Doug Emslie — The Marathoner of Modern Exhibitions
He built a global exhibition empire, sold it to Informa, and now runs a new race—turning passions into smart event businesses.
Doug Emslie doesn’t meditate. He runs. The repetition is the point—the way a route, done again and again, reveals new details and patterns you’d never notice once. In London, in Dubai, or whichever city he’s landed in, he finds a loop. He knows when the lights change, where the pavement dips, which corner floods after rain. The body takes over, and the mind starts working: a deal that needs untangling, a conversation that won’t stop replaying, an irritation that fades with each mile until, by the time he’s home, it has been metabolized. Running is where he notices. It’s also how he has built a life in the trade-show world—by looping the floors of events until they tell him their secrets. Where others see aisles and booths, he sees flow, friction, and spark. Running and events are, to him, the same act: repeat until the pattern emerges, then change what needs changing.
“Running and events are the same act: repeat until the pattern emerges, then change what needs changing.”
He never planned to spend his life in exhibitions. In his mid-twenties, with no industry pedigree but as an big accounting firm up and coming wiz kid, a friend urged him to meet Neville Buch, the flamboyant founder of Blenheim, then one of Europe’s most aggressive exhibition companies. Blenheim was swagger and speed: acquisitive, personality-driven, obsessed with empire building. At twenty-six, Emslie was negotiating multi-million-pound deals. Trade shows weren’t just stands and schedules; they were assets and levers in a global chess game. When Blenheim was sold to United Business Media, Buch called again—start over, build something new. That call became Tarsus.
The early years were survival through stamina. Every new show had to be bought, launched, and run well enough to keep the lights on. He built and greatly expanded LabelExpo , expanded the Dubai Airshow, added Intertraffic, Intersolar, Mexico Wind Power, Zuchex, Hometex, SIUF, Offprice, and a roster of medical conferences. By its second decade Tarsus stretched across beauty, healthcare, aviation, infrastructure, packaging, homewares, sustainability, and fashion—a marathon of acquisitions, each mile another learning curve.
In 2019, the company was bought by Charterhouse Capital Partners for roughly £560 million, taking it private and tightening its stride. Tarsus became more data-driven, more focused on valuation metrics, less the founder-led family Emslie and Buch had started. It was sharper, more financial, and unmistakably a different animal.
Then came the pandemic—the steepest hill of his career. As Chair of SISO, the Society of Independent Show Organizers, Emslie found himself orchestrating the industry’s survival run. With trade shows frozen worldwide, he helped broker an unprecedented alliance between the for-profit and non-profit worlds—SISO, UFI, AIPC, ICCA—sharing protocols, lobbying governments, drafting the All Secure Standard, and helping form the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance. For an industry built on competition, it was radical cooperation.
“We stopped fighting each other. Everyone realized that if the ecosystem collapsed, there’d be no race left to run.”
When events finally returned, smaller but hungrier, Emslie saw the reset as necessary. The marathon had forced everyone to relearn pacing—less spectacle, more substance; less volume, more meaning. Leadership, he decided, wasn’t about sprinting for quarterly wins. It was about endurance, calibration, and getting an entire field to the finish line together.
“Leadership isn’t about sprinting for quarterly wins. It’s about endurance, calibration, and getting everyone to the finish line together.”
Four years later, at another SISO CEO Summit, he was seen in conversation with Charlie McCurdy of Informa Markets. Months later, Informa acquired Tarsus for nearly a billion dollars. For Doug, it was the tape across the finish—an exit on a high and the start of a freer stride.
Now through Cuil Bay Capital, he invests in communities where passion already runs deep: a majority stake in Raccoon Media Group, a minority in Jacobs Media, a board seat at Easyfairs, investments in the Abilities Expo that is now part of Raccon Media Group, and the creation of TrailCon. If Tarsus was about empire, Cuil Bay is about alignment—picking sectors where obsession already burns and asking only: can passion pace itself into a business?
In 2024, his wife Caroline died after a long illness. She was remembered for her warmth, her work with teens, her quiet authority on the tennis court. For Doug it was the hardest run—one no balance sheet could prepare him for. He doesn’t talk about it often, but you hear it in the softened edges of his voice and see it in how he’s redirected his energy: chairing the Cuil Bay Foundation for youth wellness and serving as trustee of the Green Hub for Teens. Running helps him metabolize grief; giving back gives it structure. The man who once built billion-dollar platforms now builds something quieter—networks of resilience and belonging.
He worries that corporate consolidation has drained events of their characters. He points to China’s integration of WeChat into live experience as proof that innovation often comes from the places dismissed as behind. He believes the best content isn’t panel chatter but dialogue, and that facilitators—real humans helping strangers talk—will become the new headliners. He is blunt about economics: airfare, hotels, and catering have doubled; organizers must now deliver a return on time. AI can guide visitors to what matters, he says, but it can’t replace the spark of presence.
Doug Emslie’s career reads like a marathon in chapters: the sprinting youth of Blenheim, the long endurance of Tarsus, the uphill miles of the pandemic, the freedom pace of Cuil Bay. Each phase demanded its own rhythm. He still runs the same streets, noticing what others miss. He still believes gatherings are the pulse of business and culture. And he still insists that passion is essential—but only if it’s trained for the distance.
“You just keep running. You find your pace, watch the horizon, and don’t forget to look around. That’s where the good stuff always is.”
He smiles when he says it, like someone who has found a kind of peace in motion—proof that the marathon of modern meetings isn’t just about finishing; it’s about the grace of keeping the world connected, one stride at a time.
