As stock markets crash, corporate profits plunge and meeting professionals worldwide brace for painful budget cuts, one planner is fighting back with a blog.
Once a month, Alison Ray, CMP, founder of Metropolitan Meeting & Event Group, whose clients include liquor companies Pernod Ricard USA and Moët Hennessey USA, posts career advice and event photos on a blog she launched recently to draw attention to her work.
"In this economy you need to be creative about spreading the word about your services," said Chicago-based Ray, who has been in the business for more than a decade.
Having lived through the downturn that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she was determined to build up her defences early. So in the past year, Ray has begun volunteering on industry committees, networking more and diversifying her services. In fact, she started the blog to accompany her new side business—the International Network of Travel Directors—which connects meeting planners and freelance travel professionals.
These are tough times. The world is almost definitely in a recession, and the U.S. economy is expected to grow just 0.1 percent next year, according to recent data from the International Monetary Fund. The European Commission predicts the same weak growth for the Eurozone in 2009 as well. Earnings posted by companies in the S&P 500 Index dropped by almost 12 percent in the third quarter, reports Thomson Reuters. The poor climate has already begun to hit the meeting business: A third of planners polled by MPI in September say they expect business to decline through the first quarter of 2009.
But success and opportunity can be found even in this climate, meeting professionals say. Anyone with the right strategy, they argue, can continue to boost sales, cut costs and even turn the recession into a unique opportunity for career growth.
"If you can take a negative and turn it into a positive, it can be a great opportunity for you to differentiate yourself," said Lee Ann Adams Mikeman, assistant vice president of conference planning and special events at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a McLean, Va.-based technology and engineering firm with 44,000 employees worldwide.
Show Value
Of course, different strategies work for different types of professionals. The downturn will affect independent planners differently than, say, corporate staffers. One rule of thumb applies to everyone, however: Companies looking to reduce costs will reward professionals who can rein in spending while proving the value of the meetings they organize.
"There always has to be a value attached to the meetings that you plan," said Dan Hoffend, vice president of corporate account sales for Dallas-based events management firm Freeman. "If you can generate a list of action items from your attendees, then you can show the value of your meetings."
Hoffend says measuring value isn’t as difficult as it sounds. He argues that planners often get caught up in the details of how to quantify what they consider to be vague outcomes and lose sight of measurable results. Instead, people should try to define actions they would like attendees to perform after the meeting.
"The meeting ends on a Friday. On Monday morning you want attendees to … what?" he said.
Measurable outcomes can be very specific (such as leads generated or inquiries made by potential clients) or fuzzier (such as increasing customers’ knowledge about a topic). If participants can successfully complete a survey after an event, showing that they understood the content presented, that’s an action item that has been fulfilled.
Cut Spending
In addition to proving their value, meeting planners should also be prepared to slash spending. But this doesn’t necessarily require sacrificing quality, says Julia Ashton, director of operations at MCI Group in Brussels, one of Europe’s largest event planning firms.
One easy way to cut costs is to rely more on digital technology. Ashton says she has reduced printing costs by sending out more invitations and announcements by e-mail and by organizing more virtual events. In fact, virtual events are experiencing a boom, with spending on Web conferences predicted to more than double in the next three years, according to Roopam Jain, principal analyst at business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. The trend is benefiting companies already positioned to compete in that space, such as Cramer Online and Unisfair.
Eric Myers, director of Internet marketing at Quest Software, says his group started holding virtual meetings with Unisfair last year and has reaped huge benefits while sharply reducing cost per inquiry compared to typical face-to-face events.
One of Quest’s recent virtual events was a user conference to showcase its Microsoft Windows-related suite of software, which registered more than 4,000 participants, yielded 50 RFPs during the event and resulted in 3,200 information downloads by users—an overwhelming success, according to Myers.
Inviting customers to virtual events instead of face-to-face ones makes customers especially happy in this economy, he says.
"We know that our customers and potential customers are getting their budgets slashed too, and two of the top things to get slashed are training and travel," Myers said. "If we can offer them something for free that they can do from their desk, on their time, that’s a winner."
Centralization
There are ways, however, to cut spending without making any significant changes to the way meetings are conducted.
Mikeman says she saves SAIC an average 15 percent each year on meetings and events, simply by centralizing event spending at the company, controlling risk and liability exposure, making use of efficient technology and strictly enforcing pre-existing spending policies.
"Due to the economy, we’re tightening up our policy compliance," Mikeman said.
For example, SAIC has always had a policy barring employees from organizing meetings worth more than US$5,000 without help from Mikeman’s department. In the past, the policy was only lightly enforced, with violators informed by e-mail that they had broken the rule. Now, Mikeman plans to inform violators’ supervisors, too.
