The more you engage with a customer, the more data you get, the better you can serve their needs, Paul Miller, CEO of a global B2B events company, realised when the Covid pandemic shut down events. His company has shown remarkable growth and bucked global trends. Paul talks to us about the industry cracks Covid exposed, the beauty of human interaction, and how technology is your friend.
There are moments that define a company.
For Paul Miller, CEO of B2B global events and content company Questex, the moment of truth came in early 2020 with news of the first wave of Covid infections in Europe. Faced with a global pandemic that could slash their revenue, it was time to sink or swim.
The advent of Covid was particularly galling for the Questex team because they had recently been taken over by private equity company MidOcean Partners and were embarking on an aggressive growth and acquisitions strategy.
Yet what happened next is quite remarkable. Despite the twin challenges of Covid and a stalling global economy, Questex has managed to grow as much as 40%.
So how did the company buck a worldwide trend?
Paul Miller, CEO of Questex, spoke to me via Google Meet from his office in New York. While Paul leads a global company from the capital of US media, there is no escaping his English accent. His career includes stints as a journalist in the UK and running European and US companies.
Since 2018 he has been the CEO of Questex, which was formed in 2005 by a friend of Paul’s, Kerry Gumas. Initially, it was mainly an amalgamation of a bunch of acquisitions, Paul says. These include the Fierce businesses (Fierce Telecoms, Fierce Wireless etc) and the Bar and Restaurant Show.
Within a few years, the company boasted a slew of B2B events in niche areas such as fashion, hospitality, travel, and tech, many supported by thriving content-based communities.
The importance of data
When Paul joined Questex, it was at the behest of MidOcean Partners, which saw massive growth potential in B2B events.
Paul was quick to highlight what he thought would be some obvious wins.
“When I joined Questex, it was clear that it was not exploiting a digital presence anywhere near enough. It wasn’t using the data from digital, and it wasn’t helping events build better experiences by using digital data. So we set out in 2018 to challenge the old trade show model.”
To access the data, Paul and his team agreed on a strategy that was considered a little old school.
“At that time people like Informa and others were jettisoning their content businesses and focusing directly on trade shows. We went in the opposite direction. We thought that was a wrong strategy. So we said, ‘It’s not about trade shows and media, it’s about the customer.’ And they need data on a daily basis, and you can bring them together annually.”
The strategy has proved to be the right one for Questex. Although external factors have influenced their path (we will talk more about Covid in a while), Paul believes much of the acceleration has been driven by the businesses’s strategy and culture – and especially its people.
Meet Paul at Mx3 Barcelona on 12-13 March, an international summit focused on media innovation, where he will be part of our speaker line-up. Read more and sign up at mx3barcelona.com.
Supportive partners and staff
One factor is Paul’s relationship with the team at MidOcean Partners. He describes the company’s executives as completely supportive and relatively hands-off.
“Basically, they asked us what the strategy was. They then proved to be a good sounding board. And then basically said, ‘We love it. Let’s go for it.’ And off we went. And I’d say that, aside from a weekly call with my chairman, which is just an update for 30 minutes, they are really hands-off.
“During the Covid era, MidOcean came into their own, and they were tremendously supportive. They could have walked away and just said this is a disaster zone. But they were great, supporting management, paying bonuses, even though we couldn’t come anywhere near the goals we initially agreed on.”
The main engine behind the Questex growth though, Paul says, is its staff. As many as 70% of the staff started after the MidOcean deal dropped, and the team’s quality and their ability to work with and create opportunities from data is central to the business.
“We wanted people at the company who are willing to embrace risk, willing to try different things based on data,” explains Paul. “There’s a lot of ego in the media world. But data and the customer voice are the key drivers. We don’t do anything unless there’s a voice of the customer in the room.
“So if somebody says, ‘Hey, I read The Wall Street Journal on Monday, I’ve got this great idea for a new product’, our first question is: What are the customers saying? And if you can’t answer that question, we’re not going to invest in it.”
Finding the right niche
They have four key vertical markets, Paul says. “We make sure that sales, content and marketing are close to the customer in each one. But everything else is centralised. Our database is centralised data, event operations are centralised, best practices and SEO are centralised. So in our business, if you can’t collaborate, you’re not going to succeed.”
Paul believes Questex has chosen the right markets to operate in – markets that have proven resilient both in terms of their growth trajectories and how the pandemic impacted them.
“Being in the right markets is really important. I can say we created all of this growth, but we were lucky we were in the right markets. Pharmaceutical, healthcare and tech are good markets to be in in a Covid environment. And then coming out of Covid, luxury travel, bars and restaurants, hotels and hospitality became good places to be.”
