In today’s newsletter:

• Opportunities & Updates

• Events as Truth Sanctuaries in an Age of AI

• The Creator Economy: Built-In Audiences for New Events

• Events as Antidotes for Social Isolation

• The Festivalization of Events Is (Finally!) Here

• Events as ‘Reset Chambers’ to Combat Digital Overload

• Distributed Teams Need to Come Together

• A Robust M&A Marketplace Fuels Investment in Events

• AI as a Productivity Hack to Offset Increased Costs

• A Fragmented Industry Offers Consolidation Opportunities

• Improved Data Capture & ROI Analysis

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Opportunities & Updates

Event Entrepreneurs Seeking Investment

In January I joined the Events Venture Group, a collaborative community of 30+ industry veterans looking to support promising startups or early stage ventures in events through investment, mentorship, and strategic guidance. If you’re an entrepreneur building a new event, tech product, or other business, this is the smartest money you can get. Learn more here.

Mastermind Group for Event Business Owners

So far I’ve heard from 7 event business owners who are interested in joining a Mastermind Group. It’s a great group so far, but we need another handful to ensure a diverse mix of the 6-8 participants needed. Interested? Shoot me a note.

Roll-Up Opportunity for Production Companies

I’m advising an event production company (creative, scenic, fabrication, staging, lighting, sound, etc.) that is leading a roll-up. We’re looking for companies with around $1M in EBITDA, clean financials, reasonably predictable revenue, and whose owners are aligned with the roll-up vision. To learn more, email me here.

Event Agency Acquisition Opportunity

I’m working with a meeting & event agency looking to acquire one or more smaller agencies (Adjusted EBITDA of $250k - $1M) as part of their growth strategy. To confidentially explore this opportunity, please call or email me.

Tailwinds

Over the past few months I’ve written about some of the headwinds facing the event industry, in particular the uncertainty and chaos generated by the Trump administration, and what event profs can do about it. Though the tariffs, DOGE cuts, shit-posting about our allies and gutting of Brand USA’s budget (see David Adler’s sharp take on this here) are all self-imposed, there are other challenges adversely affecting events, such as conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East, rising costs, tighter budgets, shorter lead time and audience fatigue.

Frustrating as those may be, I believe they pale in comparison to the seismic tailwinds propelling the event industry forward. Conversations with numerous private equity leaders confirm this view. Indeed, they point to many of these tailwinds as reasons for their increased investment in our industry.

1. Events As ‘Truth Sanctuaries’ In An Age of AI Fakes

I’ve been saying this for the better part of a year, but it took a Tweet (sorry, “Post on X” just doesn’t have the same ring to it) by Mark Cuban last month for the concept to really gain traction. AI is already able to generate incredibly lifelike videos - and they’re only going to get better, faster and easier to generate - resulting in a growing quest for authenticity. And the ultimate arbiter of authenticity is being face to face with people. It’s only when you see the words coming out of an actual human being’s mouth that you know it’s real.

According to a 2024 Freeman Trends Report, in-person events were the top source of trust (at 80%, up from 75% in 2023), outranking trade groups, universities, company leaders, media and government, among other sources. Those numbers go up even further when only Gen Z and Millennials are polled. Events are now positioned as “Trust Sanctuaries”, to borrow a term coined by my friend and Wizard Studios CEO Matthew Saravay.

2. Events As Antidotes to Social Isolation

There’s been no shortage of articles, books, and studies documenting the increased isolation and loneliness. People are glued to their devices. Where we used to have the shared experiences of everyone watching the same TV shows and digesting the same news, we now live in fragmented realities. And this has all happened concurrently with the decline of religious, social, and other communal organizations.

Face-to-face events offer a unique response to this dilemma, perfectly capsulized in a recent article by XP Land: We Are Living in the Anti-Social Century: Experiential Is the Antidote. Human beings are social creatures, and in-person events provide a platform for a connection-hungry population to come together and replenish social bonds.

