When Tara Meadors Wilson founded her experiential marketing agency, Tara Wilson Agency, back in 2015, she was putting on events of all kinds for clients of all kinds. For the first decade the Texas-based agency was in business, experiential took the spotlight. It was all about
“in-person marketing events to get a product or service in the hands of consumers, so that they can feel it, touch it, smell it, experience it in an immersive and authentic face-to-face way,” WIlson explained.
Then, during the pandemic, business ground to a halt. “I lost 95% of my business during COVID because the events industry went away,” Wilson recalled of the challenging time, which didn’t rightsize itself until 2023. “You would think, ‘Well, you bounce back in 2021.’ But it took time to unravel,” Wilson admitted.
It was at that point Wilson felt she needed to do more to “grow and develop” the agency, at which point she picked up David C. Baker’s book, The Business of Expertise. “The whole premise of the book is that you want to become an expert so that your clients know where to find you. And if you tell someone, ‘I specialize in this,’ then you also want to show that you specialize in that,” Wilson explained of the reading, noting how inspired she was.
It took until 2023 for business to resume “as usual,” Wilson said of her agency, but it was within the past year that she implemented what she learned from Baker’s book and become an expert in experiential for sportswear and beauty brands.
“I often tell people that because we sit at the intersection of sportswear and beauty, we are also really known for how we can create activations that speak to women in particular.”
“It was a natural progression, but it’s also been a very intentional [strategy] over time,”
Wilson added of establishing her newfound niche. After all, she initially planted the seeds for female-focused gatherings with the founding of Fierce Lab in 2019, an empowerment platform for women that assists in career development, financial intelligence, risk taking and mental health.
Wilson divulged that before reading Baker’s book—which the author describes as an “expertise manifesto”—she thought, “Oh, the more niche I am, the less people I have.”
“But the truth is, when you are that niche, you have a lot less competitors and people. Clients say, ‘This is my expert. I need them,’” Wilson said.
For other event professionals looking to do the same, Wilson noted the importance of practicing restraint. “I shared with you that Samsung is a client, but if you were to go to our website, you’re not going to see any work that we do for Samsung because they don’t sit in the space of sportswear or beauty,” Wilson explained.
Also bear in mind that “telling people who you are and what you do does not preclude you from doing work from others,” Wilson said, noting the importance of “having to take work to keep the lights on.”
“We have a lot of giant clients, so certainly their logo sits on our website, there’s no doubt about it. But from a case study point of view, we’re not showing that work [that’s not in our niche] necessarily,” Wilson explained of her own strategy.
As a result of honing in on sports and beauty, Tara Wilson Agency is doing better than ever, and Wilson is in the midst of making a six-figure investment in adding multiple new team members. The same day Wilson interviewed with Vendelux in early December, she said that a new event producer was working her first day at the agency after years with the Dallas Mavericks (which seems to be the perfect fit given the niche).
But the agency needs even more horsepower. “We need event producers—senior event producers—to be able to support in a full-time capacity, versus leaning into contractors,” Wilson said, explaining that she had to rely more on freelancers in the past, but the agency is now “certainly taking on more business.”
The need to grow now—at a time when many other firms are paring back—is that “we need to be able to support multiple events at one time, multiple client engagements at one time, and you really want a roster of players,” Wilson continued, noting that Tara Wilson Agency is also on the market for a senior graphic designer and will be opening a brand marketing position come early 2025.
When asked about how she vets team members, Wilson pointed to six core values she said her agency has “lived and died by, or hired and fired by,” since its founding 14 years ago. “Those are really the lifeblood of who we are and how we operate,” Wilson said, noting that those values have guided a three-step interview process that is first, “all about alignment and skill set;” second, about “demonstrating thought;” and third, about answering the question, “How does this person operate?” That final step involves “a small project in an hour-and-a-half time frame,” Wilson said, at which point she assesses how a candidate thinks and communicates—and how that fits into the culture at Tara Wilson Agency.
“I’m definitely excited about 2025,” Wilson concluded, noting that it excites her to see news reports that experiential is going to be a $108 billion industry. “As an entrepreneur, when you see those kinds of numbers, you feel like, just give me a slice of that.”