Another critical route to growing a business is via acquisitions and before Covid hit, acquisitions were a major plank in Questex’s strategy. The pandemic meant this side of the business had to be recalibrated. Paul admits Questex hoped for a 40% or 50% revenue increase for the acquired businesses, but this hasn’t been the case.
“We bought some assets out of Informa in late 2019, mainly event assets. And, of course, that turned out to be a disastrous piece of timing. So we spent all of this money, and we had two years of really no return.”
So Questex doubled down on content creation to get closer to their customers and generate data. It has proved to be a successful strategy.
“Covid exposed some cracks that were already in the foundation of the business and then wedged them wide open. And that’s led to the beginning of a new transformation in the business. And we’re happy about it because it was a theory we had a couple of years before Covid hit, which helped us to survive Covid. The more you engage with a customer, the more data you get, the better you can serve that need.”
Prospering in the pandemic
Ah, the pandemic. What was it like to be an executive of an event-based company, knowing that your core business model was under threat in unforeseen and unprecedented circumstances?
Paul admits it is “a bit of a PTSD question” for him.
The first half of 2020 was an incredibly confusing time for the events industry. Mobile World Congress, slated for early February, was one of the first big events cancelled. As February turned to March, more and more events were pulled.
Initially, Paul – like many of his peers in the industry – remained optimistic.
“In the boardroom, we were basically saying to each other that this thing will be over by June. We’re just gonna have to accept that our shows might be a little bit smaller in Q2 of 2020.”
Developments overtook that optimism.
“What happened in February sort of started to deliver lots of different types of news on the severity of Covid. People started pulling out of the events that were close to it. Some of them had corporate edicts and mandates, so they couldn’t come to the events. Some of them had individuals making decisions, some people caught Covid and said, I can’t come.”
Paul remembers flying to London on a Thursday night. He arrived at Heathrow on Friday morning on his way to Berlin. Their local manager called him and said, “Paul, we’ve had a mass pullout of investors from the event”.
“And it’s an event where investors are key and I told him we’ve got to cancel the event.,” Paul explains. “And that was three, maybe four days before it was due to floor in Berlin. Cancelling was a huge deal for us as it’s a $9 million, $10 million event.”
The company was also planning a large beauty and skincare event in New York in March. The day before it was due to begin, the governor of New York state declared a state of emergency.
“I got to the exhibition, and we had probably 600, 700 exhibitors who are in a stage of build-out of the show. I made a decision which, at the time, I think was probably considered the worst decision of my professional career, to cancel it on the eve of the show and incur the wrath of people who had flown in from Australia, the Caribbean, the West Coast, and Europe.
“It did take a good two years after that event for the community to forgive us, frankly, and they’ve now actually forgiven us so much that they saw it was such the right decision. And look, it’s easy to look back on it. But at that time, I can tell you, there were sleepless nights involving cash flow issues.”
Rebooting the business plan
Perhaps the most pivotal moment of 2020 for Questex was when Paul spoke to a MidOcean board member. At that point, the penny dropped that the business needed to change direction very quickly.
The board member told Paul to prepare for a year of not doing events as there was “just something not right about this”.
“So we immediately pivoted to digital events and virtual events, and created $10 million worth of revenue, actually, in the first two weeks of that pivot. We decided to cancel all events through Q2, and move towards being a digital content-driven business, which was already 30% of our business pre-Covid.
“We look back on it now and say we made these decisions and they didn’t look like good ones. And some of them were and some of them weren’t. Somebody once told me that the job of a CEO is being able to look around corners and see what’s coming. That was the first time in my life where I thought, it doesn’t matter. I can look around the corner and I have no idea what it means. So yeah, it was a leadership challenge.”
‘Business as usual’
How many innovations forged in the heat of the pandemic have stuck? Has Questex returned to business as usual? And have companies with significant events interest now developed fallback plans in case of further pandemics?
“Covid exposed cracks that were in the foundations of the event industry. Companies were jettisoning content strategies and day-to-day contact with their communities to just focus on the very profitable trade shows. People were retiring out of the industry, which got accelerated by Covid, and then being replaced by 30-year-olds and 40-year-old attendees to trade shows who are much more demanding on the live experience than just walking up and down booths.”
While technology didn’t replace human interaction, it did show that it can help bring people together.
“In 2023 and beyond there’s been a mass reaction to people being unable to travel. I think people have realised the beauty of human interaction and how important it is,” Paul says.
“So, people have gone on vacations, they’ve opted to work from home or work from anywhere. And even with things like generative AI and technology increasingly in people’s lives, it’s basically exaggerated the need for people to get together as well.”
That means, Paul says, the events industry is “riding a wave of roaring ’20s type behaviour.”
- Watch our interview with Paul on why technology is your friend, the role of generative AI in the events industry and his predictions for the next year. We started off by asking Paul about the lessons we learned from Covid, and whether we are back to business as usual.
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