How the good stuff gets killed

K
Aug 4
4 min read

Updated: Sep 8

“Don’t use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training.” - CS Lewis, 1959

I chanced upon an online picture of a random event brochure while browsing at the social media feed in my Wechat one day. It reminded me of how I used to spend hours on end refining the design of our brochures and website for our Asia Investment Conference (AIC) event.

I always made sure that the alignment for our collaterals was in place, appropriate font faces, font size standardized, and that the formatting was flawless. Yet at the same time, I was responsible for the overall P&L of the event. This meant sourcing, negotiating, and closing sponsors, and making sure that cash flow was in positive territory. Largely because both my money and reputation was on the line.

Some might say the time and energy might be better spent on talking to more sponsors to bring in more money. If I had a higher up, I think that would surely be their feedback: “Spend more time looking for sponsorship dollars rather than sweat over curating the perfect speaker rundown or making sure our marketing collaterals are done to perfection.”

Sometimes the time I spend on aesthetics and event rundown would be disproportionate to the time spent on sponsor outreach. I would stay up all night just to get our agenda right, get every alignment on the website to perfection, making sure that the panel discussions were up to date with the latest trends taking place in the industry. The marketing and sales outreach was also a laborious process. But by the third iteration, we had nearly systemized our execution using automation. With just a click of a finger, thousands of email invites would be sent, we would head off to lunch and come back an hour later with easily anywhere between twenty to fifty responses.

I would also study our competitors closely. I would analyze their creative pricing strategies, their panel topics, the kind of online ticketing portals that were being used, and think for hours how we could do things better and differently. As a result, every sponsorship closed or ticket sold meant more than simply just dollars. It meant that we had done something right.

That said, I had faced many challenging and conflicting moments. Speakers who dropped out midway at the last minute, sponsor rejection (and sometimes nasty) emails, sponsors who were willing to pay huge amounts in exchange for bending a panel discussion to their personal interests, potentially throwing our conference theme off-track.

And then there were those who paid minimal sponsorship dollars but ended up inviting more than their designated share of guests. It was a fine balance of having to preserve and uphold the quality of the turnout, ensuring the panel discussions were relevant to the speakers and attendees, all the while making sure that the overall economics stay above water.

It was difficult to accurately quantify what actually made AIC successful: Was it our unrelenting sales pitches? The rockstar speaker line-up? The obsessive need for perfectly designed publicity materials? The touch of making sure that everything ran smoothly on that day, or the goodwill of friends? Maybe it was a mix of everything.

And then the pandemic struck in 2020. The untimely "circuit breaker" brought all face-to-face events to a standstill, effectively crippling our efforts and momentum in assembling the fifth installation of AIC.

Even past the aftermath of COVID-19, many of our friends, past attendees, including sponsors had written to me, asking when we were planning to hold the event again. The reply had always been the same: “we are still evaluating and will definitely reach out once we have firmed up a date”.

I remain deeply grateful for these people who had reached out personally to give us the vote of confidence.

Many had also approached me to restart the event. Some had even offered money to invest. Truth is I had no bandwidth to continue doing this. While we operated on a somewhat “asset-light” mode with very minimal manpower, you still needed someone to follow execution like a hawk. Without money on the line and skin in the game, no one would take ultimate ownership and responsibility for the outcome.

Yet, if an investor were to put real money into this venture, the Asia Investment Conference might have turned out very differently.

We would have intense weekly catch up meetings to take stock of progress, not to mention monthly milestones and year end targets, doing more events every year by adopting profit-sharing incentives.

There is nothing wrong in taking a good idea or product and bringing it to its full potential. But I think AIC turned out successfully the way it was because every stage of the curation and design process had been painstakingly personal - or at least it had been for me.

The thing is: most of the time, the stakeholders who try to do this often just end up prioritizing sponsorship dollars over making a good product, or they just get caught up in the publicity and social hype, or wind up thinking about how much profit they can reap from selling it in five years.

And that exactly is how the good stuff gets killed.