CUSTOMER STORY
He sells eight services.
A client books one company.
Zach Thomas runs Apogee Event Productions, a multi-service event company in Oregon, and he decided a long time ago not to be just another DJ company. Apogee sells DJs, photo booths, photography, wedding film, planning, casino parties, game shows and arcade rental, bundled however a client wants them. It has run on Check Cherry since 2018, through a warehouse lease signed eleven days before the state shut down, and it is wider now than it was before.
One company, the whole event
A client planning a wedding in Portland can hire Apogee for the DJ, the photo booth, the photographer and the film crew, and get one contract and one company. That is not an accident of growth. It is the plan.
"I have been trying to figure out how to build a company that could handle much more of an event under one roof, instead of being just another DJ or photo booth company. We are now approaching the market as our area's multi service provider."
He was already running four of those lines in his first six months on Check Cherry, bundled together, back when there were nine or ten people at the company. Casino party, game show, arcade rental, planning and coordination came later. The booth catalog alone now runs from a classic print booth to a 360 platform.
What a client can book from one company
DJ and MC
Photo booth
Photography
Wedding film
Planning
Casino party
Game show
Arcade rental
Almost every tool in this market is built around one of those lines. The one he came from was, which is a large part of why a spreadsheet was still doing the work a system should have been doing.
He still works events himself about once a month, and the ones he picks are deliberate. Sponsorships, the free ones, the rooms where the point is not the fee. That is not nostalgia for the booth. It is a sales channel that does not look like one.
It started with getting time back
He hired his first DJ besides himself in 2012. By 2018 there were nine or ten of them, selling DJs, photo booths, photography and wedding film, already bundled together.
What he did not have was a system. He signed up in 2018 for a simple reason, and it is the same reason most people sign up.
"When I first started using Check Cherry, the biggest thing it gave me was time. I wanted to reduce my redundant actions. Copying email templates from my drafts, tracking events in Excel, having all details in a single area."
He had come from another booking product, so his expectations for what came next were low. What surprised him was that the software kept changing.
"I love that you actually work on the software. A lot of guys in the past have just made something and dumped it, and it's clunky. You're really actually working on it and making it better all the time."
That is the part of a software decision nobody can evaluate on a demo. You find out in year five.
Then came eleven days
In November 2019 things were going well enough that he went looking for room to grow into.
He wanted warehouse space. What he found had a finished fifty-person event room in the front, which seemed like a bonus. He heard the word COVID in February 2020 and did not think much of it. He signed at the end of that month.
"I think it was eleven days later, we got the governor's order to shut down."
He kept telling himself it was two more weeks. He held the space longer than he should have. He does not describe it as bad luck so much as a bill that came due early, and he is the one who says he should have called it sooner.
He came out of it without the space and without the plan he had signed for, and still in business.
He took a job, and rebuilt what they run on
In November 2022 he went and got a job. He knew the owner of The Party Team, another Oregon event company, and he needed to get back on his feet. Plenty of people in that position would have been too proud to make the call. He made it, and that company got a great deal more than an events hire.
He is their Event Director, not their owner. He brought them onto Check Cherry, moved a large client list off the platform they had been using, and stood up four territories that each had to read as a local company. He did not have to do any of that. He was not the one paying for it.
Three years on he oversees all of their events from Salem to Medford, plus national sales, alongside running his own company. He is not their biggest producer and does not need to be. He is the one who moved them onto the system they sell on.
"Check Cherry solved the four territory issue, better lead capture, reporting, and flexibility for what we needed to do. We have had significant growth since we've implemented CC."
Apogee Event Productions
His own company, on Check Cherry since 2018. Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend and the Oregon Coast.
The Party Team, four territories
Where he is Event Director. Portland, Bend, Eugene and Boise, each needing to read as local.
Hundreds of events a year
That he books himself, across both. He is in the system every day, which is why he has opinions about it.
An agent opens a support ticket
A conversation arrives in our inbox that begins "Hello, I'm Zach's AI agent." It wants help with SMS notifications.
He asks for an API key
There isn't one to give him yet. He is told so.
He asks again
This time he has been through the developer portal too.
We open the API to everyone
Four months after he first asked. He was not waiting on it by then, he was building around it.
He got there before we did
In March 2025 a support conversation arrived that opened, "Hello, I'm Zach's AI agent." He had one answering for him a year before most people had tried one.
A year after that he started asking for a way in. Not for a report. For something to build on.
"I'm hoping I can get an API key so we can monitor our leads in real time. I'm trying to build some intelligence around our leads in CC."
We did not have one to give him. He asked in February, asked again in March, and had gone through the developer portal in between. The Check Cherry API opened to every account that June. He has also built his own game show software with a coding agent, which is not a sentence anybody expected to write about a wedding DJ.
So now he asks the data who to call
The man who signed up to stop copying email templates out of a drafts folder has an AI assistant reading eight years of his own history.
Check Cherry speaks MCP, which lets an assistant read your bookings, leads and payments with your permission and answer questions about them. He does not use it to admire dashboards. He uses it to find the next sale.
"Who's booked a holiday party in the last three years that hasn't booked one yet this year?"
Read that again as a sales manager would. It is a call list, and it took one sentence. No report to configure, no export, no filter to remember.
This is a man with an AI agent that opens his support tickets, who asked us for API access four months before we had any to give him. He is not squeamish about the technology. He is specific about where it stops.
"You can't just run an agent company with the events. When you're doing weddings, there's got to be personal experience to that."
He is not arguing against the automation, though. He is arguing about what it is for.
Ask why he still turns up to run a casino night once a month and the answer stops being about business at all.
"Events are one of the last things we even have left as the fabric of society... I just think that society needs it, I guess even more than I need it."
"If in 2018 someone would have told me, when I first started using Check Cherry, that I would be running millions through it, I wouldn't have believed them."
Zach Thomas
Owner, Apogee Event Productions
A solo DJ in 2012. Nine or ten people by 2018. Eight service lines at his own company now, and four more territories at the one where he is Event Director.
What this means if you are shopping
The demo is the easy part. What you are choosing is who you are dealing with in the bad year.
It has to hold more than one service
Most tools in this market are built around a single line. Eight of them run out of one catalog here, bundled together, which is the difference between adding a service and starting over.
It has to still be there in year eight
Switching platforms costs you history, templates and a month of your life. He has not had to do it since 2018, and the product he bought then is not the product he uses now.
It has to be run by people
Businesses take hits. What happens next is decided by whoever picks up the phone, and that is not a feature you can compare on a pricing page.
About Apogee Event Productions
Apogee Event Productions is a multi-service event company owned by Zach Thomas, serving Portland, Salem, Eugene, Bend and the Oregon Coast. Seven-time finalist for Best Wedding DJ and two-time finalist for Best Photo Booths in Oregon Bride Magazine, now Oregon Wedding Day.
weareapogee.comBuild something that lasts
Start where he started. Grow into the rest when you are ready.