What are your brief backgrounds

What are your brief backgrounds?

Mitch: I’m a 22-time Ironman athlete and serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Active.com, a company that sold twice for over a billion dollars. Stephen was an Olympic hopeful swimmer and ran one of the world’s largest equipment sites and magazines.

How was Events.com set up? Why did you decide to create the Events.com platform as a global business?

Mitch: Stephen and I met through sport in the triathlon circuit. We had a complementary skill set and vision and founded the business together in 2011. We created Events.com to fill the need for a centralized place to manage all aspects of event management. The Events.com business model is robust and scalable and provides a wide range of software and services to event organizers and participants all on one cloud-based (SaaS) platform.

The company supports hundreds of thousands of event organizers globally with a variety of services. We provide event discovery, advertising, planning and logistics, marketing, branding, venue and ticket management, market analytics, sponsorship management and activation, business intelligence, data aggregation and reporting, and more.

When COVID hit, events went virtual. Events.com is taking advantage of the dissonance caused by COVID to turn a once-in-a-lifetime challenge into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. 2021 may very well present the possibility for live events again, or a hybrid of live and virtual events, and we’re ready to disrupt the industry with our vision.

What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years?

Stephen: Event organizers were using too many disparate systems that really don’t collaborate well, so they’re having to waste resources just to manage their information on different systems. Events.com uses a SaaS platform that allows organizers to save time by consolidating information and services in one place, with one solution. It also helps organizers generate more revenue through sponsorships and additional revenue streams that other platforms can’t. In that way, we’re becoming industry game-changers.

What is your company’s vision statement? And to what extent do you successfully achieve it?

Stephen: Events.com helps event organizers save time and make more money by providing them with a scalable event management platform and a suite of technology products and services.

We help event participants find, interact and transact with the events they love with technology that helps people experience the meaningful moments of their lives.

What are the 5 factors you consider to be the biggest assets to your company and why?

Mitch: Our relationship as co-founders is a huge asset because we have full trust in each other, which is rare in business and life. We have 40 years of experience combined in the industry of events, software, and technology, our companies being some of the earliest in the industry of online registration and transactions.

We also put people first and believe in over-communicating with our team. When faced with an unfortunate circumstance, we both immediately focus on what’s next to keep moving through challenges. As triathletes, we share the mental attitude of “just keep going” and apply it to entrepreneurship like it’s an endurance sport.

What are the core values/principles that you have in place to maintain a healthy work environment?

Stephen: Trust, honesty, and integrity. We support the health and well-being of our team and believe in over-communicating with not only our internal team but also with our investors and clients. Our culture is dedicated, focused, and fun. Every member of our team has the ability and drive for relentless follow-through and a sense of urgency. During Covid, we were one of the first tech companies to go completely remote because we wanted to protect our team members, first and foremost.

COVID-19 has massively impacted industries all over the globe. How has COVID-19 impacted the event management industry? How is your company dealing with it?

Mitch: When Covid hit, all live events shut down and the whole industry froze in its tracks. A lot of money had already changed hands for events that got canceled. That was a huge challenge for every company involved in events.

We chose to take a deep breath and come up with a crisis plan that focused on the following:

Over-communicate with our team, investors, and clients Focus on our core values Support the health and well-being of our team Build a system to support our clients before they even knew what hit them

Stephen: We had to make some tough decisions. We furloughed everybody to a percentage of their salary but didn’t lay off a single employee so they had health insurance during the pandemic. We identified what was critical and where we could safely scale back. We came up with data-driven solutions and let our values and principles guide those decisions.

Mitch: When we realized that Covid was going to be a massive global challenge, we knew the most important thing for us to do was support our customers through the initial period and during the recovery phase safely and effectively which has strengthened our relationships with them. We launched virtual and hybrid event technologies along with features that postpone or reschedule events, communicate with attendees, and transition events to a virtual experience.

Stephen: We used the pandemic as an opportunity. Hundreds of thousands of event-organizers are looking for new solutions as their technologically outdated contracts expire. It’s perfect for our best-in-class innovation to make organizers’ lives easier and help them generate more revenue. It’s an opportunity to offer event-goers a new hybrid of live and virtual events for a layered experience never before experienced.

What are your predictions for the future of the event management industry?

Stephen: In the US, and globally, Events.com is not really keeping up with developments; we’re developing them ourselves. Our innovative technologies are changing the industry as we speak. Our platform helps organizers with every aspect end to end to successfully manage virtual, hybrid, and live events. It’s an improvement for both organizers and event-goers because it allows organizers to offer everything under one platform and it allows participants to find, interact with, and experience events more easily. We are prepared to help our clients with any type of event they want to organize this year.

How has digitalization helped your company?

Mitch: We’ve embraced SaaS technology and created a robust and scalable platform. Through its digital technology, Events.com can help hundreds of thousands of event organizers across the U.S. and globally manage every aspect of their events.

We plan to continue hiring more of the best technologists, varsity engineers, and team members and to pair that with robust research efforts to stay on top of future needs and technology developments.

What is your advice to someone starting out as an entrepreneur in today’s business environment?

Stephen: The best advice would be to stay on top of the data because it changes almost daily. Then find your niche where you perceive a gap in service. It’s really important to be flexible and scalable, because we can’t predict how 2021 will play out. We should all try to be ready for anything.

What are your upcoming projects? Also please tell us how you are planning to expand in such uncertain times?

Mitch: Though we heard the word “unprecedented” non-stop, this pandemic looks a great deal like pandemics of generations past. A Yale professor, Dr. Nicholas Christakis, just released a book discussing what the post-pandemic world might look like. In “Apollo’s Arrow,” Christakis shares that the world could soon see a resurgence of the arts, mass rejoicing, an explosion of sexuality and the rediscovery of the joys of life. So if we’re headed into the “Roaring Twenties” of this century, what better business to be in than the event business?