In the late 1990s and early 2000s a company that became known as Classic Party Rentals embarked on one of the first rollups in the events industry. Starting in California, they expanded nationwide by making two dozen or so acquisitions, eventually bringing the total number of locations to 39.

The concept seemed simple enough: combine a bunch or local or regional businesses that all do the same thing into a larger entity that could operate at scale to leverage efficiencies, share resources, implement common systems, and eventually sell for a nice profit. And it worked, for a while.

Around the same time, PSAV (now Encore) was also engaged in a rollup of A/V firms. Yet while Classic ultimately filed for bankruptcy and was sold for auction, Encore grew to a $3.4B empire. In this article, I dig into why Encore succeeded where Classic did not, how Brand Revolution is showing how to execute a rollup strategy for event agencies, and why rollups are harder than they look.

Oh, and get out and vote on Tuesday!

In this issue:

• Initial takes on Informa’s $3B acquisition of Clarion

• Maritz reports a 12% drop in international registrations

• Benefits and challenges with rollups

• The rise and fall of Classic Party Rentals, and why Encore’s story is different

• How Brand Revolution has become an M&A machine

• Best practices for successful rollups

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Updates & Industry News

• Informa’s $3B acquisition of Clarion earlier this month earlier this month has gotten a lot of buzz, and you can read my take on it in a Skift Meetings article in the link above. One aspect that hasn’t been covered as much is Informa’s decision, announced along with the Clarion deal, to divest of its Taylor and Francis publication division, which means Informa is doubling down on the trade show side of their business. This is a huge indicator of the increasing investment appetite for events, which are viewed as a safe port in the AI storm, because, among other things, they’re ‘algorithm-proof’.

• Trifecta Collective, backed by PE firm Grey Lion, acquired the Medical Spa Show from the Med Spa Association, marking their fifth acquisition. It’s also their third event they’ve bought from an industry association (though Med Spa is for-profit), which is something we should see more of, though doing deals with associations is not for the faint of heart.

• Maritz reports a 12% drop in international registrations to its association and trade show client events in 2026, following an 8% drop in 2025, a trend I think will continue to be an issue for the next two years. [See my last article on the impact to Canadian registrations and bookings. Similarly, more than 60% of respondents to the Incentive Travel Index survey said geopolitical instability is impacting which destinations they select.

• I’ll be speaking on the State of M&A at IAEE’s flagship event, Expo! Expo!, November 16-18 in Milwaukee. This is my first time at the event, and would love to connect with fellow readers. If you’ll be there, shoot me a note!

• December 1-3 I’ll be back at EDPA ACCESS (Experiential Designers & Producers Association) conference, this time at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, leading a session on M&A Trends for the Exhibit Industry.

• November 3rd is election day, so get out and vote! Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, my rule is if you don’t vote, you can’t complain if you don’t like what’s going on. Either way, come next Wednesday we’ll be mercifully spared anymore cringey campaign ads, for a couple of years anyway.

The Art of the Rollup

With all the news recently of mammoth-sized acquisitions in the trade show side of the events industry, capped by Informa’s $3B acquisition of Clarion announced earlier this month, there’s been little discussion of the strategy both companies used to scale their businesses: the rollup.

As a concept, rollups make a lot of sense. Start with a “platform” company as the base, acquire other similar companies in a fragmented market, and merge them into a single business to leverage economies of scale, typically with the end goal of selling at a valuation multiple significantly higher than the individual companies could fetch on their own.

In practice, however, it’s not so easy. As with most things in business, the execution is much harder than the concept. Acquisition and merger announcements make headlines, but no one posts on Linked In when those deals crater upon integration. Studies by BCG, Bain and McKinsey cite a 70-90% underperformance or failure rate for M&A deals. The culprit is almost always poor integration management.

Benefits

It’s easy to see why rollups are enticing: they offer multiple expansion, operating synergies, and a faster path to scale.

