Amy Merriman
Managing Director

Amy founded Event Planet in 2001 and, under her direction, the company has continued to grow and expand over the past 11 years.

Event Planet now manages an impressive list of corporate and government client accounts and is recognised as one of Australia’s most respected event management companies.

Amy provides Event Planet’s clients with a wealth of high-level experience gained managing and producing major corporate and Government events in Australia, Europe and the United States for over a decade.

After graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Commerce, Amy travelled extensively throughout Africa and Europe before a chance encounter at a horse race in France, resulted in her landing a job as an Event Manager with one of the UK’s most respected event management companies, TEAM. She was soon working with TEAM’s high profile IT clients such as Nokia, Cisco Systems, Intel, 3Com and Compaq.

In particular, Amy was responsible for the creation and implementation of exclusive incentive programs for her clients, including specific events across Europe: taking in the British Grand Prix, sailing in Malta, skiing in Switzerland and skidooing on glaciers in Iceland.

After two exciting years based in the UK, Amy returned to Australia and immediately established Event Planet. Since then, the company’s corporate clients have included many market-leading companies and brands: Vodafone Hutchison Australia, Nestle, Coca Cola, Veuve Clicquot, Commonwealth Bank, Microsoft, DHL Worldwide, Fuji Xerox, McKinsey & Co, PwC, Bloomberg, Bonds, The Berlei Group, Sheridan, Audi Australia and many more.

Event Planet has also designed and managed a number of high profile Australian Federal Government forums and conferences, including the National Broadband Network Forum and the Digital Television Switchover Conference for the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Additionally, the company has produced the inaugural National e-health Conference, the Australian Indigenous Leadership Forum and a number of key, multi-stakeholder events for Infrastructure Australia.

Laura Sage
General Manager and Senior Event Producer

Laura originally joined Event Planet at the beginning of 2010 as a Senior Event Producer. She became the company’s General Manager in late 2010.

With her organised and efficient professionalism, Laura capably leads the Event Planet team to deliver on every client brief.

She holds a Bachelor of Design in Architecture and Landscape Architecture, which allows her to firmly grasp a complex creative concept and brief, place it into a structured delivery plan and timeline, oversee any event’s “construction” process and offer balanced and sound advice throughout – by being able to see both the big picture and the fine detail at the same time.

Having previously managed a large diversity of events throughout Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, Laura came to Event Planet after just over six years with Hannafords Events, based in both Sydney and Queensland.

Her scope of previous work includes conferences, road shows, corporate parties, product launches, public events and sporting tournaments.

She has capably handled every size of event both indoors and outdoors - from an intimate, 12-person sophisticated dinner to a seamless 3000-guest public event.

As expected, Laura’s previous clients have included many of Australia’s largest corporations. These include Citigroup, Asgard, BT Financial, Optus, Orica, AMP, Uncle Toby’s, Vodafone, Nestle, Asia Pacific Critical Care (Congress) Goldwell KMS, Probuild, Moet Hennessy, Sydney Cricket Ground Trust, Pacific Brands and Sheridan.
She has also managed and produced large-scale events involving multiple stakeholders and clients, such as the Paspaley Polo in the City National series and the Sydney Children’s Hospital Gold Dinner.

As with everything Event Planet does, Laura prides herself on delivering every event within budget while maintaining the client’s corporate reputation and ensuring a high level of integrity and professionalism.

Alexis Vaughn
Senior Event Producer

Alexis brings over 10 years' experience in both international and domestic event production to Event Planet.

She currently manages our client accounts for Vodafone Hutchison Australia, Fuji Xerox Australia, Coca Cola Asia Pacific and Xstrata Coal, as well as a mixture of other portfolio clients.

Alexis' career has seen her produce exhibitions, road shows, product and policy launches, incentive programs, conferences, seminars, fundraising events and ministerial meetings in locations right around the globe for a wide range of corporate, government and association clients.

Her past projects have included events for Konica Minolta, Nokia, The Australian Hotels Association, Greenwood and Freehills, James Hardie, Macquarie Bank, Oracle, AusAID, Football Federation Australia, Nikon, AMP, Microsoft, Intel, Indigenous Business Australia, ASEAN, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

With her natural flair for creative events and design, Alexis takes great pride in producing individually-customised themed events for Event Planet’s clients - developing bespoke concepts and design layouts for their varied range of special event needs.

Adam Niewand
Senior Event Producer

Adam joined Event Planet as a Senior Event Producer in 2011, bringing with him a unique blend of cross-industry experience – as well as his own creative spark and unending enthusiasm.

He currently heads Event Planet’s team managing our role in the Department of Health and Ageing’s National Change and Adoption Program for electronic health (e-health) records across Australia.

Working within a consortium of experts, including McKinsey and PwC, on an event of national significance is a perfect fit for Adam. He not only gets to manage the event requirements of a broad-scale, multi-stakeholder project, but is able to utilise his individual blend of health industry experience, event management industry background and much-needed technology skills.

