Community Highlights: Meet Lisette Elhayani of Good All Day Collective

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisette Elhayani.

Hi Lisette, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I’m a first-generation Moroccan-Israeli, born and raised in Los Angeles, and the daughter of a caterer…so you could say events were less of a career choice and more of a family inheritance.

I got my first job at 14 working coat check, which eventually turned into serving, catering management, wedding planning, and learning very early that when you work in events, absolutely anything can and will happen. My job was to smile, solve it, and make sure the guest never knows.

In 2007, I made the jump from social events into the corporate experiential world and eventually landed at Fresh Wata, where I spent 12 years helping grow the company into a multi-million-dollar experiential production business. During my time there, we expanded into a 60,000+ square-foot warehouse, launched a rental division, produced experiences for some incredible brands, and I ultimately became VP. It was basically my masterclass in producing: big ideas, impossible timelines, complicated logistics, and figuring out how to make the answer “yes” when everyone else is still staring at the problem.

Then life decided I needed a different kind of masterclass.

In 2018, I had a myomectomy that went very wrong and required a second emergency surgery to treat internal bleeding. It was one of those experiences that makes you question everything: What am I doing? How am I living? Who am I being? And, perhaps most importantly, is this actually the life I want?

A year later, my sister suffered a terrible accident, and I stepped away from work for a few months to help care for her. That time cracked the questions back open. I had built a successful career, but I knew I was ready to challenge myself in a completely new way.

So naturally, I did the least terrifying thing imaginable: I left the company I had spent 12 years helping build and decided to start my own.

In 2019, I enrolled CC Boom Bursell—a brilliant creative director, friend, and longtime client from her Nickelodeon days—to co-found Good All Day Collective with me. We had already spent more than a decade making the impossible happen together, from Kids’ Choice Awards VIP weekends to a last-minute SpongeBob birthday party for Pharrell to Shark Week in Vegas. Turns out, that was pretty damn good training for starting an experiential collective.

We later brought the incredible Amy Von Rosen on as our Director of Design and Production, and together we’ve built Good All Day around a simple idea: bring really GOOD people together to make really GOOD work—and have a GOOD time doing it.

Today, I’m the Founder, CEO, and Experiential Director of Good All Day Co., still producing big ideas, building experiences, solving problems nobody warned us about in the kickoff meeting, and creating alongside our all-women crew in Los Angeles.

I’m also a recent graduate of Mastery in Transformational Training’s Legacy Program, which has opened up yet another chapter of questioning how big I’m willing to dream, how boldly I’m willing to lead, and what becomes possible when the vision gets bigger than me.

And yes, CC and I remain firmly aligned on one very important company policy: jumpsuits and fresh kicks absolutely count as formalwear.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? Absolutely not. We launched Good All Day two weeks before stay-at-home orders shut down the world—and, more specifically, the entire live events industry. Which is either spectacularly bad timing or a very aggressive first test of entrepreneurship.

Live experiences were our entire business, and suddenly humans were no longer allowed to experience things together. So we did what producers do best: figured it the hell out.

We quickly taught ourselves how to produce virtual events and created an entire line of at-home experiences and custom experience boxes for brands to send to influencers, press, employees, and consumers. At one point, we were hosting a “Pasta with Nonnas” experience where Italian grandmothers in Italy taught Spotify employees how to make pasta from their kitchens. It was weird, wonderful, and very 2020.

And honestly, we had a pretty GOOD run with it. The challenge was that we became so good at boxes and branded merch that people started to think that was what Good All Day *was*.

So when live events came back, we had another pivot to make, back to ourselves.

We had to intentionally reintroduce Good All Day to our clients and the world as an experiential collective: big ideas, live experiences, production, design, and bringing all the beautifully complicated pieces together. Our sweet spot has always been creating moments people can actually step inside of.

Building this company has taught me that entrepreneurship is basically a series of pivots disguised as a business plan. You make the best decision you can, learn quickly, stay scrappy, and keep moving when the original plan gets fully thrown out the window.

Six years later, we’re still here, still evolving, still growing, and still making GOOD happen.

Considering we started two weeks before the world shut down, we’re pretty damn proud of that.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Good All Day Collective?
Good All Day Collective is a women-led experiential creative and production studio based in Los Angeles. We create brand experiences that make people stop, participate, take a photo, tell their friends, and hopefully remember long after the open bar closes.

We specialize in live events, experiential marketing, pop-ups, brand activations, mobile tours, trade shows, creative stunts, custom fabrication, artist collaborations, and all the beautifully chaotic production required to bring big ideas to life.

We’ve created experiences for brands like the NBA, Nike/JD Sports, Netflix, Paramount/Nickelodeon, Booking.com, Yahoo, Spotify and more—sometimes with months to plan and sometimes with timelines that make everyone ask, “Wait… when is this happening?”

What sets us apart is the **Collective** part. It isn’t a buzzword; it’s our operating system. Rather than building every project around who happens to be on staff, we build the right team around the idea—pulling from an incredible network of artists, fabricators, designers, producers, technologists, strategists, makers, and professional problem-solvers.

Just really GOOD people, brought together with intention. More transparency.
More really fucking talented humans at the table.

We celebrate collabs here.

And turns out, good people making good shit together is kind of our whole thing.

We’re also proud to celebrate the collaborators behind our work and, whenever possible, support women-, minority- and independently owned businesses.

At its core, Good All Day is how we want to move through the world: do great work, treat people well, share the credit, have excellent taste, don’t take ourselves too seriously, and leave things a little GOODer than we found them.

We’re serious about the work. We’re just not interested in being painfully serious while doing it.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
Keep it real. Be authentic, be curious, be intentional and don’t be afraid to ask someone you admire for their time or mentorship.

When someone does invest in you, be responsible with it. Be integral, do what you say you’re going to do, and put their advice into action.

Most importantly, exist in possibility. Live with urgency, take risks, make the call, send the email, ask the question. Some of the biggest opportunities in my life started with simply being willing to ask.

The worst they can say is no. The best? It might change your life.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.goodalldayco.com
• Instagram: @goodalldayco
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/good-all-day-collective/?viewAsMember=true

Image Credits
Tiffany Rose Photography
Conscious Minds for Nike photo