Multiple Arbitrage

This is hands-down the sexiest allure of a rollup. Take five independent companies each doing $1 million in EBITDA ($5M for the group). Now let’s say that individually they’re worth a 5 times multiple of that EBITDA. So each company is worth $5M, and collectively the group is worth $25M ($4M x 5 firms).

Combine them all into a single business, however, and the math changes. Now you have one company doing $5M in EBITDA. Because larger, more profitable businesses command higher multiples, this new enterprise might be worth 8x EBITDA, or $40M. [I’m using round numbers here to illustrate the point.]

When business owners first discover this concept, it almost feels like they’ve found a loophole in the system. After all, how could the same total profit be worth so much more simply by bringing several companies under one roof?

And this doesn’t even start to factor in economies of scale, cross-selling and other synergies that should be leveraged in the process.

Attracting Different Buyers

Higher revenue and profit through a rollup also opens the business up to new tranches of buyers. Most private equity firms, for example, won’t look at companies below $5M in EBITDA; the payoff just isn’t worth it.

Leveling Up to A National Sales & Marketing Operation

An event production company in San Diego is likely working with clients whose events are primarily in that metropolitan area. But put that company in a larger conglomerate with offices in NY, Chicago, Dallas and Miami, and now you can justify building out a national sales team to call on brands for all of their events.

The same goes for marketing. A rolled up business with a broader footprint can afford to advertise in national or global media, or rationalize investing in a booth at trade show, or hire a social media agency.

Economies of Scale

Similarly, a larger business leads to numerous benefits of scale, such as greater negotiating leverage when buying health insurance and hiring vendors, or being able to afford a real CFO or an in-house H.R. leader.

Challenges

With all those enticing benefits, it’s easy to see why rollups are so attractive. So why don’t more of them work?

Integration Risk

As mentioned above, the biggest challenge with rollups is integration risk. Will the clients stay with the new owner? Is the acquired company keeping its name or it it being subsumed into the mother ship’s brand? If the latter, how is that change being communicated to the outside world? Will the employees continue performing at peak levels, or stay on at all? Migrating people to a new tech stack and adjusting to a new culture can be distractions.

Successful integrations almost always have an internal champion who’s responsible - and accountable - for smoothly weaving new clients and employees into the fabric of their new owners.

Rob Adams, CEO of Bishop-McCann, has developed a simple yet highly effective strategy to help with integration. Each employee in the acquired company is assigned a buddy working at Bishop, whose job it is to ensure that employee learns the ropes, gets onboarded into the culture, and has a sounding board for any questions they might have. An added bonus of this approach is that it makes a successful integration the responsibility of the whole company, not just senior leadership.

Even if the acquired company is going to transition to the parent’s brand, it’s still possible for them to preserve key aspects of their culture. The Opus Group’s Kim Kopetz talks through the importance of this nuance in a previous post, A Tale of Two Acquisitions.

Owner Egos

One of the toughest obstacles to pull off when attempting a rollup is managing the disparate egos of the owners. Founders have spent years doing things their way, and are rarely challenged by their own teams. Getting four or five headstrong entrepreneurs to shift their mindsets from being the final decision maker to having to build consensus on key strategic issues is not easy. Having a boss goes against muscle memory.

Overpaying

As you’ll see below in the example of Classic Party Rentals, paying too high a price when buying a company, let alone multiple companies, can make it extremely difficult to realize enough efficiencies to generate the profits needed. It’s like a real estate bubble: overpaying is fine as long as property values continue to rise, but if a deep recession hits you’re screwed.

The Rise and Fall of Classic Party Rentals

Back to Classic Party Rentals, the rental business rollup effort I opened this article with. Classic changed hands several times, cycling through four private equity firms, of which Dubin Clark (now Dynamic Core Capital) had the best return. In May, 2003 they acquired 60% of the company when it was doing $45 million in sales across six locations. By the time they sold it to Quad-C in late 2006, Classic was doing north of $185M with 18 locations. Though sale prices were never disclosed, those numbers would seem to imply a strong return.

