You can put two hundred people in a ballroom and call it networking. Most of them will go home having met nobody.
Be Sage Conference 2025 solved that with a format worth stealing. On dine around night, everyone met first in the Fairmont Mayakoba lobby for cocktails. Then the room broke apart on purpose. Small groups of eight to twelve headed out to different restaurants across the Mayakoba resorts — some on foot, some by boat across the lagoon — and stayed there for the night.
Why Eight to Twelve Is the Right Number
A table of ten is the largest group that can still hold one conversation. Below that you get real depth. Above it, the table splits into cliques and someone always ends up stranded at the end, talking to a candle.
That number also changes what people are willing to say. In a ballroom you get the elevator pitch. At a table of ten, three hours in, you get the actual numbers — what a business is really billing, what is not working, what somebody is scared to try. These are experienced owners who have run out of use for surface-level conversation. The format gives them somewhere to put the real questions.
And because the groups are assembled rather than self-selected, people end up across from someone they would never have chosen. That is the whole point. The relationships that come out of a night like this outlast the session notes.
More from Be Sage 2025 at Mayakoba: The Setting at Mayakoba · Welcome Party · Closing Dinner & Party
Cocktails First, Then the Split
The lobby hour matters more than it looks. It is where people find their footing before the night narrows down — a drink, a first hello, a hat still on from the afternoon. Someone had a film camera out. Two guests turned up with a pair of Bengal cats on leashes, which is not a sentence we expected to write either.
Then the groups peeled off. Boats crossed the lagoon in the last of the light. Restaurants opened with a welcome pour from a hammered gold pitcher. Musicians played through dinner. Somewhere past the second course, the tables stopped being a seating chart and started being a conversation.
Photographing Small Groups Without Wrecking Them
Covering an evening like this takes a different approach than a big reception. With eight people at a table, a photographer is not a fly on the wall — you are the eleventh person in the room. So we move early, work quietly, and get out of the way once a table settles. Long lenses across a courtyard. Available light and candlelight rather than a flash in someone’s face mid-sentence.
Then there is the logistics problem: several groups, several restaurants, spread across a 595-acre resort, all happening at once. That is a planning conversation to have with the host well before the night itself, and it is one of the reasons a multi-day conference photographer earns their keep — knowing which rooms to hit, in what order, and how long to stay.
From Dallas–Fort Worth to the Riviera Maya
We flew to Mayakoba from Dallas–Fort Worth, which is home and has been for a long time. That is the short version of what we do: DFW is our base, and we serve the whole Dallas–Fort Worth area for conferences and multi-day events — but when a host takes their people somewhere worth going, we go too.
Both halves of that matter. If you are planning a conference in Dallas, Fort Worth or anywhere in North Texas, we are already here and we know the venues. If you are taking your group to Mexico, the Caribbean or further, a destination conference photographer who has done multi-day coverage abroad is worth more than a local hire who has never worked a week-long event. We do both, and this week was the second kind.
More from Be Sage 2025
Be Sage Conference is built for event business owners — three days of hard-core, no-fluff education from Be Sage Consulting, educators for the wedding industry since 2009.
See the rest of the week: the setting at Mayakoba, the welcome party, and the closing dinner and party. You can also revisit Be Sage 2024 in San Miguel de Allende.
The Team
Conference: Be Sage Conference, produced by Be Sage Consulting
Host venue: Fairmont Mayakoba, Riviera Maya, Mexico
This event was photographed by Tracy Autem, Amanda Lloyd & Jennifer Aguilar of Lightly Photography
Planning a conference or multi-day event of your own, in DFW or somewhere that needs a passport? Learn more about our conference and multi-day event coverage — or reach out and let’s get started.