Most events, even the biggest, most successful ones, are a single-product business.

Tickets are sold, sponsors are acquired, but it all happens once a year and the revenue exists around one date on a calendar. 

Striking the right balance is tricky - an underperforming edition, whether due to a shift in business strategy or an economic downturn, can jeopardise the whole brand.

A platform is different. TED, Comic-Con, World Health Expo and Gulfood are great examples of events that have grown out from a single ticketed weekend. The live event becomes an anchor for a much wider commercial structure with media, licensing, data, community and multiple revenue lines that don’t depend on a room full of people.

So how do you attempt to turn your event into a platform?

When Doug Emslie started out more than 30 years ago, entrepreneurs tended to understand their markets deeply, spot an opportunity, find talented people and go for it. There was less data, fewer consultants and certainly fewer committees. Today we have vastly more information available to us, yet he sometimes wonders whether we have become less willing to make decisions.

Between 2004 and 2010, Mark Brewster ran trade and consumer events and saw first-hand what good research could do for an events business – measuring performance, understanding audiences, even turning market research into a revenue line of its own.  The only problem was that the market for quality show research was stuck with boutique agencies: expensive, slow, and impossible to scale. So, Mark set out to build the self-service alternative. That business became Explori. 

Virginia Kern joined her father's exhibitions company in 1976 and turned her attention to a region with almost no infrastructure to speak of. Over the next four decades, Fairs & Exhibitions Ltd (F&E) grew from tented shows on the Deira creekside into the organiser behind the Dubai Airshow and Arab Health, riding the Gulf's transformation from oil discovery to global business hub. 

In this post, Virginia shares why total focus on one region beat spreading thin, why customer loyalty mattered more than short-term profit, and why she never actually planned to sell the business she built. 

As Chief Growth Officer at Montgomery Group, Sanjeev Khaira sits at the centre of the company's acquisition strategy – deciding which events are worth pursuing, what a fair deal looks like, and how to work with founders once the ink is dry.

We asked Sanjeev what makes an event stand out to a buyer, why the first few editions matter more than people think, and the advice he'd give any founder building toward a future exit.

For Thom Hetherington, the leap into business ownership arrived twice, and both times redundancy did the shoving. The first came at 24, just after he'd bought his first house. The second came years later, with a doer-upper on his hands and a first child on the way. This time, the redundancy led him to acquire Northern Restaurant and Bar (NRB), a struggling young trade show he would go on to build into the definitive hospitality event for the North of England.

Some founders spend years building up to the leap of launching on their own. For Bill Hammond, the moment arrived all at once, in the form of a redundancy letter and a wife who was fairly sure he should stop working for other people's events and start building his own.

Bill spent over two decades in the tech sector, most of it in B2B publishing, before founding Big Data LDN in 2015. He built the event from a first edition that wildly outgrew expectations, through a pandemic that nearly derailed the exit yet ended up accelerating it, to a sale just six years after launch.

In this post, he shares what it took to build his brand from scratch, why he wishes he'd taken social media more seriously in 2016, and what he'd tell anyone thinking about going it alone.

Some founders discover their idea in a flash of inspiration. Others get there the harder way – through a failed consumer show, a room full of frustrated exhibitors, and one voice cutting through the noise with exactly the right words at exactly the wrong moment.

Jason Franks spent twenty years running events in corporate life before launching EMEX and UKME. Both sold. One to Mark Allen Exhibitions, one to Easyfairs. Along the way, he built a family-like founding team, stayed lean past £2m in turnover, and survived a due diligence process he describes – without much affection – as having been invented by sadistic lawyers and accountants.

Serge Dive launched This is Beyond after a safari to Africa in 2005 changed his perspective. A decade of building later, he sold it. Along the way, he learned that in the luxury events world, the rules of conventional business don't always apply – and that the most counter-intuitive decisions are often the right ones.

Building an event business and building a valuable event business are not the same thing. Unfortunately, many founders discover this distinction too late.