Meet Erica Helphand | Business Owner | Event Producer.

We had the good fortune of connecting with Erica Helphand and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Erica, how does your business help the community?
While OP 3 Events is an event production and fundraising consulting agency, everything about our business is geared toward improving the world because we almost exclusively serve non-profit organizations. Our impact begins with the hundreds of thousands of participants we support and the hundreds of millions of dollars we help our client partners raise. It might look like setting up signage, loading trucks, moving barricades, and recruiting volunteers, but don’t be fooled—we’re working to stop suicide, to pay for patient navigation and support programs, and to cure cancer, Alzheimer’s, Lupus, and diabetes. Everything we do is to bring people together and make the world better…when it all comes together, it’s magic.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Colleen (my business partner) and I were initially hesitant to buy our business from our former boss, but what we realized pretty quickly is that we were already running everything and treating it as if it were our own. Once we went for it, it turned out that everything we were worried about was a complete waste of imagination–those traditional boss archetypes (who, as far as we’d seen, looked nothing like us) didn’t have some secret handbook about how to run successful businesses. Everything we didn’t know, we figured out (or we figured out we didn’t want to do that thing and we hired someone who did). I’m proud of the women owned, women led business we’ve built. And I’m not the only one. It means so much to more people we work with than I ever imagined.

In terms of lessons learned, we’re not risk averse, but we are very risk aware. We’re at the point in our lives and careers where we need to be able to sleep at night. We do that by growing slowly and intentionally, by not overextending ourselves (e.g., we don’t get it unless we can pay for it), and by (sometimes painstakingly) running and parsing all the numbers and data and details to help us make the right decisions for us. I probably took more risks earlier in my career, but that was at least partially because I didn’t know any better—my optimism and feelings of “it’ll all work out somehow” have evolved. How is it going to work out? What plans and infrastructure do we need to put in place to give whatever it is the best chance of getting us the results we want? Those are the elements and answers that I need to hash through now before doing something—even if it’s something I’m excited about. Simply put, the math has to math.

Working with non-profits means impossibly tight budgets. You can let that get to you, or you can get to work innovating. While there will always be fabulous ideas that come up that are logistically difficult (or, more typically, not affordable), we don’t want to give up on those ideas. From there it becomes, “Okay, but what can we do? How can we do something that honors that original vision even if it’s a little different than we originally hoped for?”

One final lesson that I think is always in progress is balance. Work life balance is a lie, and asking people to chase it is part of the problem. I think the best we can do is get super aware of what consumes energy versus what creates energy—this is obviously very personal, and it looks different to everyone. But taking the time to figure that out is how you try to spend time on things that give you more energy than those that take your energy. You won’t always get it right, but that awareness can help guide you to be more intentional with your time and do more of what makes you happy.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
DTLA – Arts District, all the breweries, street art and mural crawl, Bradbury Building, and Grand Central Market
Beach – Bay Cities Deli sandwiches in Santa Monica before renting a beach cruiser and riding to Venice for canal walk (or KC’s Crepes in Playa del Rey after riding), PCH drive out to Malibu for lunch at Neptune’s Net or brunch at Geoffrey’s
other fun stuff: concerts at the Greek, the Forum, SoFi Stadium, the Fonda, the Wiltern, and the Bowl; LA Sparks games at Crypto.com Arena and ACFC games at BMO Stadium (everyone watches women’s sports…duh.)
for families and kiddos – Disneyland, Universal Studios Hollywood, a movie bus tour leaving from the Farmer’s Market (with Du-Par’s pancakes beforehand or a Monsieur Marcel croque monsieur afterward)

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Going it alone is definitely overrated; on the great days as much as the hard days, I am grateful for my business partner Colleen. I’d also be remiss not to shout out the amazing team that I am lucky enough to work with, a team that is even bigger than just our immediate folks; it includes our independent contractor friends, our client partners and their incredible participants, the venues we work with, the sponsors and stakeholders at every event, and even the random passers-by who stop to talk with us about whatever event we may be building, running, or tearing down on any given day. It’s hard to imagine making the magic without any of them (and it wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful…or fun!).

Website: https://op3events.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/op3events/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ehelphand/