If you’ve been following our blog or if you know any of the Taylors, it has probably become fairly obvious that we are a family owned and operated business. Since we all sat around at our last community “Who” meeting and made the decision to share this blogging experience, we thought it was important to introduce the different members of the family. You’ll have to forgive us for our Dr. Seuss references but being in a family business sometimes requires a bit of humor! Unless you own your business or spend your days working among family, it’s hard to understand how many different hats each member has to wear. On a daily basis, my title could vary from VP of Accounting to VP of Human Resources to VP of Putting Groceries Away. Technically, I’m Dawn…VP of Operations and daughter of our owners, Al and Michelle Taylor.
Our first blog was written by my brother, Brad. His technical title is VP of Sales and Finance. He and I both graduated from ASU a few hundred years ago (or so it seems) and have been in this business for as long as my parents could figure out a way to put us to work! Event planning and catering is in our blood I guess you could say. Brad is on the outside, talking to customers, networking and helping to create Special Moments wherever he can, while I prefer to be in the background working in the kitchen and keeping the operations going. It’s a good system and we make a good team.
The next blog was written by Al, our CEO and President. He retired from police work and joined my mom in the catering world. An odd transition to some but it has some surprising similarities at times. He was the Lieutenant of the downtown Tempe quadrant when the Superbowl came to town. Planning the security and overseeing all of the events that took place down there makes him our expert in event design, special event liquor licenses and large event management.
Soon, you’ll hear from Michelle, my mom. She is the founder of Special Moments and it is her special touch and caring heart that started our success. My mom truly cares about the events that she puts on and she is still the one quite often in the warehouse arranging the flowers and compiling the sets for our customers.
To help us in our blogging endeavors we enlisted the help of my daughter, Larissa. She’s going to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU and has worked for Special Moments for as long as I could find a job for her to do! We thought it might be nice for someone not necessarily involved in the daily operations to be a part of our voice.
And finally, you’ll hear from Mimi, Brad’s assistant. She’s not technically family but we pretty much adopted her! She should probably write about what it is like to work for a family like ours, especially when she’s caught in the crossfires of sibling bantering!
Overall we hope our blog accomplishes a few things for us and for our readers. We hope to share some of the crazy moments of our business endeavors (like the grease trap insanity) as well as offer up some of the knowledge we have gained over the years in this industry. Our topics will probably be as varied as the family members (and adopted ones) who write them but we hope they are fun for you to read! At any rate, it was a family commitment so one thing is for sure…we’ll see it through!