What Now? Event Business Owners At A Crossroads

On Hitting A Wall (Business & Personal), And Options For Breaking Through

Author

Howard Givner
January 31, 2025

Welcome to Event Business Intelligence!

This is the first issue of my newsletter, so please bear with me as I iron out the kinks. I’ll be using this platform to provide deep dive insights for owners of event businesses and in-house executives responsible for event P&Ls to help them get their companies and events to the next level. Topics will include strategy, growth, innovation, measurement and M&A.

Much of today’s trade media is written to appeal to the lowest common denominator, to pull in the biggest audience that can be monetized through ads, producing content that’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Because I’m not looking for advertisers I can pick topics that are critically important to a niche audience and express an opinion, even if that challenges the status quo. It’s my hope that readers will find value in what I cover and the perspective I bring to the table.

With that said, here we go!

Conversations with 25 Event Business Owners

In September I left PCMA, having stayed on after selling my last company (the Event Leadership Institute) to them in January 2023, and was trying to figure out what was next for me. In the time since then, I’ve spoken to over two dozen owners and CEOs of event businesses, mostly agencies. My goal was to understand the landscape and determine if there was a lane for me to add value.

I was very open about my experiences running event businesses over the years, and gave them the opportunity to be equally open with me. I asked them:

  1. How’s businesses?

  2. What challenges are keeping you up at night?

  3. What opportunities are you excited about?

  4. Where do you want to be in 3-5 years, and are you on track to get there?

  5. How can I help?

A number of themes emerged:

Top Opportunity: Without question, everyone is excited about AI and the prospect of leveraging it to drive productivity. The biggest expense of any agency is talent, and AI presents a game-changing opportunity to make that talent more efficient, and improve profit margins.

How exactly they’re integrating AI to do this is another story, as some are clearly deploying it faster and better than others.

Top Challenge: Though not as universal an issue as AI, many owners lamented struggling to figure out a steady-state staffing level. Most went from massive cuts in peak Covid, often “down to the studs”, to a mad scramble for staff in 2021-2022, the latter being the best year ever for many. Even if they were able to find people, the loss of institutional knowledge was brutal, so owners were reluctant to scale back in 2023-2024 when business slowed down a bit. Finding the right balance has proven elusive.

Now What? This is where it got interesting. The past five years have been enormously impactful for everyone, but people fell into different groups depending on how they responded and where their heads are at now.

It’s been a brutal grind, to be sure. The extinction-level threat of Covid was stressful enough, but then came the business boom of 2022 and the mad rush to staff up quickly to accommodate the slew of events coming in with little lead time. Throw in inflation, supply chain issues, date compression and last minute registrations, and you have a recipe for burnout. The enormous response to my recent LinkedIn article, The Body Keeps the Score: The Toll of Ongoing Uncertainty & the Value of Recharging, shows how wide-ranging this stress has been.

But business owners carried additional burdens, such as being responsible for their employees’ livelihoods, and tapping credit lines or loans that were personally guaranteed, putting their homes at risk if they defaulted.

4 Paths Forward: Sellers, Buyers & Everything In Between

In short, the ongoing uncertainty of the past five years, moving from crisis to crisis, took its toll, leaving owners at a crossroad trying to figure out what’s next. Through my conversations I found they fell into several categories, each of which requires a different solution:

  1. “Ready to Cash Out.” Owners who are fried. They’re done and want out. They’re ready to sell, and will stay with the new owner as long as it takes to migrate their clients and teams, but they’re eager to move on to the next phase of their lives. The ideal suiter is a strategic buyer who can absorb their clients.

  2. “Looking to Take Some Chips Off the Table.” Owners who like working with clients and producing events, but don’t want the stress or headache of running the business. They’re willing to sell a majority stake in their companies and de-risk their positions, or merge into another business that brings partners with complementary skill sets to the table. They’d be a good fit for either a private equity firm who could fund a COO or other supportive role, or a strategic buyer that already has a strong leadership team in place.