This policy not only ensures that SAIC secures the best negotiated rates through its meeting department, but also allows Mikeman to make sure that SAIC gets to add its own addenda to vendor contracts, giving it more favorable liability and cancellation clauses. Mikeman also plans to centralize cash flow in order to cut costs further, by directing as many expenses as possible through one central charge card.
The backbone behind Mikeman’s policies for the past five years has been a strategic meetings management (SMM) program—which is a tool to help manage meetings-related processes, spending, volumes, standards and suppliers, while cutting costs and risks.
"If you can keep one foot in meeting planning, and develop your SMM, you’re going to be very valuable to your company," Mikeman said.
Slow and Steady
However, finding success in a weak economy isn’t just about operating defensively by proving value and cutting costs. In fact, marketing aggressively and offering new services can turn a meeting professional who is just trying to survive into one who is perfectly positioned for inevitable recovery.
"In weak economies, strong companies gain market share," said Freeman’s Hoffend, whose company has continued to spend on advertising despite the looming recession. "Companies that position themselves consistently instead of running for the hills with the rest of the gang are the ones that will make it."
For example, Wen Ee Lim, Eastern U.S. and South American area director for the Singapore Exhibition & Convention Bureau, says the group has kept its marketing budget steady and pumped up its client research efforts in order to make up for the anticipated decline in demand. However, Lim is concentrating on sales efforts that are likely to pay off.
"Our focus is on consolidating our resources. We ask, ‘Is this initiative going to produce results for us?’" she said.
As a consequence, Lim is pitching fewer deals to finance and insurance industry representatives and focusing instead on companies in the bio-medical space and associations.
In addition, the Singapore bureau has come to realize the benefit of helping out potential customers with some financial support. In recent years, the group has offered to subsidize events with grants from its US$100 million "Be in Singapore" program, but it is now more flexible in negotiating the terms of that subsidy. Lim and her colleagues are more persistent now with local vendors when trying to negotiate the best price for meeting organizers.
"We’re speaking a lot more with our industry partners in Singapore, and making sure they really understand the economic situation here," she said.
Like many vendors, Lim is also boosting the reach of the bureau’s business partnerships, to help her weather the economic storm.
Grow Your Sphere
Partnering with others doesn’t only offer financial incentives to large vendors, it also works wonders on a smaller scale for individuals who want to give their careers a boost—in the form of good old-fashioned networking.
Metropolitan’s Alison Ray says she has been attending more business events than ever, posting regularly on social networking sites and industry forums and volunteering on three MPI committees in order to stay tapped into business opportunities.
"That’s how you meet people. That’s how you develop relationships with other planners, but also with suppliers who might eventually recommend you," Ray said. "For me, it’s about building relationships in the community."
Ray’s other savvy career move has been to diversify her offerings. As founder of the International Network of Travel Directors, Ray has managed to pave the way for another source of future revenue.
Employees at larger firms are also encouraged to diversify their skill sets in this economy. MCI Group’s Ashton says she has been cross-training her staff in order to make sure that the team can roll with the punches through an uncertain time. In the past, teams at MCI were divided up by specialty, and whenever one team was overwhelmed with projects, it hired temporary help. In this climate, Ashton doesn’t want to spend unnecessary money on outside staff, and is instead making sure that her employees can cover for each other.
SAIC’s Mikeman adds that expanding your skill set through more formal channels is also crucial in this environment. As a hiring manager, she usually looks for experience first when interviewing job candidates, but lacking the experience, she prefers to hire someone with relevant degrees.
She says certifications are important to keeping skills sharp and staying up to date. Additionally, appropriate degree programs, such as a master’s in tourism or meeting management, are immensely valuable.
In fact, the recession offers a rare opportunity for meeting professionals to take a year off work and go back to school, if they can afford it. At the very least, the recession gives them a chance to slow down, look around and see what opportunities they have been missing when their heads were buried in work.
Ashton says the weaker economic climate has allowed her to send her staff on more educational and networking events than before. In the past, she says, her employees had to turn down most invitations they received for familiarization trips, seminars and trade shows.
"We organize up to 150 events a year, and it can really be a roller coaster ride where you’re organizing one event after another," she said.
The fact that business has slowed isn’t all bad news.
"It’s great for me, because I can finally send my staff to EIBTM and all the other events they never have time to go to," Ashton said. "This way when the RFPs start coming in we’ll have had time to familiarize ourselves with the new venues and hotels."
To best ensure stability in the continually uncertain economy, grow your skill set and knowledge base, increase the reach of your professional network and you’ll form the foundation for perhaps the closest thing to a recession-proof business.
DALIA FAHMY is a New York-based freelance business writer.
