Shay Brown: A Day in the Life of Event Planning
Photo credit: Brooke Parker Photography
By Meg Hale Brunton
Shay Brown was raised a country girl at heart on a working farm in Western Carolina and North Georgia. She contributes those values daily to the company that she has grown for the past 23 years. As the owner of Shay & Company, Brown knows it takes determination, organization, and hard work to organize an event that makes an impressionable mark in this community. “Growing up on a farm, I had a different work ethic than a lot of people,” she recalls. “I worked very hard, and I still do to this day. Early to rise and late to bed, rings true here.”
After earning her degree in criminal justice from Western Carolina University, Brown got a job right out of school as a probation officer in South Georgia. From there, she became a lobbyist for the Department of Transportation and ultimately Vice President for CSX Transportation in Atlanta. “You had to be the early bird if you wanted to get bills through the house or the senate,” Brown explains, adding that this period in her life started her off with the values she carries today. I was fortunate to learn from some of the most influential people and the values they instilled in me I carry with me today.
Brown states that her passion has always been to create and that she has the vision to transform a space. “Making people happy, seeing things come together, and creating an atmosphere that makes people enjoy themselves is very fulfilling,” she says. For Brown, this passion started with her planning small events for local community groups after she made the life-changing decision to leave her first career. Brown realized that the skills she had learned as a lobbyist, combined with her love of working with people, had made her uniquely qualified as an event planner. Brown created her own event planning business in 1999, which she called Shay Brown Events. She rebranded the business in 2023 as Shay & Company, because the company had grown to be more than just event planning and is managed by a wonderful team.
Shay & Company is now a leading event planning company in WNC. Brown attributes the company’s success to her amazingly dedicated team and the long-standing relationships she has forged with the area’s most qualified vendors and community leaders. She says that many people envision wedding planning as an elegant job, but in reality, it is rarely glamorous. “We move tables, set up from start to finish, and at times have to clean toilets if that is what it takes to make the event perfect,” Brown says. “It is not an easy job but it is a fulfilling one.”
Brown says that working with so many creative people in her community and bringing people together is truly why she does what she does. “Collaborating with so many brilliant minds and seeing an event come together changes people’s perception,” she says. She goes on to say that it never ceases to amaze her how the power of bringing people together can remind everyone what is important in life. “I have seen so many families that have been so separated, rebuild relationships. Seeing all those people come together and forgetting all the family drama, and seeing the happiness and the love is remarkable.”
When asked about Shay & Company’s growth over the years, Brown reveals that every business owner should have a ten-year plan to re-evaluate their business and move it forward in some fashion. In 2010, Shay & Company expanded to include venue management services and now manages eight venues in the Asheville, Marion, and Brevard areas. In 2019, she added planning for large-scale festivals and events to the company's portfolio. For Brown, expanding Shay & Company to support the causes she champions in her community was a huge move forward. “It’s eye-opening, if you set goals and strive to achieve them, what you can do,” she explains. “I love creating a beautiful day and event for people. I love ensuring that the family or client is taken care of and the guests are happy and that the space is gorgeous. This is true for weddings, festivals, and big celebrations for the community.”
After 23 years of building a successful event planning company, Brown admits she does aspire to take more days off to travel and spend time with her family. “People don’t understand with planning that not only do we work a 9-5 job Monday through Friday, but almost all events take place on the weekend when people can travel,” she explains. “The team does not ever get time off unless we take that time off, and that is very important to have a balance.” To maintain her own sanity with her busy schedule, Brown has kept up her ritual of getting up by 5:30 every morning. Only now instead of heading straight to work, she takes a quiet moment to reflect and enjoy her morning, surrounded by her beloved animals.
Brown says that her role sometimes requires her to push herself and her staff to maintain their professional standards, or to meet a deadline, but that they are always so grateful to one another after putting together a beautiful and successful event. “What we do can be hard; I can be very demanding,” she admits. “But I am always very thankful for the long hours, hard work, and dedication of my team.” Along with her dedication and tireless work ethic, Brown puts trust, integrity, dependability, and gratitude at the forefront of everything she does at Shay & Company, having learned the importance of these qualities long before starting the business. Her professional journey and experiences, along with the support of her family and friends, have certainly paved the way to a successful career.
For more information on Shay & Company, or to schedule your event today, visit their website: https://shaybrownevents.com/
