ROIC: Return On Investor Conference
The week of Labor Day, I attended a full-day conference in NYC hosting emerging growth companies and investors who invest in them. I arrived the evening before the event to collect my badge and to participate in some prescheduled meetings, both with companies and with investors. Having registered under the name of our sister investment company, I received a badge labeled "INVESTOR." Half of my evening meeting participants failed to show, and Founders of unscheduled companies seized the opportunity to fill those unattended time slots. After my scheduled meetings, I turned my badge around backward so that I could leave the venue without interruption.
The next day, my counterparty for my first meeting failed to show. The second meeting did not have a designated table number, so I needed to message my counterparty through the event's app to communicate to him the table number where I was standing. He never found me. My third meeting went smoothly. Like last night, Founders seized opportunities to capitalize upon any time when I was not obviously engaged in a meeting, including the time during which I briskly strolled to the restroom. I respected the hustle, though I did once again reverse my badge so that I could eat lunch while completing some work uninterrupted. At the end of the day, I returned to my hotel to collect my luggage before heading to Moynihan Hall to catch a train home. I felt exhausted, though I did view a material number of my meetings as productive.
This experience helped me appreciate why my team places such a high hurdle upon conference attendance. Conferences are usually expensive, consume material amounts of time between prep, travel, attendance, and follow-up, and do not always translate into revenue.
However, I do still attend conferences. Half of the conferences I attend throughout the year are first-time attendances, where my team of growth consultants and investment experts believes there is a reasonable probability of a return on investment because of the combination of relatively low registration fees, less expensive travel, limited duration, and density of attendance among emerging growth companies likely to meet our Ideal Client Profile. The other half of the conferences I attend throughout the year are proven revenue generators.
The conference I describe here may yield revenue, though it would benefit from the following enhancements:
Assign Investors dedicated tables, and don't make those investors move.
Place a placard at each table with the investor's name, photo, and meeting agenda.
Use a chime to inform meeting participants that meetings have ended.
Distribute a Code of Conduct for attendees to encourage tasteful meeting solicitations.
Follow up with Investors to thank them for their participation.
Attending conferences offer valuable insights and connections, especially for those focused on investing in or scaling emerging growth companies. While the event had its challenges, including missed meetings and unstructured schedules, the potential for fruitful outcomes remains high when aligned with strategic goals. By refining processes and ensuring a more organized approach, conferences like this can better serve investors and the emerging growth companies they aim to support, maximizing both return on investment and long-term business growth.
Are you an emerging growth company looking for expert guidance to boost your ROI and overall revenue potential? Learn how our proven RevOps services can help refine your sales strategies and 10x your sales.
In our “Solve It” short stories segment, we want to connect (hopefully) entertaining professional experiences to insights that Marion Street Capital derives from pursuing its MISSION, VISION, and PURPOSE. I chose "Solve It" as the title of this series because the MSC mission is helping innovative growth companies SOLVE their most pressing challenges, and because as a child, I was addicted to mysteries like Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, The Hardy Boys, and Encyclopedia Brown.
At MSC, our mission is to help innovative growth companies solve their most pressing challenges. We aspire to be the first name that Founders, CEOs, and Board members consider when thinking about how to best solve material challenges for innovative growth companies. MSC exists to help entrepreneurs build sustainable, market-leading businesses so that our next generation of stakeholders may prosper.