We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Taqee Vernon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Taqee below.

Hi Taqee, thanks for joining us today. What do you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry?

Corporate America not a place for the neurodivergent creatives it craves. The stories are countless. The problem is, what makes a person exceptional in creative work are qualities at odds with established corporate management norms. Corporations are built on consistency, rigidity, hierarchy, and other means of producing consistent, repeatable, traceable results. However, corporations depend on creatives to fill the mysterious gap between the present and a desired future.

When modern technology or modern practice fails to solve a problem, a creative mechanic is summoned to update the hardware and fill in the gap. This requires an absence from the norm, as the norm is what produced the current result. During times of crisis, corporate culture can accept this divergence, but can never truly appreciate it long term.

“Thank you for solving that $3M problem…now why were you late to the employee happy hour?”

This is not limited to the traditionally cited “creative” jobs, either. Positions traditionally considered rigid, scientific, and exact are consistently disrupted and improved through creative, imaginative, experimental, uncanny practitioners. Frankly, corporate culture is openly in love with them, but only in short spurts of creative problem solving. Think of the Einsteins, Isaac Newtons, and Steve Jobs of history, who drew universal conclusions from everyday experiences, or organized highly complex thoughts, but were often at odds with the times they lived in.

Before hitting his stride, Jobs was fired from his corporate job for not wearing shoes in the office, and even his own company for a time.

Many good corporations birth their own competition by stifling the work of the creatives they employ, micromanage, and burn out.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Taqee Vernon, son of Mama Njia Kai and Kofi Royal, brother to the incredible Ndidika, Ola, and Zubair Vernon.

I would now consider myself a full time event planner and marketer, whose work spans across sectors, from personal to private to political.
I’m not sure when I “started” this journey. Both my parents are career entrepreneurs and community activists, so we have been involved in event planning since a very young age.

I could say it started with my first Economics class at Detroit’s Renaissance High School. I had a very dynamic teacher, Mr. Smith, who taught Economics through the lens of everyday decision making. With a natural interest in human behavior, and a healthy respect for the dollar, I would go on to internalize how economic decisions occur in our daily lives, and how that could best be used to encourage people toward intended behaviors and decisions. I recognized how this knowledge is most often used cancerously, encouraging people to consume unhealthy foods, but also had the potential to help solve everyday problems like getting my nephew to eat more vegetables than sweets. Ironically, my initial reaction kept me far away from the marketing side of business until my junior year at the University of Michigan’s Business School.

Fast forward to more recent history, in 2021 I was working on some pretty big concerts and began a service called Vendor Qonnect, which would later become my full time focus. Immediately after my most recent (last?) full time job fell through, it occurred to me that my spirit is not meant for full time employment. Around the same time, I realized I was a few notches short of maintaining a full time job for myself, but also that I would not be able to clear that gap without giving it my full attention.

What began as a 4 month challenge to myself to maintain during the quiet winter months, turned into a second summer of events, and the rest is history.

Vendor Qonnect, llc provides event design, planning, and management services to great ideas everywhere. It was my intent with my first company to serve as a walking incubator for others to build their companies from.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

28,000 steps

Every good team is aware of their KPIs…key performance indicators, to the untrained.
Products, parties, and most bookable services share a similar mix of KPIs that leaders can use to measure their coming success or failure, both before and after their product is sold. But what is the KPI for event management?

Well, of course, it depends on who you ask.

It was during the summer of 2022, my second year active, that I found mine with the help of my iPhone’s health app, and its step counter.

How many steps does it take to ensure an event is running smoothly?

In several cases, the number would surprise you, but my number is 28,000 steps.
As the person whose chief responsibility is invisible, and whose good job is silent and unnoticeable, it was important to be able to quantify my efforts.

My job is to ensure the correctness of things at any given point. Lights, power, sound quality, timing, entry, vendors…the list goes on, and each requires its own set of skills to solve. But, as these things all occur on different sides of the event, often very long distances, it struck me after one of CrowdFreak’s Backwoods & Bonfires festival when I looked at my health app and it showed that I had taken over 28,000 steps that day.

I sat and wondered how it was even possible. The venue isn’t especially huge or spread apart. But the magic was in the steps. Instead of tracking my instagram story views (advertising), or any other external/social metrics irrelevant to maintaining the vibe, I chose to focus on the metric that immediately showed that I was doing my job diligently.

While many others rest on the contracts signed (leading indicator) or referrals/new business (lagging indicators), I needed to focus on a quantifiable means to hold myself accountable to my duties.

Since then, I check my steps after every event and believe there is no greater way to illustrate to potential clients that Vendor Qonnect is present and accounted for, often solving problems as they occur, and sometimes before.

And please believe, it takes muscle to hustle!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Humility

I have sat in many rooms and at many tables, working directly with top brass, middle management, and even the cleaning staff, most often as a team member to any. This phase of my career demanded humility; Humility to say yes when others and egos would say no. Humility to pass credit and even rewards to others for my work or my ideas, because sometimes the good news sounds gooder out of someone else’s mouth.

While I was trained in the Sales realm, I never adopted the attitude of taking credit I did not feel was due, partial or full. I have since learned to keep my mouth shut sometimes.

Praise can be uncomfortable to the untested. We are trained to never shine our light too bright, as not to offend or belittle others. But too much of a good thing is no longer a good thing. I had to learn to accept credit, compliments, and even praise despite my practiced humility not to. In doing so, I believe it displays to the spirit of the other person that here stands an individual we put our faith in and, in a world full of flakes and scammers, he delivered.

It is up to the leader to know how to distribute praise, glory, reward, etc. to the team in a way that does not destroy the team through comparisons and inflated egos. But, facing externally, it is also the duty of the leader to encourage and manage praise while the world shapes their image of the “brand,” and being overly humble can quickly redistribute that good will to your outwardly confident competitors.

Be warned, however, that the pendulum swings in both directions. The leader who respects the sweeper wins. The leader willing to pick up the broom wins. The leader willing to follow, wins.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vqdetroit.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vendorqonnect
• Facebook: https://www.fb.com/vendallyear
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taqeev/

Image Credits

Vendor Qonnect, llc