The events industry has always been an interesting place for entrepreneurs. Unlike businesses that require enormous amounts of infrastructure before they can begin, an events company can start with little more than an idea, a network of contacts and somebody willing to trust you to deliver.
British entrepreneur Joe Blackman , now based in Austin, built much of his early career in exactly this environment. Starting an events business while still young, Blackman eventually developed it into Collection 26, working across private and international events for clients from business, entertainment and sport.
His route into the industry is far from unusual. Events have always attracted entrepreneurial people because the barriers to starting can be relatively low. Building a successful company, however, is considerably harder.
An industry where you can simply start
A surprising number of events businesses begin because somebody organises one event successfully.
Perhaps they put on a party at university. They organise a charity dinner. A friend asks them to arrange a wedding. Somebody produces a small conference and discovers that people are prepared to pay to attend. There isn't necessarily a moment when the founder formally decides that this is now going to become a business.
One thing just leads to another.
That makes events particularly attractive to entrepreneurs. There is room to experiment without immediately building an enormous organisation around the idea. A promoter can test a concept with a single event. A corporate events company can begin with one client. An independent producer can build a reputation one job at a time.
Joe Blackman's own events career followed a version of this route. What started as Green Ant Events in Britain developed over time into Collection 26 and a much broader international business. Years later, after relocating to the United States and ultimately Austin, Blackman's work expanded beyond events into business, advisory work and international relationships.
But the entrepreneurial lessons learned through events remained surprisingly transferable.
The product disappears at the end of the night
There is something slightly peculiar about building a company around events because, after months of work, your product effectively disappears.
A manufacturer can point to something coming off a production line. A property developer can stand outside a building. Someone producing an event can spend six months creating something that exists for six hours.
By the following morning the flowers have gone, the lighting is coming down, the caterers have packed up and somebody is probably wandering around a ballroom looking for a missing charger.
What remains is the experience people had and the reputation of the people who created it.
That makes reputation disproportionately important in events. A beautifully designed website can help win attention, but it cannot rescue a business if clients don't trust the people behind it. Equally, a relatively small company with an excellent reputation can find itself competing for work far beyond what its size might suggest.
Word travels surprisingly quickly, particularly at the higher end of the industry. Clients recommend producers to friends. Venues remember which companies were easy to work with. Suppliers know who pays invoices on time and who doesn't. Assistants move companies and take their contacts with them.
It is an ecosystem built around relationships.
Event entrepreneurs like Joe Blackman sell confidence before anything exists
Most entrepreneurs have to persuade people to believe in something that doesn't exist yet. In events, that happens almost every day.
A client can look at a venue, a mood board, some drawings and perhaps a computer rendering. What they cannot see is the finished room with 500 people inside it because that room does not exist yet.
The entrepreneur is asking them to trust that it will.
That requires an unusual mixture of creativity and practicality. You need enough imagination to see what an empty space might become, but enough operational sense to know whether it can actually be built in the available time and for the available budget.
There are plenty of wonderful ideas that should remain wonderful ideas.
Experience eventually teaches events entrepreneurs which ones those are.
Problems are part of the business model
Entrepreneurs are generally expected to be comfortable with uncertainty. Events take that requirement and turn the dial up considerably.
Weather changes. Flights are delayed. Speakers cancel. Equipment fails. Guest numbers move. A client suddenly develops a passionate objection to something they approved three weeks earlier.
Sometimes genuinely strange things happen.
The important skill isn't creating a world in which nothing ever goes wrong. That world doesn't exist. It is building enough flexibility into an event that the guest never knows what went wrong behind the scenes.
This is one reason people who have spent years in events often develop a fairly high tolerance for business problems elsewhere. When you've dealt with a major problem minutes before doors open, an awkward Tuesday morning email doesn't necessarily produce quite the same level of panic.
From British events entrepreneur to Austin
For Joe Blackman, events ultimately became a route into a much wider world of entrepreneurship.
After starting his company in Britain, Blackman spent years producing events and travelling internationally. Collection 26's client base eventually included entrepreneurs and business leaders alongside figures from entertainment, sport and royal families.
