Event planners see business in DIY market
Let’s face it: When you’re a startup in a multibillion-dollar industry, it’s very likely you’ll be ground into dust by entrenched and much bigger players. You’re small and trying to find a market; they’re big and they own the overall market.
But you might survive and, possibly thrive, by finding an underserved segment of that industry and devising a way to provide those in it what they specifically need.
That’s the plan of Eventsage.com, a Vancouver startup that is following this strategy to the letter. By adding a unique layer to the $29-billion Canadian events industry, it hopes to carve out a strong business by making life easier for a segment of amateur event planners that have been forced to do it themselves.
These are the thousands of office administrators who work for smaller businesses and are burdened with organizing events — as if they didn’t have enough to do — because the business can’t afford the high rates of professional planners. This group accounts for about $4 billion of the industry’s total spending.
Eventsage was hatched two years ago and launched last year after a year of research by industry pros Kimberly Rohachuk, a veteran event planner, and Jonathan Buchwald, CEO of Prime Strat- egies, Canada’s largest event management agency. With a combined 40 years experience as traditional event planners, they were well aware small businesses were increasingly holding smaller events but had no easy way to perform do-ityourself planning.
The 475,000 administrative professionals in Canada who plan these smaller events aren’t able to hire a professional meeting or event planner, says Eventsage president Rohachuk.
“Until now, companies that don’t use a professional planner are left working primarily with search engines, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations,” she says. “There are hundreds of thousands of meetings planned each year in Canada with no single website currently servicing this niche.
“Eventsage is the event research and planning alternative to Google. With its simple interface and intuitive management tools it allows people to cut their planning time in half.”
Essentially, the site is a matchmaking service between vendors and planners. Users enter their event details, and the system generates tailored options and quotes from a database of more than 640 suppliers in the Vancouver region. Suppliers provide quotes directly to users based on criteria provided, cutting the usual back and forth that’s so common in these situations. Eventsage fa- cilitates all communication between the user and supplier. Everything from venues to photographers and décor can be booked on the site.
“The idea is to bring this elusive industry to suppliers, many of whom are too small for the bigger events, or hadn’t thought of themselves as event suppliers,” Rohachuk said, explaining that the value of the value of a planner is the network behind him or her, and Eventsage is in essence giving away those networks.
“Increasingly, events are being held in venues that one wouldn’t normally think of. People are tired of scavenger hunts and the like so they want to do other things to make their event interesting. We’re putting them together with the opera, or the art gallery or The Permanent (a historic financial building that has recently been restored to its former glory).”
The company’s business model is to provide the service free to users and charge event suppliers a lead fee. However, to stave off supplier exhaustion and, the inevitable flight that usually goes with it, Eventsage limits every user to only three requests for quotes. That way, suppliers know they have a one-in-three chance of winning the business. Eventsage already has more than 600 curated suppliers in its database.
The website is currently being put through its paces in the Vancouver region, but sales and marketing director Tara Boddington said it will spread across the country soon.
Continuing the theme of helping administrative professionals do it themselves, Eventsage.com is also preparing a communication plan that will include an e-book with tools for successful planning, other authoritative content, a blog and regular newsletter. It also is a strong user of social media, in which it shares ideas, and free user advertising for venue suppliers.