Storms don't only come straight at you. Sometimes they blow in from the side.
Season two of Sideways Rain is a full slate of those stories, told by the people who build meetings, events, and experiences for a living. Hosts J.R. Spiess and Kris McNeil sit down with founders, planners, and production pros and walk through the same three beats: the storm, when things went sideways; the umbrella, how they adapted in the moment; and clear skies, what they changed and where they landed.
Some guests survive a storm. Liz Lathan walked straight into one with her eyes wide open.
Years into building her career in the association world, Liz had earned her director title and hit the ceiling of a four-person shop. Then another executive director dangled the thing every ambitious person wants: come here, and I'll groom you to run the place. She said yes — and showed up to find the "grooming" was answering the phone by the third ring and having the mail on the boss's desk by 1 p.m., under a leader who was fifteen years from retiring. Most people would call that a wasted year. Liz turned it into new skills, a free education, a coerced-resignation fight she refused to lose, and an accidentally-doubled paycheck that launched a Fortune 50 career across Dell and IBM.
In this episode she gets honest about the stuff we don't say out loud: title-chasing, toxic bosses, the nights she cried, the therapy, the imposter voice that whispers you were never as good as you thought — and why she's living proof it's lying. She shares the questions she wishes she'd asked, why you learn more from bad bosses than good ones, how to build a network that actually shows up for you, and the wellness truth nobody wants to admit (spoiler: it might be a glass of wine with friends, not a 5 a.m. cold plunge). Plus a lightning round, state-fair food debates, and the advice her dad gave her that still holds: trust, but verify.
Her rule for the hard days? "You just keep going until you hit a wall — and then turn left."
Connect with Liz Lathan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizlathan/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizlathan/)
Club Ichi: https://www.clubichi.com/ (https://www.clubichi.com/)
19 Jul 2026
20. Strength by a Thousand Paper Cuts with Alyssa Frank
Most guests bring us one storm. Alyssa Frank brought a thousand paper cuts.
Alyssa is a CMP with 15 years in meetings, events, and incentive travel, and the founder of Covalent Events and Travel. She slid into the industry from a front desk in college, got handed events, and learned the job on the job. No single catastrophe defines her career. Instead there were a lot of small cuts that felt like gashes at the time and turned into a kind of strength.
In this one she walks us through the moments that stuck: a dessert that showed up as jiggling jelly at a black tie gala, a public callout on Facebook that got answered by an executive, a venue contract she inherited before the run of show existed, and a Minneapolis site visit she scheduled at the wrong time of day. Along the way she shares the habits she built from all of it. Take live notes on your watch. Cap food and beverage increases in the contract. Ask for a first right of refusal before you sign. Walk the venue at the same day and time you will actually use it. Run a 15 minute team huddle at the start of each show day.
We also get into the parts nobody prices in: the time, the pre-work, the reconciliation, and the value conversation that comes with running your own shop. Alyssa makes the case for education and community as the habit that changed her career, and for the high touch work smaller agencies can do that the behemoths cannot.
Covalent is a chemistry reference. A covalent bond is atoms sharing a hold. Her philosophy: the event is the vehicle, the bond is the point.
Find Alyssa Frank and Covalent Events and Travel on LinkedIn. Links in the description.
Storm. Umbrella. Clear skies. Here comes the rain.
Covalent Events: https://covalentevents.com/
Alyssa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-frank-cmp-7753a451/
30 Jun 2026
19. Four Times the Floor Dropped with Kevin White
Most people in events have one storm they'd like to forget. Kevin White has four.
Across 30 years in experiential design, Kevin watched his whole industry go under four separate times: the dot-com bust, 9/11, the 2008 crash, and the Covid shutdown. Not rough patches. The floor gone, no lifeboat in sight. This week he walks us through how he survived all four, and why that last one turned into his best revenue year ever.
We get into why we keep getting blindsided (the short version: success floods your brain and you forget the last crash), why the calm stretches are when you should be making your biggest calls, and what he means by finding yourself in the being instead of the doing. Kevin is founder and chief strategist at XPL, an international president of ILEA, and the guy who teaches this stuff at NYU and the Event Leadership Institute.
Storm, umbrella, clear skies. Kevin brought all three.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
164
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Spotify
5.0 / 5
3 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 56 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
73
Social presence
0
YouTube
64
Engagement
32
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Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Questions about Sideways Rain
Who hosts Sideways Rain?
JR and Kris host the show. Published by J.R. Spiess and Kris McNeil.
How often do new episodes come out?
The show publishes bi-weekly, based on its RSS feed.
Does Sideways Rain take guests?
Yes. Guests have been identified in episode analyses.
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