3. The Festivalization of Events Is (Finally!) Here

Predictions of the ‘festivalization’ of events have been made for the past fifteen years or so, a false promise whose time has finally come. Newer generations of attendees want more from their events than the stale formats that have been recycled over and over. They want business events to be infused with the fun, community, discovery, blended experiences, alternative formats and other elements that make SXSW, Coachella, Cannes and other festivals so great. We now have a number of business examples that show why trade shows are chasing SXSW, as Colin Morrison wrote in Flashes & Flames.

In 2022, former Informa veteran Matt Middleton launched the first Future Proof Festival, aiming to bring these same elements to the staid world of financial advisors. His events (there are now 4) are wildly successful, with last September’s flagship event drawing 4,400 people in only its third year. The company expects to generate $30 million in revenue this year, double what it did last year. Numerous other examples abound, such as Possible taking this approach for the marketing sector.

This trend is why Informa spent $1.5 billion last year to acquire Ascential, producers of Money 20/20 and Cannes Lions, which will anchor the new Informa Festivals division, headed by former Ascential CEO Phillip Thomas. Informa is reading the writing on the wall, and is making a sizeable bet that the creativity and engagement delivered by festivals is the future of business events.

4. Events As ‘Reset Chambers’ to Combat Digital Overload

With all the challenges of air travel, one of the unheralded benefits is the dedicated block of time it gives you to escape the constant torrent of digital stimuli. Personally, I find it a relief to be “unreachable” for several hours as I detox from emails, texts, posts, alerts, etc.

Events, particularly multi-day ones, take this to the next level, offering an extended break from the day-to-day distractions we’re bombarded with. When you’re out of town at a conference or trade show, chances are you’ve cleared a chunk of your work schedule and your OOO auto-reply tells people not to expect you to respond right away.

This gives you a desperately-needed opportunity to focus on the big picture items that are normally crowded out by the demands of your job. You’ve made mental space to process the ideas you hear at the content sessions, the new products and services you demo on the show floor, and the connections you foster through networking events and 1:1 meetings. Your brain has shifted gears from working IN your business to working ON your business, and can think about how and where to leverage those insights.

In a world of digital overload, we should be promoting events as vehicles for transformative thinking, recharging attendees’ ‘professional souls’, and rekindling the passion for their trade that’s been doused by the daily grind.

5. Distributed Teams Need to Come Together

The remote work pendulum has definitely swung back to the in-office side recently, with more companies mandating workers come to the office now. Despite that, there are still far more remote or hybrid workers than pre-Covid, with plenty of businesses now fully distributed, with no office at all.

This has created an unprecendented need for organizations to bring their employees together to foster teamwork, weave workers into the cultural fabric of the company, and communicate key messages. So many companies are bolting these events onto large industry trade shows - since they’re already paying for many team members to travel there - that smart organizers of these shows are building this idea into their marketing campaigns, and offering to help with meeting space and extended room blocks. Others are creating fun, summer camp-style outings, like Camp Thumbtack.

6. The Creator Economy: Built-In Audiences for New Events

It’s never been easier to build an audience. Tools like Substack, Beehiiv, and Kit make it a snap to launch a newsletter, while software like Descript, Audacity and Riverside.fm enable anyone to start a podcast. In short, if you have something to say, you can get the word out at almost no cost. Once you have an audience, events enable you to bring them together to connect with each other, turning an audience into a community.

And it doesn’t take a large audience to support a successful event. Juan Mendoza had 3,500 free subscribers to his MarTech Weekly newsletter when he decided to launch his first event in Melbourne last year, which was so successful he added additional events in San Francisco, London, New York, and Singapore. Dave Gerhardt leveraged a 5k membership base to host Exit Five’s first in-person event, Drive, which sold out in 24 hours. He shared how he did it on Eventastic last month, which you can view here.

There’s been an explosion of independent creator / media brands over the past few years, and a good chunk of them are either doing events, thinking about it, or need to be told to do it. If you’re an agency looking for a Blue Ocean space to go after new business, this is a good one.

