For months now, almost every conversation I have with entrepreneurs ends up, sooner or later, at the same question: “how much longer can we keep this up?” I talk to founders in e-commerce, software, retail and services. Some have had a good year, others have barely made it through. But the people who run events, conferences, trade fairs, weddings and festivals are by far the hardest hit. For them, 2020 has not been a bad year. It has been a year in which their product was simply banned.
It is early October. In Romania and across much of Europe, large events are either prohibited or so heavily restricted that they no longer make economic sense. Case numbers are rising again, people are talking more and more about a second wave, and nobody serious can tell you when we will see full venues again. So I am not writing about “getting through the crisis”, but about something more modest and more useful: how to stay alive until you have a market again.
Cash before anything else
I have said it before and I will say it again: cash is oxygen. I learned this in 2009, when I had to sell the majority stake in my businesses because the alternative was bankruptcy, and those years taught me most of what I know about surviving a downturn. The lesson is the same, only harsher this time. An events company without events has close to zero revenue and costs that do not go away by themselves.
The first exercise is a simple weekly table: how much money you have, how much is certain to come in, how much is certain to go out. Not what you hope for, only what is signed. Then cut everything that does not keep the company alive. Subscriptions, warehouses full of stage sets you will not use for months, leased vehicles sitting in a car park. Every euro you save now buys you a few more days.
Renegotiate everything, with everyone
Venues, AV and lighting suppliers, caterers and partner hotels are in the same boat as you. They have no events either. Which means that most of the time they would rather reach a deal than go to court. Ask for payment deferrals, turn deposits you have already paid into credit for future events, renegotiate the rent on your warehouse or office. Say you paid a deposit to a venue for an autumn conference: instead of fighting over money neither of you has, move both the event and the deposit to 2021.
The same principle applies to your customers. Between cancelling and postponing, postponing is almost always better for both sides, as long as you are honest about it. Between a voucher and a refund, the voucher helps your cash flow, but do not force it on anyone. Offer it as an option, perhaps with a small bonus, and give the money back to those who genuinely need it. Customer trust is the one asset that does not lose value in a pandemic, provided you do not burn it yourself.
Keep the core team and the community alive
The temptation is to let everyone go and “restart from scratch” when this is over. The problem is that people who know how to produce a good event are not easy to find. If you have a core of two or three people who carry the suppliers, the clients and the processes in their heads, try to keep them, even on reduced hours. Use state support schemes where they exist and where you qualify, from furlough-style programmes (in Romania, “technical unemployment”, where the state covers part of the salary) to other measures for affected businesses. Do not build your company on them, but do not turn them down out of pride either.
Your community, the audience that came back year after year, the sponsors, the speakers, needs to hear from you even when you have nothing to sell. An honest newsletter, an online conversation, a simple message saying “we are still here, we are preparing the comeback” is worth more than you think. Those who vanish completely for a whole year will have a lot of work to do reminding people that they exist.
Online and hybrid: a solution, not an automatic rescue
This spring everyone moved their conferences to Zoom. Some worked surprisingly well; many were long webinars with slides read out loud. Now, in October, the fatigue is real. People have spent months in video calls, as I wrote about working from home becoming the norm, and they will no longer sit in front of a screen for eight hours just because an event is free.
A good online event is a different product, not a copy of the physical one. It is shorter, better produced, more interactive, with networking designed on purpose rather than left to chance. And it comes with the hardest question of all: how do you get sponsors to pay? A logo on a virtual backdrop is not worth as much as a booth in a packed hall. Sponsors want data, qualified leads, scheduled meetings with the right people and content they can reuse. If you cannot give them that, either the price has to come down or the format has to be rethought.
Small, outdoor events where allowed
Where the rules allow it, small formats can keep the business active: small outdoor gatherings, workshops for small groups, private events with a limited guest list and clear health rules. They will not cover a year of losses, but they keep the team moving, preserve your relationships with suppliers and show you what people still want. Just be careful about one thing: the rules change fast, sometimes from one week to the next. Do not lock up a lot of money in something that can be cancelled overnight.
Sell what you know, not just what you organise
An events company does not really sell venues and chairs. It sells production, logistics, relationships and the ability to make things happen on time. Many of these skills can be sold in other ways:
- video production and live streaming for companies that need to talk to their employees or customers;
- internal online events, product launches and training sessions;
- content: recordings, interviews and podcasts with the speakers in your network;
- consulting for other companies that need to move their own events online;
- partnerships with agencies, platforms or production companies, where each side brings what it does best.
Prepare the comeback now
When things relax, and at some point they will, demand for face-to-face meetings will be strong. The winners will be those who are ready to start quickly. That means a clean, up-to-date database (with people’s consent), a brand that stayed visible, partners who still pick up the phone and a few calendar options already worked out.
Do not make a single plan for 2021. Make three scenarios: one where restrictions last all year, one where they ease gradually from the spring and an optimistic one. For each, write down your costs, realistic revenues, the decisions you need to take and the deadlines for them. We do not know what next year will bring, and neither does anyone else. But the difference between panic and strategy is having the answer ready before the question arrives. Back in March I wrote about the first business lessons from lockdown; the most important one still stands: the speed of adaptation matters more than the perfection of the plan.
And if you don’t make it
This has to be said too, honestly: not every events company will survive. Some went into 2020 with no reserves, with loans, or with one big event that carried the whole year. If you have done everything you could and the numbers still do not add up, closing in an orderly way, paying your debts as far as you can and treating your people fairly, is not a personal failure. It is a responsible decision in a situation none of us caused. I have also had moments when I had to let go of something I had built with great effort, and I wrote about some of them in what I learned from 20 years of entrepreneurship. The experience and the relationships stay with you and can be used in the next project.
What about you, if you work in events, tourism or hospitality? What have you tried this year, and what actually worked? I would love to hear it, because the best survival ideas I have ever heard came from the people on the front line.