From the Runway to the Room: Marquita Rugless on ROC Events

About This Episode

Every great event makes it look easy. The room is right, the energy is right, the lighting and the flow and the details all line up into something that feels effortless — even though effortless is exactly the opposite of what it actually was. Behind every experience like that is someone who obsessed over every element before a single guest walked in. For Marquita Rugless, that obsession is not a professional habit. It's a calling.

Marquita is the founder and Chief Experience Officer of ROC Events LLC, a Rochester-based experiential event company that she has built from a passion project into a legitimate business presence in the region. Her background is in fashion — specifically in the world of runway shows, where every detail from the lighting cues to the model walk order to the seating arrangement tells a story. That sensibility, the belief that an event is not just a gathering but a curated narrative experience, is what she carried with her when she pivoted into the broader events space.

In this conversation with Jaclyn, Marquita talks honestly about what it took to make that pivot real. Building a business from a creative passion in Rochester is not a straight line. There are clients to find, credibility to establish, and the constant work of explaining to people who hire for events why experience design is worth investing in — why the difference between a good event and a great one isn't just flowers and a good caterer, but a thoughtful architecture of moments that leave people feeling something. Marquita has had to make that case over and over, and she's gotten good at it.

The episode also gets into what it means to operate a woman-owned business in Rochester's entrepreneurship ecosystem — the particular combination of visibility and invisibility that women founders navigate, the networks that are available and the ones that aren't, and the decision to build something on your own terms anyway. Marquita doesn't complain about those dynamics. She names them, explains how she works within and around them, and then moves on to what she's building. That pragmatic determination is characteristic of the best entrepreneurial thinking, and it comes through clearly in this conversation.

What lingers after this episode is Marquita's core belief: that every event should tell a story. Not a generic story about celebration or success or community, but a specific story about the people in that room and the moment they're sharing together. When she talks about her work, she talks about it the way a director talks about a film — as a set of choices, each one contributing to an emotional arc. That's a sophisticated way to think about event planning, and it's the reason ROC Events LLC is the kind of company Jaclyn wanted to put on the record. Rochester has builders who think this way. Marquita Rugless is one of them.