By 2014, however, Classic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was sold at auction to Apollo. What went wrong? In the court filing, CEO Jeff Black said the 2004–2008 acquisitions “were priced and financed based on projections that proved unattainable” once demand slowed following the 2008 recession. Translation: they overpaid based on overly optimistic forward EBITDA projections, and funded it with debt sized to that forecast.

How much debt, exactly? At the time of the bankruptcy filing Classic showed $246M in liabilities, against only $148M in assets, a shortfall of nearly $100M. Asset-heavy businesses like this are able to finance acquisitions with debt, debt that’s backed by all those tables, chairs, glassware, etc. Easy access to debt, however, invites overpaying, which the 2007-2008 real estate bubble showed only too well.

I never really understood the logic behind a rollup of this kind. Sure, there are benefits to standardizing inventory management systems and the like, and you can certainly negotiate better insurance rates for trucks, rental equipment and staff. And in a regional rollup, which is how this started, being able to share equipment between locations makes a lot of sense. But on a national level, not so much. While a NYC party rental company can truck items to Philadelphia or even D.C., they’re not going to send them to Phoenix. Not profitably anyway.

An even bigger issue, however, is the durability of revenue. A large chunk of a party rental company’s business comes from caterers and planners who can switch vendors at will. There are no long-term contracts, or any other levers to lock in the revenue; every order is on an event-by-event basis.

Why Encore’s Story Is Different

Encore (formerly PSAV) is another rollup example in an asset-heavy sector of our industry, which followed a similar path to Classic, up to a point. Both companies used debt to fund numerous acquisitions and grow quickly. And both filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at one point. Encore did so in 2001, when it was operating under the Carabiner name (anyone remember that one?), following the dot com collapse and ensuing recession, though in their case there were also class action lawsuits alleging management misrepresented their numbers. (I know an investor who was part of that lawsuit, and “misrepresenting” is putting it mildly.)

But whereas Classic Party Rentals never really survived bankruptcy, Encore eventually thrived, continuing to make acquisitions and growing the company to $3.4 billion in revenue, as reported in their S-1 when they filed to go public.

So why did Encore succeed whereas Classic did not? Unlike Classic, Encore’s real asset isn’t their equipment or personnel; it’s their multi-year agreements with over 2,000 hotels and other event venues which all refer event clients to them. That’s their moat. While other A/V firms can buy the same gear and provide the same technical production service, it would be extremely difficult to penetrate Encore’s venue ecosystem.

Agency Rollups

Rollups can also work with asset-light businesses, though the value proposition is somewhat different. For service businesses like agencies, one of the main benefits is that building a larger company enables you to take a national, or even global, approach to sales and marketing.

Take PRA, for example. Traditionally destination management companies (DMCs) offered hyper-local expertise that was destination-specific. If you’re planning an incentive event in Miami, you hire a Miami DMC. But put a dozen or more DMCs from different destinations all under one roof, and you can afford to stand up a national sales team, one that can call on corporate clients and offer solutions to their events every year, wherever they take place.

Similarly, marketing dollars can be spent much more efficiently. Instead of taking a small table at your city’s booth at IMEX, for example, you have the scale to justify a large booth of your own. The same investment in a white paper on incentive or offsite trends, or some other thought leadership vehicle, is more economical when spread across numerous DMC locations.

Brand Revolution: An M&A Machine

One agency that’s been doing more acquisitions than anyone else right now is Brand Revolution, which was formed by the October, 2024 merger of U.S.-based marketing and events agency Haute and U.K.-based promotional products firm Fluid Branding.

I was initially curious about the logic of combining an experiential firm with a merch company, but when you think about it, it expands their entry points into clients, enabling them to obtain greater share of marketing wallet spend, which is their investment thesis. Their M&A strategy validates this; recent acquisitions have included a social media creative agency (Brilliant), a creative studio (Lumenati), and a production company (DDMC Event Design) and a merch agency (Fresh ID).

