Prescott Nasser, Co-Founder & Board Member SourceScrub.
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They’re baaa-aaack!
From Las Vegas, Nevada, to Hanover, Germany, road warriors are once again heading off to conferences and trade shows. Frazzled organizers are grappling with staffing shortages, finding themselves battling to accommodate unexpected guests while running out of steak and lobster entrées at networking lunches.
Eager would-be dealmakers must also contend with challenges in the post-pandemic environment. Without savvy preparation, it’s entirely possible for you to arrive in San Diego or Atlanta only to realize—too late—that while you’ve made it to your destination safely, your conference strategy is DOA.
Planning ahead has always been crucial for private equity investors to ensure that they extract the most value from the time and money they invest in attending an industry event; navigating a crowded and busy venue without a line of attack is a recipe for failure. Today, having all your ducks neatly lined up in a row is even more vital as travel costs climb.
Adding to the headaches is the fact that the cost of attending those conferences is rising, while some embattled organizers are compressing their length into two or three days rather than three or four. That means that private equity dealmakers face greater pressure to deliver value for each conference they attend while having less time to unearth intriguing new opportunities.
So, why not just stay home? Well, dealmakers tell me that’s not an option, either. With investment banks delivering fewer actionable ideas, they’re more reliant on developing their own M&A ideas, which, in turn, means undertaking more proprietary research.
Attending conferences—at least, showing up at the right gatherings and finding ways to make the most of their time—is an essential part of that process. And since everyone knows that their rivals are responding to precisely the same incentives in similar ways, the pressure is on.
The Importance Of Preparation
The success—or demise—of your own approach rests squarely on how thoroughly you’re prepared to make the most of each conference you attend. That requires thorough research into more than finding the most economical airfares and hotel rates. As novelist Jeffrey Archer wrote, "Time spent on preparation is seldom wasted."
Hands down, the most rewarding conferences to attend in the current environment are those that offer as many networking opportunities as possible and have the potential to generate new contacts, insight and data. It’s always been more economical to attend a conference during the course of which you might meet with half a dozen prospective deal candidates than to travel to attend a one-on-one meeting to get more insight into a single specific deal.
That’s become even more crucial in the "new normal" of post-pandemic conferences. I’m not surprised that travel industry news site Skift found in a survey of meeting planners that nearly two-thirds of attendees are even more interested in networking opportunities offered at events than they were before Covid-19 upended "business as usual."
I’m hearing variations on that from many clients; one told me that for it to be worthwhile to dispatch someone to Seattle or Miami, they want to be confident they can meet with or get insight into at least 20 prospective targets.
Goodbye, serendipity. Welcome, careful preparation.
Advance research is now even more vital for those dealmakers intent on ensuring that the conferences they do choose to attend are target-rich networking opportunities rather than costly boondoggles. That’s particularly true of smaller gatherings in out-of-the-way locations like Duluth or Chattanooga. Those may offer attendees insight into rapidly-growing industries, but will it help a private equity team expand a deal pipeline?
How To Build A Conference-Specific Deal Pipeline
To do that, investors must research the answers to a series of questions. The logical first step is to get as complete and accurate a list of attendees as possible and cross-reference those with internal target lists.
Even if you’re only interested in a single company that’s planning to show up, the conference may still prove valuable if you can identify whether other businesses you’re not yet familiar with but are experiencing growth in revenues or headcount also will be there.
That means that you’ll need to figure out how to obtain reliable information on those new-to-you enterprises. Then, too, a potential target’s customers, suppliers or business partners may be attending; meeting with them can give you more insight into what’s afoot within your target.
Part of dealmaking is wooing that target—and to do that successfully, you’ll want to know as much as possible about key managers, the business’s history, industry trends and current headwinds or tailwinds. What other conferences have they attended, and what does that tell you about where they see their business going? The more data points you have, the more insight into a target company’s strategy and growth you’ll have at your fingertips.
Having a conference strategy in place also means going beyond the obvious task of researching conference attendees. Try to identify and explore businesses that share similar characteristics to those conference-goers, but that might not yet be showing up at industry gatherings.
Also, apply geographic filters to your research and look for companies that intrigue you that are based in the same area. So, if you end up heading to Denver for a conference, you can identify interesting companies in the city or up the road in Boulder, even if they are in different industries, and use the extra time created by the shortening of conferences to meet and talk with them. That gives potential acquirers—or investment bankers eager to refill their own deal pipelines—more bang for their conference buck.
In a tricky dealmaking environment, using tactics like this to raise your conference game can spell the difference between success and failure.
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