Picture this: a dozen rooms, 200 attendees, a paid hands-on training session everyone showed up specifically for, and the Wi-Fi just... dies. Not for five minutes. For hours. Turns out the culprit wasn't the venue's internet at all, it was a stranger walking the floor with a pocket microwave sucking up bandwidth. This week's guest lived it, owned it in front of her entire leadership team, and turned it into one of the biggest lessons of her career. Stephanie Wells has spent 20+ years building the content strategy behind some of the biggest tech conferences on the planet, Microsoft, Salesforce, Tableau, Workday, to name a few. She's a founding member of the Event Content Council, just wrapped two years embedded inside the world of hands-on training, and this fall she's launching her own firm, Gold Heart Events. She's also the person you call when your event has sessions but no strategy, and this conversation is exactly why. What You'll Learn: Why an event content strategy needs to exist before the venue contract gets signed, not after The real story behind a hands-on training Wi-Fi outage that took down a paid conference session, and what it taught an entire leadership team about contingency planning Why AI-written session titles are quietly making every conference sound the same, and what that's costing attendee loyalty The "Scope or Nope" test for deciding what actually belongs in your event content plan How to build a content repurposing strategy before the agenda is even finalized This episode covers the real mechanics of event content strategy: what belongs in scope, what gets cut, and why event ROI depends on decisions made months before anyone signs a venue contract. Stephanie makes the case that content should be first out the gate and last to leave, ahead of sponsors, ahead of venues, ahead of everything. Guest bio: Stephanie Wells has spent over 20 years building content strategy for Microsoft, Salesforce, Tableau, and Workday. She's a founding member of the Event Content Council and most recently spent two years inside hands-on training at Skillable. This fall she's launching Gold Heart Events, specializing in event content, strategy, and operations. Connect with Stephanie: LinkedIn: Stephanie Wells: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-wells-6930325/ Website: goldheartevents.net (launching fall 2026) Instagram: @gold_heart_events Subscribe to Event About It so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops. We're going deeper into the full event content lifecycle, from venue contract to post-event report, plus where celebrity keynotes and sponsored sessions actually earn their spot on the agenda. Send this episode to the event planner still finalizing the agenda before anyone's touched the content strategy. Keep laughing, keep growing, and keep eventing about it. About Your Host Megan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers. Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics: Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.com Newsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup Consulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/ Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutit TikTok: @eventaboutit