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8. Revenue not costs. I have sat in many budget meetings. The story is always the same – 95 % of the time is spent going-over every cost line, no matter how small, and no more than 5 % talking about revenues. The latter usually consists of:“ Put up prices at inflation? Agreed?”
I have lost count of the number of times a new CEO from outside the industry decided that their prime mission is cost-cutting – going to the NEC, Melville or GES, or LiveBuzz and shaving costs everywhere they can. As if this is the route to glory. It isn’ t.
The trade show business is an ecosystem. The venues, suppliers and organisers depend on each other. They all need to make sufficient returns to keep the machine turning. They are your friends, not your enemies. This is not to say that arguing with Excel about a 10 % rack rate rise is wrong. And there are one or two things which do deserve debate – Wi-Fi charges at some venues for exhibitors have become absurd, for example.
But if the venues go broke, where will we run our shows? If our suppliers go broke, then who will build our stands? Costs should be seen as a percentage of revenue – falling as a show gets bigger – not as some absolute which needs to be cut. CloserStill got where it is by concentrating on revenues – by saying, for many years, that the costs could go up 5 % as long as the revenues went up at 5 + 5 %. Cutting costs, I promise you, will not be the route to your $ 2bn.
9. Don’ t do anything silly. I don’ t know where to start on this point – so let’ s leave it at UBM, Interiors, EcoBuild and IFSEC.
10. Fight to avoid the BPUs – the Business Prevention Units. All growing companies fall prey eventually to the BPU disease.
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Don’ t get an HR department until it is utterly unavoidable( such as when a PE company with their own internal rules demands it). Outsource HR record-keeping and dispute resolution to an external operator.
And don’ t have“ pricing units” or all those“ awareness of heavenknows-what-units” and divisions which insist on plastering the name of the parent company on all the shows. Your exhibitors know their event as“ The XXX Show” – they don’ t give a damn who owns it.
11. Chase the winners, abandon the losers. It’ s easy to spend time and money trying to resuscitate a declining show and leaving the winners alone, because they don’ t need help. This is nonsense. It is far easier to generate an extra £ 200,000 revenue from a £ 10m show than a struggling £ 1m show.
It’ s blindingly obvious yet so easy to ignore. Closer had its failures – we tried solar for a time, we looked at biogeneration as a food and energy source, we looked at African and Asian food events. We cut them pretty quickly. If you have a portfolio of events, never worry about culling the least successful ones and redeploying your people. Chase your winners, always.
12. Don’ t wander round the world planting flags. From about 2014 to 2019 private equity firms were constantly nagging us“ Why aren’ t you in China?” It was the mood of the times but we didn’ t go there. The theme moved to the Gulf. And we are not there either. Not because they cannot be excellent markets, but because we were a small company with limited resources and we had to focus.
Money wasn’ t the problem; the problem was people and time. We had no inside knowledge of the markets, and we had no spare capacity or spare people to send over there for
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“ Cutting costs, I promise you, will not be the route to your $ 2bn” |
two years. If you are an Informa or RX you can perhaps find people inside your business. We didn’ t have those luxuries. We entered the French and German markets by employing French and German people in the UK and running those markets from London.
We did exactly the same( to begin with) in the USA. Since then, apart from the odd show we acquired with UKI, we have moved only into Spain and Singapore. Thus, we focus intently on just six markets – UK, USA, France, Germany, Spain, Singapore. We focus on a small number of verticals, and a small number of countries and markets.
13. 90 % of what passes for brilliance is really about standing back and catching the mood – the ebb and flow of the world, seeing the big picture and ignoring the background noise. Don’ t ever think you are some sort of Einstein – you are( almost certainly) not.
14. Don’ t paint silly company mottos on the walls.
15. Be lucky. EW
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www. exhibitionworld. co. uk |
Issue 3 2026 17 |