  3. “Strong but Stuck.”Owners whose businesses are in decent shape, but have plateaued at a certain revenue tier and are struggling to break through to the next level. Like reptiles that need to shed their skin in order to grow into a larger body, they realize they need to make some structural changes to get to that next level. But they either don’t know what those changes are, or they do but they need some outside guidance to push them along.

  4. “Lean & Hungry.” Owners who’ve used these years to streamline their operations and focus on profitable clients and services. They’ve built a better mousetrap, are re-energized, and are looking to grow by acquiring other companies and tucking them into their infrastructure. In many cases they’re most interested in companies that add new verticals or services, and finding the right personal and culture fit is critical.

Regardless of which category they fell into, they were in need of help, whether it was finding acquisition targets, positioning them for a sale, finding a buyer, or helping them grow. When I floated the idea of providing growth consulting, exit planning, and M&A advisory services, the first thing I heard was “Oh, you’d be great at that!” (pats himself on the back), which validated my thesis that event business owners would find value in someone who’s been in their shoes to help them get to the next level.

“Successes Are Shouted From the Mountaintops; Failures Occur In the Shadows”

And indeed I had been in their shoes. Over the course of running several businesses in the events industry I was in all four of the above groups at one point or another. There were times when things felt hopeless, and other times when I thought I’d cracked the code and could conquer the world.

What I remember most, however, is the sense of struggling to break through to the next level, whatever that was at the time. Sometimes that struggle lasted years, the frustration eating away at me, feeling like I was running out of time. I was convinced that everyone else had figure things out, and was brutally hard on myself in comparison.

I later learned that this is often an illusion, that people tend to only share their highlights - landing a new client, winning an award, hiring new staff - but behind the scenes things aren’t always so rosy. No one posts about having a competitor steal your client or losing a key employee, but it happens nonetheless. This is the dark side of social media. We compare our insides to other people’s outsides, and it’s not healthy.

Defining, and Getting To, the Next Level

The key is to focus on where YOU want to be in 3 years, 5 years. When business owners tell me they’re struggling to get to the next level and I ask them to define what that is, I’m still shocked at how many can’t articulate that with any specificity.

It’s easy to say you want more clients, bigger events, more money, but rarely do I hear someone say “I want my business to be worth X.” Ultimately, that should be any owner’s north star, whether you decide to sell or not, because your business is likely your biggest asset, and for sure it’s what you spend the most time on. If you’re not focusing on the value of your business as an asset, then what you’ve really built is at best a lifestyle business, at worst a job with brutal hours and difficult boss. If that’s your goal, then fine. Accept it and stop focusing on the next level, because you’re probably not going to get there. Otherwise your next steps should be:

  • Point A: Understand what your business is worth now

  • Point B: Determine what you ultimately want it to be worth at some point

  • Only then can you figure out a roadmap to get from Point A to Point B.

Doing this requires stepping back from the day-to-day and having some hard conversations about your business, something I found is much easier with the right outside guidance, particularly someone who can look at your business dispassionately and provide an honest assessment of what’s working and what needs to change.

And there’s no shame in asking for help. In fact, it takes courage to admit you can’t get to the next level on your own. Sometimes even a small change can yield big dividends. Maybe you’re not charging enough. Maybe you’re providing a 100% level of service when your clients really only want to pay for an 80% level, and maybe there are other things they’re willing to pay more for. Maybe you need a real CFO instead of a glorified bookkeeper.

Whatever the issue is, knowing your Point B gives you the lens through which to make decisions. Will solution x or y help me get the business to the value I want? Everything needs to track back from that end goal. It won’t be easy, but the clarity will be liberating, and inspiring.

Here’s to taking your event business to the next level,

Howard Givner

P.S. Thanks for reading! Please give me feedback by hitting reply.

If and when you’re ready, here are ways I work with owners of event businesses: