Venue Focus
Conventional wisdom with an experiential twist
CMW SPEAKS WITH RYAN SIMONETTI , CEO OF US-BASED VENUE GROUP CONVENE , AND HEARS HOW THE ‘ ONE COMPANY TWO BRANDS ’ STRATEGY IS DEVELOPING
Q : You ’ re the founder of Convene : how did this concept come about ? Ryan Simonetti : My dad was an entrepreneur and owned a bread delivery company . I ’ ve been in and around the food and hospitality business since I was a youngster , so I ’ m not too surprised that when I decided to start a company , there was a tie back to hospitality .
After university I stumbled into real estate and worked at Lehman Brothers and later for a real estate investment company .
I did a lot of office and hotel investing . If you go back to 2005-2008 in the United States , it was the birth of lifestyle as a movement . We saw Whole Foods , Trader Joe ’ s , Equinox Soul Cycle , Ian Schrager with the whole boutique , hotel room , and W Hotels , the brand . But nobody had really thought about bringing the lifestyle experience into the workplace or into an office building . And so the thesis for Convene was , what if you ran an office building like a hotel , and you brought in the amenities , the meeting and event space , the food service , the tenant lounge , and cafe , could you create a better experience in the building ? Could you also become a place where companies in the community could host their events and meetings
Ryan Simonetti instead of going to a hotel or doing it internally , and at the same time , do it in the way that a hotel brand can create value for the owner or developer of a hotel ?
We opened our first location in 2009 in the middle of the financial crisis . Building owners felt that having access to that meeting space experience in their own building would be really helpful for new tenants who would not need to build a large training room , but could just use Convene in the building .
The world and our business have both evolved , but the core thesis has remained consistent . What differentiates us , similar to the etc . venues , product and platform , is really intentional design , great food , technology that works , but most importantly , the human element . There really is a difference between service and hospitality . Hospitality to me is emotional or human to human delivery of a service experience . We do that really well and have built a brand on that . We had a great run up until Covid . We were up to 34 locations , multiple cities in the US , and about to open in London . We ’ ve since scaled down the business , to some extent , and positioned ourselves to the point where , coming out of it with new capital partners , we were in a position to do things from an M & A perspective .
Did you manage to retain most of your staff ? RS : In the US , unfortunately , they had nowhere near the level of support or government support that was available in the UK . We went from 1,000 people to 120 and stayed there for two years . And now collectively , between us and etc . venues , we ’ re back up to over 900 .
IS : When you came up with an idea for Convene , were you aware of etc . venues ? RS : No . At the time in the US there was nothing like it . About a year into the business . I was at an IACC conference , and etc . venues happened to be there .
50 / CONFERENCE & MEETINGS WORLD / ISSUE 126