Today we’d like to introduce you to Dayna McKee.
Hi Dayna, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I suppose I got to where I am today by building a network of great relationships and following opportunities as they have presented themselves. My family business, TNT Auction, Inc., has been a lifelong education in managing people and events. Those skills translated very well to my work with the Utah Arts Festival. I got involved with the festival around 2003 through friends who volunteered and worked at the festival. I started showing up to help out where it was needed. Eventually, someone gave me a job. I spent most of my 18 years at the festival putting my event management skills to work by assisting with, and eventually running the sponsor hospitality patio at the Utah Arts Festival. In 2019, my passion for live music collided with the retirement of the previous performing arts coordinator and I moved from coordinating hospitality to coordinating and booking the bands and dance companies for the festival.
In addition to the networking and skills I have built through my job and through the Utah Arts Festival, I attended the Master of Arts in Community Leadership program at Westminster College. This program combined my networking skills with my passion for my community. The program’s final thesis project required that we partner with a non-profit to oversee our thesis. It just so happened that the non-profit I found myself partnered with produced a fundraising event called Taste of the Wasatch. I had the fortune of assisting in the event management and production for Taste of the Wasatch for three years before the final event in 2018.
Shortly after graduating from Westminster, I was able to further utilize my skill set by assisting my neighborhood in organizing a controversial building project. Neighbors came together around a purpose and I was able to help them gather and share information, organize, and make their voices heard by the community, city leaders, and others. This led me to become a member of the Sugar House Community Council. There had been no representation for my particular neighborhood in over a decade. I and two of my neighbors we able to join the Sugar House Community Council, representing the Nibley neighborhood, where we have been able to make sure our neighbors are informed and engaged in the community. I have also been able to put my event skills to use with the Community Council, in 2019, helping produce the Sugar House Backyard Bash.
Additionally, my involvement in the Community Council led me to become involved with the Sugar House Chamber. I worked with the Chamber on the Sugar House 4th of July event in 2017. In 2020-2021, the Sugar House Chamber was moved into a partnership with the Community Council and I was nominated to the Chamber’s secretary position. The Chamber and Community Council both have a desire to create more opportunities for community engagement through events and I am happy to be part of the team, continuing to build my network, my skills, and bring my community together.
I am quite fortunate to have built trust with the people and organizations that I continue to work with. There are so many amazing mentors who have given me opportunities to thrive. I am so grateful to everyone along my journey who has put their trust in me to build, manage, and produce great experiences in the Salt Lake community.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Life is never a smooth road! Particularly when you are managing family, business, people, events, and community. Navigating personal and professional boundaries is a continuous process that I’m not sure I will ever figure out.
Going back to school in my mid-30s was full of difficult challenges. I had been out of school for almost a decade and being in an academic setting after having worked in the business, government, and non-profit worlds, it was often difficult not to get frustrated with the process. I almost didn’t finish; I almost quit. I didn’t quit, but I did take an extra year to finish. I owed it to myself and everyone who supported me over those years to see it through. I’m glad I did, but to this day I sometimes still struggle to find pride and happiness in that experience.
Managing events requires managing people and a variety of personalities. Learning to navigate different personalities and give people the space they need to be themselves can be really hard. Especially when there are timelines and goals to be met. This year was the first full-scale Utah Arts Festival since 2019. Our amazing director emailed our team leading up to the festival and told us to make sure to give each other some grace this year. Everyone has been through a lot and we all need to be patient with each other and with ourselves. That is a really difficult thing to do when you are working in a stressful environment with a lot of personalities and moving parts. It becomes more stressful when you then invite the public in to experience what you have built. You are managing expectations at all levels – from your team, to your volunteers, to your patrons, to your sponsors, to your board – everyone is coming at the experience from a different perspective and keeping everyone on board is critical to your success. Obviously, you cannot please everyone, but if you listen to people, if you trust them, if you give them a little grace, the rewards will always outweigh the challenges.
Producing events also means solving problems on the fly. Things never go as planned when there are so many layers of things that have to come together to make an event happen or to bring a community together for a common goal. Learning to let go when things don’t go as planned is difficult on a normal day but the motto has to be “there are no problems, only solutions.” Because things are always going to go wrong. I think it makes us more creative though. While having to make moves and changes in an instant is definitely not ideal in most cases, it makes you and your team really good at being strategic, working together, and then moving forward to ensure success.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
What I really specialize in is event management and production. My job, my hobbies, and my community involvement all have some elements related to creating, managing, organizing, and producing events. From auctions to arts festivals, I work with various organizations to bring goods, services, and good times to the community.
