Producers of the moments you remember.
InspireME Monte Carlo is a destination management company based in the Principality of Monaco, working across Monaco, France and Italy.
It was founded by Miek Egberts and Moreno Sonatori, who each arrived with a career already behind them. Neither of those careers began in Monaco, and between them they had been doing this work for decades before the company existed.
We began in production.
That is an unusual foundation for a destination management company. It means we plan an event backwards from the moment the doors open, and every decision before that gets measured against whether it holds up on the night.
Two careers, one company.
1969
Moreno begins producing live entertainment in Florence. Over the decades that follow the work grows into one of Italy’s established production operations, with an artist list running from Ella Fitzgerald and Barry White through Ennio Morricone and Andrea Bocelli to Roberto Bolle and David Guetta.
1990s
Miek already has her own career by the time the two paths meet. A degree from the Hoge Hotelschool in Maastricht, then Italy with Starwood Hotels and Newtours. In 2012 she takes over Allied PRA’s Monte Carlo office and moves to the Principality.
2015
Miek and Moreno found InspireME in Monaco. Two careers that had run alongside each other for twenty-five years, one in production and one in destination management, become a single company, with conferences, corporate programmes, product launches, private celebrations and live entertainment produced under the same roof.
Co-Founder
Miek Egberts
Everything InspireME measures itself against, Miek set.
She was Dutch, and grew up moving across Europe. She described herself as a world citizen rather than as any one nationality, and she spoke six languages. Her degree, from the Hoge Hotelschool in Maastricht, was in business administration with a specialisation in tourism and marketing, and the career that followed took her through the hotel side of the industry, the operator side and the production side before she started InspireME.
She was known for ideas that were creative without being decorative, and for reading what a client actually needed rather than what was written down.
She was elected to the international board of directors of SITE, the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence, and served on its executive committee, leading much of the organisation’s work on sustainability and social responsibility.
Together, Miek and Moreno built InspireME over six years, programme by programme.
Until July 2021 Miek was the soul and the engine of the company. Her life was taken in a tragic accident.
Moreno assumed the role of CEO, to ensure continuity of the business and of the service owed to the clients who had trusted her with their programmes.
The team he leads, strengthened by the years of experience behind it and by what it has delivered since, continues to work to the standard she set, and to the vision she built with Moreno and their children.
Her way of working did not go with her.
She came out of production, and it showed in how she answered a difficult request. Not with whether it could be done, but with the first few ways it might be.
It showed in the questions she asked before anything was agreed, in knowing which door to knock on and how far ahead, and in what she counted as a good event, which was not that nothing went wrong but that the group was still talking about it on the way home.
None of it was written down. It was how she worked, and it stayed. It is the reason a programme is built the way it is, and the reason we choose the suppliers we choose.
Co-Founder and CEO
Moreno Sonatori
Moreno is a producer before he is anything else.
He started producing in Florence in 1969 and has spent more than fifty years booking artists, negotiating riders and standing at the back of rooms watching whether a show is landing. It leaves you with an instinct for the moment an event either works or does not, usually about twenty minutes before anyone else in the room notices.
For twenty-five years he worked alongside Miek, first as artistic consultant and director on her programmes, then as co-founder. He is now CEO. He runs the company the way she did, which means a bit of everything on every programme rather than anything from a distance. He is in the venue on the site visit, in the room at the rehearsal and at the back of it on the night. There is no job here he has not done himself at some point, and that is the reason nothing is promised to a client that cannot actually be delivered.
He grew up in San Giuseppe di Montecarlo, a village in the hills above Lucca. A man from Montecarlo who ended up building a company in Monte Carlo is not something you could invent and be believed.
Italy
Alessandra Santoni
Alessandra runs the Italian side of InspireME with Moreno, from our office in Florence. She joined after Miek’s death and has been with us since.
Her first events were the Pitti fashion fairs, which she worked as a student in the early 1980s. In 1986 she joined American Express, in the office handling incoming meetings and congresses, and stayed for twelve years. She went on to sales for a Florentine catering company and eight years leading congress projects, then operations and sales at director level for destination management companies in Florence, with programmes across Italy and its islands.
She holds the Direttore Tecnico qualification, registered with the Region of Tuscany, and works in Italian, English and French. She knows Italian food and wine as well as she knows the venues. The hotels, caterers, guides and crews she has worked with over the decades came with her to InspireME. She plans the work and she is there for it.
Project Manager, Events and Client Relations
Federico Egberts Sonatori
Federico has worked in the company since 2018. He started with whatever a programme needed, from transfers and rooming lists to badge tables, and learned early which parts of an event decide whether it works. They are almost never the parts in the proposal.
Today he works alongside Moreno and Alessandra on client relations, site visits, supplier negotiation, budgets and reconciliations, and the run of play on the day.
Alongside the company he studied economics in Rotterdam, a bachelor and then a master in financial economics at the Erasmus School of Economics, with time in private banking in Monaco and in asset management in the Netherlands. A programme is a budget, a set of contracts and a reconciliation before it is anything else. Being able to read those properly, and to tell a client the truth about what something will cost and why, is rarer in event management than it should be.
The wider team
Decades with the same people.
Behind every programme is a group of people we have worked with for a very long time. Project managers and coordinators, guides, technical crews, drivers, artists and production suppliers across the three countries, a number of whom were working with Moreno long before InspireME existed.
The same goes for the venues, hotels and caterers we return to. When a programme is put together, the first calls go to people who have done this with us many times before, and who know what we expect without being told.
The people who plan it are the people who run it.
That is how every programme here is run, from the first site visit to the final reconciliation. Production since 1969.
If you have something in mind, tell us about it.