Expos2 - Top Ten FAQ Profile

1. How has the economy affected your show attendance?
2. What do you do differently?
3. Do you offer a self-service model?
4. Where do you concentrate the bulk of your training?
5. What kind of client base have you attracted?
6. What kind of business do you expect this year?
7. What advantages does your software have over some of your competitors?
8. How have you designed your software to work for your market niche?
9. Is your business nationwide?

10. How do you see the future of physical events?

How has the economy affected your show attendance?

2009 has obviously been challenging. I think everyone in our field, from what we hear from convention centers is pretty much true. We dropped about 30% in booth sales. We haven’t really dropped 30% in attendance. But, we have dropped 30% in booth sales just boom. In the fall of last year, we had a record show, record attendance and we had as many booths as we’d ever had. And in the past, your booth sales follow attendance, basically. If your attendance drops, your booth sales are going to drop. If your attendance goes up or stays flat, basically you can expect that it’s going to stay flat. So, we had a record show, we come back and we drop 30% in booth sales. And it was really almost a third. And we came back and had almost the exact same attendance. That was sort of atypical, but we looked up and we can’t explain it.

What do you do differently?

We did a couple of things different than anyone else early on. Because we were going to be B2C, we built storefronts for people where shopping was always possible. We also had the video aspects earlier than anyone else. But others have put them in. People looked at anything that we had that was a better feature and adopted it. That’s exactly what I’d do in their place.

Do you offer a self-service model?

We, at this point, are doing the work with the client just to understand what they’re going to want. But, mostly, yes, the client actually can put up an entire expo themselves. We have a limited number of templates they can use as the base for their show. But, in terms of the actual production of the event, part of what they get when they buy our software is a half day of, basically, introduction training to the software. And after that, we spend really very little time with them. Most of the tasks, the more complicated things for them are pretty much automated or semi-automated in the software.

Where do you concentrate the bulk of your training?

There’s more training that goes on is between them [producers] and their exhibitors. We try to prepare them for that, but they’re going to have to spend really about an hour per booth that they have in the show, getting that person up to speed because that’s where the gap is actually taking place. It doesn’t seem like it’s the producers that don’t know how. It’s the exhibitors that they have to deal with that that have never resized a photo in their life and yet they want to have a booth. Or, they never had a video camera on their computer and they want to be a speaker. That’s where the time is going up.

What kind of client base have you attracted?

We are looking in general, at people who have small expo companies, people that are just exploring how to move from the physical space into the virtual space. Almost all of our customers…we don’t have anyone, I don’t think, that doesn’t already put on some sort of physical event and they’ve just moved over. Our customers do not include major corporations, really. We want to be the every man’s expo. So, our demographics are small entrepreneurs that are putting on events, small expo companies that are already in existence that are looking for adjuncts. We are doing a fair number of job fairs for people as well. We do have events that we’re doing Chaplain University, some larger corporations. We haven’t had GE call us and say they want to do something yet.

What kind of business do you expect this year?

By the end of this year, we expect to be doing about 150 to 200 shows. If you talk to us at the end of next year, I think…if any of the predictions are right in the world, that rising tide will lift our boat along with everyone else, I’m sure. But it will be what, right now, seems to be an incomprehensible number of people using the software. I see how it could happen and especially in our space. We really can handle most of the 200 booth, 100 booth shows that people have out in the world.

What advantages does your software have over some of your competitors?

I would say we designed our event for larger number of booths, they didn’t really design it for very many booths at a time. They’re designed really well for things that have 20, 25 booths total, but, they aren’t really designed for someone who comes in and says, “I want to do the international gem and jewelry show with you. I’ve got 250 booths.” Those sorts of events from the exhibition hall side, don’t really fit very well with them. I think they have more concentrated on the conference side and, for our part, we concentrate more on the expo side. So, our customers, I think, will always be more heavily into booths in general. Again, I don’t expect we’ll be the only people who ever have storefronts in their booths. But right now, because we do, we attract a number of folks who really are looking to actually make sales or to make contacts to drive people to their websites and to actual product pages. We do that very well.

How have you designed your software to work for your market niche?

The technology is different and it’s all delivered through Flash. The front end looks a little bit different in that we were the first to have one to one video chats with people. We sort of saw that as when you go to an expo, that’s just the central. So, as a result of having that, we had live lectures from the very beginning as well as recorded lectures.

Is your business nationwide?

It is global for Expos2 platform and growing outside North America quite rapidly. With our physical events this year we’ll have done 20, 22 events and we’re in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Illinois, Wisconsin and out further west. So, we basically have a pretty good footprint except for in the Northeast. There are spots where we’re not seeing any drops, but they are few and far between. Most places you really see it.

How do you see the future of physical events?

Well, we just had an event that we hosted on our software for a group down in California that did a hypnotherapy summit. It was medical hypnotists, all these different kinds and they basically did it for themselves. I don’t know what you’d call it, B2B, it’s an association more or less, and a continuing education event. So they held this event, and afterwards they were saying, “We’re not going to do another physical event” and so was the competitive show. It is really an eerie sort of thing to see how quickly an industry could be devastated.