My full-time work is with my family business, TNT Auction, Inc. We are a small business that specializes in the sale of surplus government property (primarily vehicles and equipment), and I manage a lot of the daily operations, documentation, and auction events. This is our 36th year in business and I have been here for the better part of my life; I started out filing after school when I was 12.
Another position I am very honored to hold, is with the Utah Arts Festival, where I am the current performing arts coordinator. I am part of the team that facilitates applications, band offers, and scheduling for the bands and dance companies that perform at the Utah Arts Festival. I also work with the production team to build and tear down the festival site. I became the performing arts coordinator in 2019. Prior to this position, I was the assistant coordinator, and then the coordinator, for the sponsor hospitality area at the festival. I honed a lot of skills in that position and it has given me opportunities to work with other events in various capacities over the years. I have been working with the Utah Arts Festival since 2003. I take great pride and joy in working with my festival family each year.
I also have the privilege of being a volunteer with the Sugar House Community Council as a trustee for the Nibley neighborhood and as the secretary for the Sugar House Chamber. My role in these organizations is a bit more fluid and ranges from attending monthly meetings, sharing information with my neighbors, encouraging my neighbors to participate in giving feedback to our local government on local issues and initiatives, and producing community events. I have been a trustee with the Sugar House Community Council since 2017 and with the Chamber since 2020.
I hope what I’m known for is showing up and working hard. It gives me great pride to be part of organizations that really want to create experiences that bring our community together. I suspect some might say I’m known for bringing people together as well. People often wonder how I get myself involved in so many projects and why I do so many things, but I really do enjoy the work. In all of the work I do, a lot of communication, teamwork, and oftentimes physical labor is required. It is as exhausting as it is rewarding but I’m always going to show up for my team and make sure we all succeed together. I don’t know that it sets me apart in any way, but I am really proud to be a small part of making big things happen in Salt Lake City. The bonds forged with others through these endeavors continue to make my world very bright.
In terms of your work and the industry, what are some of the changes you are expecting to see over the next five to ten years?
The pandemic made a lot of deep impacts on the work I do at all levels. I think a lot of the changes that were required due to Covid will remain in place, for better and for worse, over the coming years. Some of that is having had to move things online, some is being more mindful safety protocols at all levels, and some is learning to be nimble in the face of constant change.
All of our auctions moved totally online. Luckily we had the expertise and the technology to make that move relatively seamlessly. I don’t see us moving back to in-person events in the future due to overhead costs, staffing shortages, and supply chain issues. Supply chain issues are the most prescient at this moment. Prices have been high while the inventory has been low. In 36 years we have not seen such sharp trends in the market and it feels like you’re always walking on eggshells. I don’t foresee the impacts of inflation, staffing, and supply chain issues being resolved for at least a couple of years.
In the case of the Utah Arts Festival, it was canceled for 2020, moved to a later date and smaller footprint for 2021, and moved back to its original dates and scale for 2022. In 2022 we continued to cope with pandemic-related issues including Covid-related cancelations from artists and coordinators, supply chain issues, inflationary costs, etc. Inflationary costs in particular are going to be a huge consideration moving forward when it comes to large-scale events like the Utah Arts Festival. Toilets, equipment, electricity, security – all of those things that are the backbone of an event have become more expensive which means that sacrifices to programming and other elements will be required. That feels really frustrating, particularly when people have come to expect a certain experience from your organization, but as an event, you are always making trade-offs. While frustrating, I think it forces us to become more innovative in our approach.
At the end of the day, while the pandemic has forever changed the landscape of everyone’s lives, it has changed the way we conceive of, produce, and manage events. We were all bombarded with fear, everchanging information, and insecurity about whether or not we might ever return to a world with live events. There are a lot of consequences to that break and the long-term effects on staffing and budget will make it a lot more difficult to carry out events at the same scale as pre-Covid for at least the next few years. With that being said, I also think the pandemic has made us a lot better at coping with changes as they happen, and made us more nimble, more calm, and more creative in many ways.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sugarhousechamber.org/
- Instagram: @utahartsfest
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TNTAUCTION
- Other: https://www.sugarhousecouncil.org/
Image Credits
Jocelyn Kearl
Jim Hayes
