret Family Reunion mystery trip.

That early side hustle ended up reshaping my career and when one of my business partners and I left the agency, it became the foundation for everything we’ve built since, including Club Ichi.

Looking back, it’s wild to think that one experiment to escape boring events turned into a movement that’s changing how brands and professionals connect today.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.weareichi.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weareichi
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClubIchi#
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizlathan/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@clubichi