Summit scaled and it’s now no more
GEELONG’S Pivot Summit has been grounded.
There are no plans to hold the tech and innovation conference this year and its founder, Leighton Wells, has sold the brand and moved on to other things.
The new owner of the brand, the Hamilton Group, is keeping the name on ice until future opportunities to reinvent it emerge.
Mr Wells, the driving force behind Pivot since it started in 2015, said the summit was taking too long to get to a level of profitability where he could draw a reasonable wage.
“I would potentially have to be personally invested in it for a longer time than I would have liked,” said Mr Wells, a father of two young children.
He declined to reveal the financial implications of the decision not to go on, other than to say “everyone is satisfied with the outcome”.
The summit reached its peak in just its third year, luring Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to be its keynote speaker in December 2017.
But, amid heightened expectations created by ‘the Woz’, the Summit immediately started to show signs it was floundering.
Despite optimistic projections the 2018 event was going to pull more than 1000 attendees over two days, it was postponed as it struggled to find its place and purpose on the event calendar.
Moved to May last year as a Friday-Saturday conference backing on to Geelong’s After
Dark festival, attendance on the Saturday was notably poor.
Mr Wells is now the “cofounder, technologist and entrepreneurship facilitator” at Regional Rising, which helps build business resilience and skills in regional, rural and remote areas.
Andrew Hamilton said the Hamilton Group purchased the Pivot Summit brand, not the business, with a view to working with a partner should the right opportunity arise.
The company was not going into the events management sphere and was not looking to employ an events facilitator, he said.
“It gives us the ability to do something going forward, we don’t know what that is at the moment,” Mr Hamilton said
“It really depends on finding the right partner.”