Growing your events business — a course for senior management

This intensive two-day course, Growing your Events Business, is designed for senior managers who are leading either part of, or the full breadth of a conference business. It will cover the key areas of devising strategy, understanding finance, and managing product, sales and marketing. This course will also focus on people management and leadership skills.

Outline

Introduction and industry overview

• Introduction
• About me
• Looking ahead at the event industry

The big picture — strategy and numbers

• Understanding the financial numbers and what to look for
  • Exercise — delegates will review a set of management accounts this year v last year v budget and draw conclusions from them
• Core KPIs — identifying the KPIs and what are the benchmarks?
  • Revenue KPIs
  • Activity KPIs — LSEs (definition is 100-200)
  • Activity KPIs — annuals
  • Exercise — delegates will complete the KPIs for their own business
• Pricing and yield
  • Exercise — delegates will review booking patters for events with different prices
  • Delegate sensitivity to prices
  • Experience of early bird discount Of 50%
  • Tiered pricing
  • Differential for 1 – 2 – 3 day events
  • Discount strategy
  • Group discussion — how else can you increase yield?

Core components of a business plan for an existing business

• What should be included and what should not?
• Exercise — delegates will complete some areas of the business plan
• 5 common pitfalls and how to avoid them
• 5 tips on turning around a poor performing business into a high-performer
• Acquisition selection and due diligence

Managing the core building blocks of an events business

• Product strategy (playing to win)
  • The core components of a product strategy
  • Creating an events database
  • Exercise — delegates will draw conclusions from an event database
  • Exercise — delegates will complete the product strategy part of the business plan
  • Event strategy meetings
  • Managing and supervising product
  • The new world of experience
  • Exercise — generate 2 formats that may be unique to your events
  • Topic generation sources
  • Exercise — delegates will discuss one topic successfully generated and one that was not and lessons learnt
  • 5 Lessons in topic generation
• Sponsorship strategy and management — playing to win
  • Sponsorship strategy
  • Group discussion — brainstorming new sponsorship packages
  • The optimum Spex brief
  • Sponsorship supervision
• Key marketing knowledge for business/product heads
  • Timeline — planning the optimum timeline
  • Getting the focus right in marketing
  • Managing marketing

Summary discussion and close