Celebrating 40 Years (and Sharing What Works)
At EVT, our purpose is to help businesses grow by motivating exceptional people with exceptional rewards and experiences.
And this year marks a big milestone — 40 years of doing exactly that.
That’s four decades of incentive programs, thousands of trips, millions of rewards, and countless moments of motivation that moved the needle for our clients. We recently celebrated with our clients, partners, and team — but I didn’t just want to mark the milestone. I wanted to share what it’s taught us.
Because after 40 years in incentives, here are the three lessons that never go out of style:
✨ Structure beats spend. You don’t need the biggest budget to make an incentive work. What matters is a clear framework — what is the program trying to achieve, who are we targeting to change behaviour and what’s the right metrics to drive program RO. When the structure is right, performance follows.
🌍 Experiences win. Cash bonuses and gift cards get spent and forgotten. Incentive travel, tangible rewards, recognition moments, once-in-a-lifetime experiences — those are what people talk about, post about, it’s what drives ongoing performance & loyalty.
📢 Keep it simple. If the communication is too complex, you lose people before they start. The best programs are clear, motivating, and easy to engage with. Simple goals + desirable rewards = results.
The tools we use have evolved — from printed launch brochures and results in the 80s, to digital platforms & email results, and now AI — but the purpose has never changed: incentives done well drive performance, motivation, and loyalty.
We also truly believe that as our world becomes more AI driven, more automated, it will be the human touch and experience that will stand out in the crowd – people want that human experience more than ever!
If you’re curious about how to apply these principles to your business today, we’d love to show you. You can book a no-strings Incentive Workshop here: https://www.evtmarketing.com/incentive-workshop-form
Thanks for being part of our journey — here’s to the next 40.