Organiser insight |
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who had every right to think their year was going well.
What the ask actually looks like depends on where you are sitting. Sales are asked to find revenue that was never in the plan, which – late in a cycle – usually means price rather than new business. Marketing are asked to hold a campaign line while the registration target stays exactly where it was. Operations are asked to take cost out of a show that is already built, and by that point most of what is left to
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cut is the visible part: the hosted buyer programme, the experience spend, the things a customer actually notices. That is the real argument for telling people early. Early, you take a little |
Above: ICE Digitain |
from each and nobody feels it much. Late, you take it from whatever is still moveable, and what is still moveable is usually the show itself.
Managing cost lines quietly across a group of shows is most of this job and nobody talks about it. It is not interesting to read about and it does not make anyone’ s career. But if you have told people early and told them honestly, you have the whole portfolio to work with and months to do it in, instead of two shows and a deadline.
If you are the one being asked, the question worth putting is simple and almost nobody puts it. Is this ask about my show, or about the portfolio? You are entitled to know which of those it is. A decent manager will tell you.
What you should not do is carry it back to your own team as a shrug. I have watched people do that and I would not swear that I never did it myself early on. It buys you an afternoon of everybody being on the same side and it costs you the rest of the cycle, because after that every conversation is a negotiation with people who have decided the number is fiction.
The reason I tell people early now is not that I am a better manager than the ones I had. It is that I spent years assuming the business was against me, when somebody two floors up was having a frightening year with a launch and had decided I did not need to know about it. EW
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Issue 5 2026 17 |