Building a new event Arc
Paul Woodward finds out why Simon Foster is feeling optimistic
t seems appropriate for two former Eurostar commuters that Simon Foster and I should meet in the lounge at the superbly renovated St Pancras Hotel in London to discuss his thoughts on the future . Foster , former CEO at Comexposium after many years in senior positions at UBM , announced in May that his new company Arc was partnering with EagleTree Capital to build a new events business .
As global businesses and the events industry reset after the pandemic , what will a new business look like and is this really a good time to be starting one ? “ Two things ,” says Foster . “ It ’ ll be building a business the same way that companies such as , Blenheim , UBM and Reed did in the 1990s and more recently Clarion and Tarsus . But we ’ ll be also looking at new ways of doing things . It ’ s the project that I envisaged wanting to do when I came back from Comexposium .”
Foster says that he doesn ’ t have pre-set ideas of just how big this new business could be . “ I don ’ t mind whether we ’ re a 10 million EBITDA business or 100 million . We don ’ t know . A lot of people look at me and say , ‘ You ’ ve only run big businesses for the last 20 years . So , that ’ s going to be what you want to do ’. And , yes , if we get to a scale , that ’ s great , but we ’ re not all about scale . We ’ re about making sure we ’ ve got the right business and the right ability to operate and move forward with the strategy .”
In the early days of the new business , he says that implies developing a set of two to four businesses of “ reasonable capacity and with the characteristics we want ”. Foster is particularly keen to build partnerships with event founders . “ We ’ re really looking for businesses where we can establish a level of partnership ,” he says . “ I think a big difference driven by our philosophy , but also driven by what we ’ ve seen during Covid , is to really work with - I hate calling them vendors - but with the owners , with the people who have the business .”
Provocative positions , new models This takes us into a discussion about the new types of business which interest him . Foster talks about some provocative positions he took when chairing last year ’ s UFI CEO Summit in Rome . “ For a long time in the industry ,” he told the premier gathering of the industry ’ s great and good , “ we ’ ve been too lazy , too backward thinking . We ’ ve been very good at selling square metres but not looking at new models ”.
And he has a wide-ranging view of what those new models might be . “ Everybody , when you say new models now says digital ,” he says , “ but I think it ’ s more than that , reshaping how we as an industry work ”.
Digging a little deeper into this , Foster comments that he is inspired by the success he saw at Comexposium with the ‘ one to one ’ model , sometimes called summits or hosted buyer programmes . “ What I saw ,” he says “ was a much higher level of engagement and connection between people , which in turn drove value for us as organisers . And it was based not on volume , but on trust and on quality .”
Picking up on the volume point , I asked whether this model is really scalable . Foster says that his experience at Comexposium suggests that this type of event can be really significant in terms of both revenue and size . “ Don ’ t get me wrong , they ’ ll always reach a cap because the event leaders , the event managers will always tell you that you can ’ t be exclusive if you ’ re mass . But I think there ’ s a difference . Too many people in the summit business have resisted the temptation to push what exclusive is , in terms of numbers . I don ’ t mean in terms of the way it ’ s arranged . You ’ ve still got to be very exclusive in the way it ’ s managed .”
Foster clearly thinks there ’ s a good bit more opportunity to push that type of event but goes on to note : “ I don ’ t see that necessarily as a replacement for trade shows . I see it as a complement , an addition ”. He thinks this is very much part of the current push back toward businesses which are “ about omnichannel and multi touch ”.
Multi touch points and M & A Our conversation turned to whether the omnichannel world is really as new as some think or perhaps
22 Issue 4 2021 www . exhibitionworld . co . uk