Adam has been working in the Australian event industry for almost a decade. He started his career in 2002 with Global Telehealth in Melbourne, specialising in video conference events. As the company grew, Adam moved in to the role of General Manager and, in 2006, accepted the challenge to establish a Sydney office housed at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP).

The business went from strength to strength and in July 2007, the RACP purchased Global Telehealth's event management team, bringing the management of all RACP events and meetings in-house.

Adam was appointed RACP's National Events Manager, became responsible for establishing this new in-house team and soon had a team of eight staff based in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. With Adam at the helm, the team ran literally thousands of meetings, events and conferences both in-house and off-site, across Australia and New Zealand, including the RACP Congress for 1200 delegates, numerous gala dinners, corporate events, policy launches and scientific meetings.

It is this wealth of health industry events experience that Adam now offers Event Planet's clients.

Drew Walker
Digital Producer
Drew joined Event Planet in 2009 as our Digital Producer. We call him our respected tech guru.

Drew holds a Bachelor of Computing from Monash University and has more than 10 years’ website development and software programming experience gained through working in
both external agencies and in-house, at end-client organisations.

He has worked on many Australian government digital productions and prominent websites, including: the Department of Health and Ageing; Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Railcorp, Energy Australia, Sydney Water and the NSW Commission for Children and Young People. He was also involved in the redevelopment/re-architecture of Tourism Australia’s site: www.australia.com.

Drew’s government work has seen him produce a variety of web-based resources involving numerous stakeholders, often with strict deadlines influenced by political
schedules and events, and usually the subject of intense media scrutiny. Typical of these are sites for the National Broadband Network and the Digital Television Switchover.

Additionally, he has produced long-range build and release-phased projects; built content management systems (CMSs) to specifically drive user-interface and site
content; and, developed multi-lingual websites in up to eight languages.

Drew’s extensive programming experience means he can deliver Event Planet’s clients up-to-date technical solutions using .NET, PHP, MySQL and SQL Server frameworks, in addition to being able to deliver custom-built systems.

He is also highly adept at leading teams of developers, programmers, designers and editors to ensure they deliver projects on-time and on-budget.

Jessica O'Brien
Event Manager

Jessica's main role at Event Planet is focused on the design, management and delivery of multi-stakeholder government projects of national importance.

Most importantly, she is currently working on the Department of Health and Ageing’s National Change and Adoption Program for electronic health records.

This role brings her back into a successful, established team with Event Planet’s Senior Event Producer Adam Niewand: the two worked together previously, on a variety of successful events, in-house, for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) for over three years.

Yet Jessica has experience across the board in the local events industry. She gained an in-depth knowledge of all aspects of the industry while studying Event Management at the International College of Management Sydney and has since worked on hundreds of events across Australia.

More recently, she worked within Hilton Sydney, one of the most prestigious event spaces in Sydney, for over 2 years.
With any event that falls under Jessica's responsibility at Event Planet, our clients can expect commitment, a quality result, a can-do attitude and a very valuable worker to have on-site throughout their event.

Monique O'Callaghan
Event Manager

Since joining Event Planet in 2010, Monique has demonstrated a natural initiative and flare for event management.

Her role as Event Manager has seen her actively support our Senior Event Producers, provide creative input on various events and capably manage the bookings and logistics for many of the great venues and experienced suppliers Event Planet sources and works with.

Monique has played a critical role in the delivery of several important recent Event Planet-managed events, including Paspaley Polo in the City Series, which is hosted annually in five capital cities around Australia; the Vodafone Ashes Series Launch; Sheridan Spring-Summer and Autumn-Winter Trade Shows; as well as the widely-acclaimed Clicquot in the Snow for Moet Hennessy.

A graduate of the University of Technology, Sydney, where she attained a Bachelor of Tourism Management, majoring in Event Management and Marketing, Monique completed her university course internship with Hannafords Events.

Working with Event Planet has now given Monique the opportunity to further develop her organisational and client management skills, as well as enjoy the excitement and adrenaline rush that is part of our daily life in event management.

Jane Jones
Finance Manager
Jane has been Event Planet’s Finance Manager for the past eight years. She is also Finance Manager for all of Jupiter Management Group’s other businesses, including A List Guide and Food Wine Sleep.

Jane graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Economics and a sub-major in Japanese in 1988. She began her working life in the hospitality industry -
initially in Sydney, and later, due to her language skills, in Japan - before moving into the finance sector here in Australia.

For several years, Jane worked as the Assistant to the Financial Controller of the large hotel marketing company Allegiance Marketing, part of the Accor Group.

Prior to joining Event Planet she worked for EntArt, an entertainment industry specialist accounting firm that, at the time, looked after a range of notable showbusiness clients, including the children’s entertainment phenomenon, The Wiggles; the singer, Diesel; and, the pop group, Mental As Anything.