One could say that a lack of adult supervision played a big role in launching Kent Underwood’s career.
“My brother and I started promoting concerts when we were in high school,” he says. “God love our parents for not knowing to not let us do that.
“You’d think they’d have asked more about the financial implications, but it must have sounded like an okay hobby,” he adds. “So they just said, ‘Well, go have fun.'”
It worked out pretty well – today, Kent Underwood is the Chattanooga-based principal in LEO Events, “a $100 million company,” he says, which has offices in Memphis, Nashville and Asheville, North Carolina. The company’s other two principals, Cindy and Kevin Brewer, live in Memphis and Kevin Underwood, Kent’s brother, is a Nashville-based senior vice president for the company.
“We’re a marketing agency,” Kent Underwood says, adding that LEO has just over 100 employees nationwide, about 25 of whom are based in Chattanooga.
“Our clients are major corporations,” he says, “and the bulk of our business is internal meetings — shareholder meetings, sales meetings, trade shows, conferences … things like that.”
This year alone, according to company officials, LEO produced in January a series of meetings for Sherwin-Williams, the first of which drew more than 10,500 participants. In June, LEO staged a series of six meetings in Fayetteville, Arkansas for Walmart Associates, with the finale drawing 15,000 attendees live and 70,000 more globally.
“We’re marketing in that we create all the presentations — videos, scriptwriting and speech-coaching for the executives, so that they can convey what they need to from the stage,” Underwood adds. “So while we do all the bells and whistles and fun stuff, what we really do is help create and manage content so (those executives) can tell their internal teams what they need to hear.”
Underwood says that, in this time during which artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly prevalent, there’s no substitute for human interaction.
“In this era of AI, people are starting to see that what’s trustworthy is what I can sit at a table and talk to you about,” he says. “It sounds a little dystopian, but I think it’s vital to get your team together, get the mission stated, then send those team members back to execute.
“We get caught up in return on investment (ROI) and key performance indicators (KPI) and all that stuff,” he adds, “but getting people together matters for your business. That’s what’s most important, and we can show that direct correlation.”
Underwood says he and his wife, Ongeleigh, were living in Memphis 15 years ago, but were wanting to make a change. They decided to visit Chattanooga and happened to do so on Beer Fest weekend.
“We’re standing in line for a beer, talking to the people in front of and behind us,” he recalls. “When we told people we were just visiting, they were very interested — ‘You should totally move here, and here’s why,’ they said.
“It was the only place we visited where everyone was so emphatic, so supportive,” he says. “And it was a cool city, with our kind of vibe. That’s why we moved here.”
Underwood adds that Chattanooga has proven as good a place to work as it is to live.
“It’s not hard to find good talent in Chattanooga,” he says, “And it’s not hard to recruit to Chattanooga … outdoor lifestyle, small-town feel in a pretty good-sized city, and you can jump on a plane and fly just about anywhere to do a show.
“You can have a foot in both worlds.”