Since then they’ve acquired four companies, and have another five under LOI (letters of intent), all of which are expected to close by the end of this year, funded partially by debt from Beechbrook Capital. This is an astonishing number for a firm their size. Alan O’Dea, who manages the Brand Revolution relationship for Beechbrook, said he spends more time on the Brand Revolution board than any of the other 10 portfolio companies whose boards he sits on, due to the frequency of deals they present for approval. They would do more deals, he added, but Beechbrook wants them to take their time.

Founders’ Model vs. PE Model

Led by Haute founders Alisa & Jeff Haynes and Fluid founders Matt Franks and Miles Lovegrove, Brand Revolution has developed an acquisition formula it calls “Founders Model”, which pays owners 50% in cash and 50% in shares in Brand Revolution, and their plan is for that equity to double in value for founders over time.

Interestingly, they eschew earn outs, something many sellers try to avoid. Since earnouts are often an important mechanism for buyers to ensure the business continues to perform under new ownership, Brand Revolution focuses heavily in their due diligence process to make sure the company can thrive with or without the owner’s significant involvement. Rolling half the purchase price into Brand Revolution equity helps ameliorate any potential downside by aligning incentives between owner and seller.

Their “buy box” for acquisitions is companies doing $1-5M of EBITDA, which are valued at 5-7x, a multiple that’s likely to be dwarfed by the ultimate exit valuation for Brand Revolution.

Tips for Rollup Success

Though it’s still early in their process, Brand Revolution appears to be using a textbook strategy for rollups, which includes the following best practices:

• Appointing a Chief Integration Officer focused solely on integrating newly acquired companies. For them it’s Miles Lovegrove, one of the founders.

• Crafting a clear M&A strategy document that covers valuation methods, diligence requirements, deal structures and other key details. Showing owners you have a formula and process can provide them with significant comfort to move forward.

• Having the disciplined to stick to their valuation approach, and being prepared to walk away from a deal if they can’t adhere to it. This avoids the trap of overpaying shown above.

• Recognizing the importance of growing organically, not just through acquisitions.

Following this roadmap, Brand Revolution is rapidly transitioning into a true global agency, with 400+ experts across 12 offices in the U.S., Europe and APAC, offering a growing array of marketing services. Their goal is to be able to meet 90% of all their clients’ marketing needs, in-house. The proof of their success will be in the pudding (integration), so to speak, but they certainly seem to be nailing the M&A part of the process so far, and will be an interesting company to watch.

Conclusion

I think we’re going to see more rollup attempts over the next couple of years, as various parts of the events industry undergo further consolidation. Other than the organizer space (e.g. Informa, Reed, Hyve, etc.), show contractor sector (e.g. Freeman, GES, etc.) investors rightly see large parts of our industry as fragmented, and ripe for rollups. There will be substantial money to be made in doing so for those that can pull it off, which, as I’ve hopefully shown, is harder than it looks.

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

Howard Givner
Managing Director | Oaklins | DeSilva+Phillips (M&A)
CEO | Heathcote Advisory Group (Consulting)

Catch up on recent articles:

• #ElbowsUp: Canada’s Pissed, & the U.S. Event Industry Is Feeling the Pain

• The #1 Reason M&A Deals Fall Through

• What’s Keeping Agency Owners Up At Night

• Narrow & Deep | Iran War Impact | Agency Summit Update

• Gradually and then Suddenly: the Widening Eventprofs AI Gap

• A Slew of Event M&A Deals to End the Year

• Mastering the Exit Strategy: Insights On Selling Event Businesses

• The View From Private Equity

• Tailwinds

• Preparing Your Event Business For Sale

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

• Business Coaching & Owner Accountability

• Business Diagnostic & Company Valuation

• Growth Consulting

• Exit Planning

• M&A (Buy Side & Sell Side)

Wanna chat? Email me to schedule a call.

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