Conference company

A Conference Company devises, researches, markets and stages events for a profit.

Business Model

Revenue is earned by charging delegates registration fees (typically USD$1,000 per day) for admission to each programme and through sponsorship. Typical costs include marketing, hotel, speaker fees, documentation, salaries for conference producers who develop the programmes, sales and sponsorship staff who sell the programme.

For a profit to be earned, conference topics usually focus upon business intelligence, covering current topics of interest to the following sectors:

*Accounting
*Banking
*Chemicals
*Construction
*Defence
*Energy
*Finance
*Government
*Human Resources
*Infrastructure
*Information Technology
*Investment
*Law
*Logistics
*Marketing
*Media
*Medicine
*Mining
*Pharmaceuticals
*Strategy
*Tax
*Technology
*Telecommunications
*Transport

Gross profits may be as high as 80% and net profit is usually about 25%.

For franchise companies the holding company would take a 24% cut from any revenue as a service charge.

A typical sales person may be able to achieve commission ratios as high as 10 to 18 % of the revenue generated. A Conference Producer gets on an average 5% of the net profit (revenue after surpassing a delegate revenue bar)

Leading Companies

The first global conference company was the Institute for International Research which began in the early 1970s. From the early 1990s, conferences as a product began to commoditise as other companies replicated IIR's success. The formula has now been largely improved and new companies have risen to be equally competitive. Click here for a comprehensive list of conference companies.

Business Category

Conferences are information products and fall into the same industry classification as trade magazines, business newsletters, Internet publishing, exhibitions, training and business consulting. Often, conference companies would have a publishing arm attached to them, or even as their main business.

Like these related businesses, conference companies research and determine content offerings. Conference Companies, and the Conference Producers who drive their activities, should not be confused with professional conference organisers (PCOs) and meeting planners. Such activity is generically categorised as event management, and relates to logistics work which creates the platform for the content to be delivered. Tasks such as booking hotels and staffing registration desks are part of event management.