Every entrepreneur knows the first half of the story, even if no one warns them about it going in. You put your head down. You build the thing nobody asked you to build, alone, on your own money, with no org chart to confer a title and no communications department to announce that you exist. You get very good at something while almost no one is watching…

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Don Welsh apologizes at the top of the call. He had been on the phone with his daughter Sarah, whose one-year-old has just learned the word hi, and hi plus pop-pop, he reports, is currently the most important thing in the world. This is the man who runs Destinations International, the global association of the people who sell cities, seventy years old, …

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The first thing you notice about Colja Dams is the smile. It arrives before the sentence does and stays after the sentence ends, which is not charm exactly but something closer to a philosophical position made visible. This is a man who spent his teenage years performing magic shows in German children’s hospitals, working for the attention of kids who h…

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A note on method. This profile emerged from a conversation that took an unexpected turn before it officially began. The office tour that preceded the interview turned out to be the interview. What follows is built entirely from what was said, observed, and discovered. Some of what surrounds Mason’s story involves Emmett Hay Naylor, the man who founded A…

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Julius Solaris is the most-followed independent voice the global events industry has ever produced. His newsletter lands in thirty-eight thousand inboxes, one week at a time. The LinkedIn group he founded passed four hundred thousand members and remains, by a wide margin, the largest professional community in the trade. LinkedIn named him a Top Voice an…

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Editor’s Note. Three forces have converged on the event agency business at the same moment, and the convergence is the story of the year. Brands have discovered that their live events are their Super Bowls, and the corporate budgets have followed. Private equity has arrived at scale in the exhibition and consumer event industry. And the digital channels…

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Editor’s Note. Three forces have converged on the event agency business at the same moment, and the convergence is the story of the year. Brands have discovered that their live events are their Super Bowls, and the corporate budgets have followed. Private equity has arrived at scale in the exhibition and consumer event industry. And the digital channels…

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At a recent SISO gathering of major exhibition leaders, an executive leaned over to Mark Brewster in the back of a breakout and said the session they were sitting in was, bluntly, awful. The speaker had missed the point. The content was thin. The room was tuning out. Two minutes later, the speaker wandered over to say hello. The same CEO turned, smiled,…

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Few people in American life have spent as much time thinking about the architecture of a gathering as Bryan Rafanelli. Fewer still have done it across as wide a range of rooms. For nearly three decades, through his firm Rafanelli Events, he has built a body of work that has made him the operator other operators watch. What he brings to the work is rare …

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The lesson Ryan Simonetti carries from his father has nothing to do with real estate or hospitality or the $230 million his company just secured from Ares Management and TPG Credit Solutions. It is simpler and older than any of that. His father ran a bread delivery route in central New Jersey — Martin’s Famous Potato Rolls, the predawn shift, every morn…

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Four for the Wisdom Bank from the Convening Class: Femi Oke the Facilitator, Marco Giberti the Entrepreneur, Tim Groot the Technologist, Andrew Roby the Designer

I am trying to build a modern wisdom bank for the gathering economy — a living archive of the practitioners whose thinking the industry will want to draw on for decades, captured while they are …

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The events industry has always carried a quiet hierarchy, even if few people say it out loud. At the top sit the producers of massive trade shows, global conferences, and sports spectacles, the sectors that speak the language of square footage, registration numbers, and sponsor activations. Further down, in the minds of some, sit the planners who work i…

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There is a photograph Femi Oke wants you to see. In it, she is walking stride-for-stride with the president of Ethiopia, heads tilted toward each other at matching angles, moving through a corridor toward a stage where five thousand people at Kigali Stadium are waiting. The briefing is happening in transit because Oke could not get into the VIP holding …

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The modern conference industry runs on a strange contradiction. Tens of thousands of professionals may gather under one roof, filling exhibition halls the size of aircraft hangars, yet the real value of those gatherings usually comes down to only a handful of conversations. The founder who meets an investor at the right moment, the retailer who finds a …

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Editor’s note: The author and Marco Giberti co-chaired the SISO Event Innovation Battlefield together for much of the 2010s. This is a profile, not a memoir, but the admiration is disclosed.

The Apple Show in Buenos Aires, early nineties. Marco Giberti was in his mid-twenties, hired to run marketing for Apple Latin America at a moment when Apple was losi…

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Three people. Three very different corners of the gathering economy. Paul Miller has built Questex into one of the most data-driven event companies in the country while quietly leading the independent show organizer community through SISO. Nicola Kastner has spent her career making the case — with receipts — that the corporate event is not a cost center…

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At The Event Leaders Exchange (ELX), Nicola Kastner sits at the center of a network that quietly shapes one of the most powerful forces in business. More than three hundred senior leaders participate in the community, collectively influencing over 160,000 events each year and nearly $12 billion in spend. Those numbers are large enough to move markets, b…

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Authority in the events industry rarely announces itself. It accumulates over time, in the decisions that don’t make headlines and the rooms where people speak more freely because they assume no one outside is paying attention. Paul Miller occupies that kind of authority. As CEO of Questex, he runs a portfolio that stretches across hospitality, wellness…

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