That progression illustrates something unusual about entrepreneurship in events. The distance between your first client and a completely different level of work can sometimes be surprisingly short.
You don't necessarily need to invent another product to move into a larger market. You need somebody to trust you with a bigger event.
Deliver that successfully and the process repeats.
Blackman later relocated to the United States and is now based in Austin, Texas. Austin itself is an interesting place for someone coming from the events world. It combines entrepreneurship, technology, music, hospitality and major international gatherings in a city where the boundaries between those industries are often fairly loose.
For a British entrepreneur whose career began in events, there is something rather familiar about that mixture.
Relationships become part of the company's value
There is a temptation when discussing entrepreneurship to concentrate almost entirely on growth, revenue and scale. Those things obviously matter, but they don't fully explain how many events businesses actually develop.
Contacts accumulate over years.
A photographer you work with on a small event might later introduce you to a client. Someone who attended an event may call several years afterwards. A supplier becomes a friend. A former client moves to another company and brings you with them. Occasionally somebody you met socially ends up generating more business than a carefully planned marketing campaign ever did.
It isn't always particularly measurable.
For entrepreneurs accustomed to dashboards and attribution models, that can make events seem rather old-fashioned. In some respects, it is. Personal recommendation still carries enormous weight.
Joe Blackman's career eventually extended beyond producing events into wider business and international relationships, but there is an obvious connection between the two. The events world teaches entrepreneurs quickly how to deal with people from completely different backgrounds, how to walk into rooms where they know nobody and, perhaps most importantly, how to make people want to work with them again.
Those aren't exclusively events skills. They are entrepreneurial ones.
Events force entrepreneurs to understand people
The best event isn't necessarily the most expensive one.
It isn't always the one with the biggest production budget either. Some enormously expensive events are strangely forgettable, while relatively simple ones can create a room people are still talking about years later.
Understanding that difference requires understanding people.
Why are they coming? Who do they want to meet? How should the room feel? What will make somebody stay for another hour rather than quietly disappear after dinner?
That human element is difficult to reduce to a spreadsheet.
It is also why entrepreneurs can thrive in events. Entrepreneurs tend to notice gaps between what exists and what people actually want. Events provide an almost immediate laboratory for testing that instinct.
If nobody buys a ticket, you learn something.
If everybody leaves early, you learn something else.
And if guests are still there when the venue is trying to turn the lights on and encourage them towards the exit, you've probably got quite a lot right.
Technology changed the tools, not the fundamental business
The mechanics of running an events company have changed enormously.
Social media transformed promotion. Ticketing moved online. Event technology became an industry in its own right. Virtual and hybrid events expanded dramatically during the pandemic, while data now allows organisers to understand audiences in ways that would have seemed extraordinary a couple of decades ago.
But the fundamental entrepreneurial proposition hasn't changed nearly as much.
Somebody still needs an idea. Somebody still needs to convince other people that the idea is worth their time or money. And somebody has to take responsibility for turning it into reality.
For Joe Blackman and many other entrepreneurs who built businesses in the events industry , that combination was what made the sector attractive in the first place. It offered the possibility of starting relatively small while thinking considerably bigger.
There is no obvious route into events, Joe Blackman MBE says
Perhaps one reason the industry continues producing entrepreneurs is that there has never been one particularly obvious route into it.
People arrive from hospitality, marketing, music, nightlife, travel, theatre, communications and dozens of other backgrounds. Others simply organise something, discover they are good at it and keep going.
That slightly chaotic entry point is probably healthy.
Events benefit from people who haven't all been trained to approach a problem in exactly the same way. They benefit from personalities, unusual ideas and people prepared to attempt things that initially sound slightly unreasonable.
Not every one of those ideas works, naturally. Anyone who has spent enough time around events will have encountered concepts that sounded magnificent over coffee and considerably less magnificent once somebody produced the budget.
But that is entrepreneurship too.
You try things. Some work. Some don't. Occasionally the thing you thought would be enormous disappears without a trace, while the little idea you almost didn't bother pursuing becomes the beginning of a business.
For entrepreneurs in events, that unpredictability isn't really an unfortunate side effect of the industry. It is part of what makes it interesting.