7. A Robust M&A Market Fuels Investment in Events

There’s been a flurry of acquisitions in the event space recently. The largest sector is trade shows and other proprietary events, fueled by an arms race among the major for-profit players (Informa, Reed, Clarion, Emerald, Hyve, Closer Still, etc.) who are all looking for promising shows to buy and grow.

While this has been the case for many years, what’s interesting now is how short the window has become from launching an event to selling it. Case in point: the first Manifest event (serving the supply chain and logistics industry) took place in January, 2022, and Manifest was acquired by Hyve in May, 2025.

Acquisitions of agencies, event tech and other suppliers has also increased. Examples include H.I.G. Capital’s purchase of both 360 Destination Group and CSI DMC, Truelink Capital buying GES, and Freeman’s acquisition of TAG Digital.

Knowing there is a vibrant marketplace for a potential exit down the line makes it easier for companies (strategic and financial) to justify investments in events. And it’s not just M&A that’s driving this; Airbnb, for example, just announced a $250 million investment in Airbnb Experiences, further validating the space.

8. AI As A Productivity Hack to Offset Cost Increases

I probably sound like a broken record to regular readers of this newsletter, or those who follow me on LinkedIn, but I continue to maintain that AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity for event professionals to exponentially level up their productivity. Planning events requires a lot of staff time over many months, which can be made dramatically more efficient by leveraging AI. In addition to improving margins, it can be a great antidote to rising event costs.

9. A Fragmented Industry = Consolidation Opportunities

Many facets of the events industry, such as event agencies, sourcing firms, and staffing companies, are still relatively fragmented, populated by numerous small firms. No one dominates these spaces the way that Cvent does with event tech, Freeman and GES do with show contracting, and Encore does with A/V. This presents opportunities for mergers, acquisitions and rollups to create larger entities that can leverage synergies, economies of scale, geographical distribution, centralized sales & marketing, and other efficiencies. It is these very opportunities that excite private equity firms and others about our industry, and to deploy resources in the companies they acquire and invest in.

10. Improved Data Capture & ROI Analysis

Another soapbox of mine over the years has been event measurement and ROI, which, surprisingly, we are still struggling with as an industry. Thankfully a growing cohort of entrepreneurs are building user-friendly tools to get the job done, such as Mark Brewster of Explori, Nick Fugaro of Vivastream, and Joe Colangelo of Bear Analytics, to name a few. There’s even a trade association, the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition (disclosure: I joined their board last month) now dedicated to bringing standards and metrics to the events industry.

Conclusion

Over the years I’ve built a reputation for telling hard truths to this industry, when it’s appropriate. Early in Covid I was very vocal that we were in for 1-2 years of pain, despite what the industry cheerleaders were saying, which earned me no small amount of scorn - particularly from sales people struggling to book business - though it was the truth. And this year I’ve not been shy to call out the many ways the current administration’s actions and rhetoric are damaging to our industry.

But as this article shows, I firmly believe we now have a confluence of tailwinds - structural forces accelerating our growth - that are not getting enough attention. There are many industries being ravaged by the trends listed above; we are lucky ours is not only not one of them, but is one that is largely benefiting from those same trends.

Here’s to taking your event business to the next level!

Howard Givner
Senior Advisor | Oaklins: DeSilva & Phillips (M&A) email me
CEO | Heathcote Advisory Group (Consulting) email me

Thanks for reading! Please give me feedback by hitting reply.

Catch up on recent articles:

• Preparing Your Event Business For Sale

• How Much Is Your Event Agency Actually Worth?

• 15 Agency CEOs Walk Into A Bar . . .

• The Silver Bullet to Doubling Your Profit Margins

• A Tale of 2 Acquisitions: Opus Group CEO Shares M&A Insights

• AI Is Creating Winners & Losers In Events: Which Will You Be?

If and when you’re ready, here are ways I work with event business owners:

• Business Coaching & Owner Accountability

• Business Diagnostic & Company Valuation

• Growth Consulting

• Exit Planning

• M&A (Buy Side & Sell Side)

Wanna chat? Email me, or schedule an intro call.

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