We at Brex have built a better way, and we are excited to tell you how we put it to the ultimate test — in February, our sales and marketing organizations gathered in Palm Springs for BrexRev, our first-ever in-person sales kickoff meeting. To launch this annual event, we employed our very own Empower platform, an all-in-one stack of global cards, expense management, reimbursements, and Brex travel to book, expense, and manage the entire experience.

To tell the story of our challenges, successes, and lessons learned, we went straight to the source, two of the leaders responsible for executing the BrexRev event: Karen DeFini, Chief of Staff for Sales and Revenue, and Paige Evanich, Senior Manager of Employee Experience Programs.

“Sales kickoff has always been a very important part of the sales year; it’s when we get everyone together, showcase new products and new services, and have them focus on the direction and initiatives that we want to work on for the year,” Karen says. “But the biggest part of it is creating an emotional connection with your team because most people are working remotely now.”

That’s where Paige comes in. “My team manages the entire offsites program and our remote connection strategy, and then leads any of the employee programs around recognition,” she says. In the last 18 months, Paige’s team has organized 150 team offsites, from leadership summits to cross-functional events and everything in between, all with the goal of being intentional about connecting groups in person and building some togetherness into our remote work strategies.

With so many moving parts involved with in-person events like BrexRev, it was critical to Paige and Karen that our teams could:

Planning for BrexRev began in October of 2022 and took roughly eight weeks. In the past, our sales kickoffs and major team meetings had been conducted over video calls. “This is the first time that we've really rallied our teams and gotten them together for an official sales kickoff,” Karen says. “And as time went on, we discovered it might be a really good opportunity to have some of our cross-functional partners join us. It grew to about 250 attendees by the time all was said and done.”

For previous events, before we launched Brex travel or Empower, the process was less transparent, and lacked control over the booking and spending experience. “When we held our first offsites about a year and a half ago, we had a 10-page policy doc, and we basically were telling people to use their Brex card to book on Google Flights,” says Paige. “We had zero visibility.” It wasn’t always clear whether employees had booked their flights correctly, whether it was at a reasonable cost, or whether anyone had canceled their trips or experienced travel disruptions.

Travel and booking aside, when it came to budgeting for the event and how employees would be spending, Empower made that faster and smoother, too. Karen’s and Paige’s teams had one large pool of funds to draw from, but they didn’t want individual employees to be able to see that lump sum, instead opting to create nested budgets that teams could draw from for each expense, like flights, dinners, drinks, lunches, and rideshares. “We know we have the compliance levers built out,” Paige says, “which is a way better experience for managers and then also a better experience for employees, too, because it just shows you trust them.”

Furthermore, it’s a better experience for finance and accounting. Because spending drew from the proper budgets and many receipts are automatically generated, it means less work for employees on the front end and an easier time reconciling spend for accountants on the back end.

“Having run kickoffs at previous companies like Concur, it would have taken me probably a day or two to do my entire expense report, and I don't think I've spent any time at all on an expense report,” Karen says. “It's been amazing, it truly has. It was unbelievably fast and easy compared to what I would’ve had to go through otherwise.”

“Empower budgets allow for a more seamless review experience on the accounting side,” says Adrienne Klamt, Accounting Manager at Brex. “We knew expenses booked to the BrexRev budget were in policy, and because all the nested budgets rolled up to the same parent, we could apply a bulk rule for the GL classification all at once.”