Inspiring Conversations with Charles Chan Massey

Today we’d like to introduce you to Charles Chan Massey.

Hi Charles, 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 first moved to LA in the late 1980s. At the time, I was briefly in the retail industry, opening and managing stores for Blockbuster Video as they moved into Southern California. Not knowing anything about the geography, I first lived in Marina del Rey but worked in the city of Orange and even then, that was one heck of a commute! It didn’t take long for me to make a change – I quit my Blockbuster job and started applying for jobs in hospitality, which had been my career out of college, finally settling on an entry-level position at a family-owned hotel in Santa Monica managing reservations with a bit of inside sales.

From there, I took a position at a chain hotel as a sales manager. Then the first Gulf War happened, bringing travel to a halt. My position was eliminated and I was transferred into a second-shift operational position downtown. While I was still with the same company and the move was technically lateral, I was miserable, as I’d done this job previously before moving to LA. But it was a job, so I sucked it up and hung on for as long as I could. I applied to blind ads in the LA Times all the while eventually getting an interview and was ultimately hired, back into sales, with a wonderful new boss who would help shape my career going forward. From there I became involved in an organization called (at the time) Meeting Planners International, where hospitality sales professionals and professional meeting and event planners networked on an equal basis. I eventually became chapter president and decided to start my own meeting and event management firm, SYNAXIS Meetings & Events, in 1994.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Life is full of bumps in the road. It’s how we navigate the journey that’s the important part. I mentioned earlier that I essentially lost one job because of the Gulf War. The job I was transferred into when my position was eliminated was second shift, 2 to 11 pm, at a hotel in the heart of downtown. I was the assistant front office manager which also made me the night manager after the general manager and every other department manager went home for the evening and given that the location was where it was the evening hours presented “opportunities” that needed to be dealt with pretty much every evening, me being the designated “deal wither!” Shortly after I started the 1992 Los Angeles riots happened and our location was one of many “ground zeros” within the city. It was a scary time.

Several years and jobs later, I was working at a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, still in sales, and the Northridge Earthquake happened. I guess it comes in three, right? I recently told a friend that while it was a tragic event for sure it was probably one of the best things that ever happened for me and my career, as our hotel was full for the next three years, with the bulk of our business being FEMA agents and insurance adjustors, and our positions, while still technically sales positions, became for a time more like public relations jobs, our sales efforts being more passive and shifting from making sales calls to new and potential clients to service calls to existing clients. It was during this period that I had the time I needed to start building my own business.

We’ve been impressed with SYNAXIS Meetings & Events and The Personal Stories Project, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
I founded SYNAXIS Meetings & Events in 1994, with the first employee being me, myself and I. You can imagine how confusing staff meetings could be, especially when one of us disagreed with another. But I digress. I started out helping friends I’d met through my professional association networking on the side and when I left my job in 1995, I essentially became a full-time freelancer with two active clients, both of whom were also small businesses. I helped them both with their events, sometimes having trouble balancing the two but somehow always making it work.

Eventually, as I began to brand myself and the company as SYNAXIS and not so much as “the freelancer who works for person x person y, and whoever else will hire them.” My client list and reputation grew, and I took on a partner. Several years later, my husband Joseph joined SYNAXIS, we bought out our partner, hired an employee, and the rest, as silly as it sounds, is history. We became a well-known and respected boutique meeting management firm and for a time even had an office in London to manage events for our North American clients in Europe. As if I weren’t busy enough, in 2012 a series of personal events happened to me.

As I said earlier, it comes in threes, so when the third “sign” came I looked up and said “OK, fine! I know I’m supposed to do something now. But what?” So I did what everyone else was doing at the time and took it to social media. Fast forward and from that series of events and my early social media outreach, The Personal Stories Project was born, and within the past ten years we have become a non-profit online story-sharing archive for the LGBTQ+ community and our allies, at the same time serving as a fundraising for 20+ other LGBTQ+ community based non-profit organizations. It’s been an exciting ride!

Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Get involved. Whether it’s the chamber of commerce, a professional association, whatever you are comfortable with, find a way to volunteer., That’s how I got to know my future clients and vendor partners when I first began, Today many of those early contacts are not only trusted vendors, but our relationships have evolved into “friends who do business together” and some of those early contacts have become life-long personal friends. Don’t ever discount any contact you make, even if they do the same thing in the same industry that you do. Your competition is also your “co-opetition.” Who are they going to refer business they can’t handle to? You, if you become friends. One of our company’s proudest accomplishments has been our ability to partner with other small businesses who do essentially the same thing we do. Whenever a piece of business would present itself to any of the members of our circle that was too large for any of our firms to handle alone, we would team up, decide who was going to do what, how we were going to split the project and go from there, with written agreements in place, of course. All of these other companies were run by people I had met when I first started out.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.synaxismeetings.com and www.personalstoriesproject.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/projectpersonalstories/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/synaxismeetings and https://www.facebook.com/PersonalStoriesProject