the third party planner

Brian Stevens, ConferenceDirect

Sustainability & Virtualness
Fall 2011

BRIAN D. STEVENS is founding president and CEO of ConferenceDirect, a full-service site selection, contract negotiation and meeting management firm based in Los Angeles, CA. MPG* first interviewed Brian in the fall of 2006.

MPG: When we spoke in 2006, ConferenceDirect was 7 years old and had about 200 associates. Where is your company now and tell us about your future plans?
Brian: ConferenceDirect has grown to over 380 associates. Our future plans are to expand internationally and we are growing in terms of SMMP, something that didn’t exist when we last talked.

What is SMMP?
Corporate America is requiring us to get into “Strategic Meeting Management Programs.” It’s the future of procurement. Corporations are consolidating large spends and we are trying to get our arms around it for some of our clients who want to move in that direction.

Here’s an example – a mature company like Seimans Corporation has a procurement department. Three years ago you could not buy a computer without procurement’s approval on which computer to buy but they could plan a million dollar meeting with no procurement oversight. The procurement department now wants the meetings department to use tools that would enable them to procure hotels the same way they buy computers.

We have the tools that aggregate spend for the things we source for meetings – hotels, A/V, transportation – everything from trade show booths to marketing materials. For example, a company president decides that he wants all of the senior management to spend a month in China. If they have fifty divisions that are going to use hotel rooms once a week, they can negotiate a better deal utilizing rooms for 50 weeks versus a one-time offering. Basically, the aggregation of data into our system enables a company like ours to negotiate much better prices.

How have meetings changed most in the past five years?
I think the greatest change is that organizations are examining the sustainability and the virtualness of their meetings. Allow me to explain using two extreme examples.

The Veterans of World War II, an organization whose membership is declining, has a reunion every year and, after they meet, they may publish a few pictures for the guys that were unable to attend. The other extreme is the Mensa “brainy kids” Convention. Most of these millennial, gen-x and gen-y people are going online to find out what happened at the meeting.

Five years ago, Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist and now they are front and center – pre, during and post meeting. The issue for us is that we are going to have to play ball in that virtual space or get clobbered.

Tell us what the word “trust“ means to you.
Here is my take on the trust issue.I think there has been a general dissolution of trust in corporate America. In 1978, when I joined Hilton, we felt that we were joining a company for life and that the company was a “cradle to grave” solution to our work life. There has been an erosion of that trust. Employment contracts are shorter and management contracts between hotel operators and owners are shorter.

I see the erosion of trust seeping into some of our deals. We had a hotel company that would not allow what we considered to be a reasonable attrition for a client who cancelled a meeting at a luxury hotel and booked a lower-priced property because of the perception issue – the “AIG effect.” The brand would not allow it and the organization paid the cancellation damages but went on to say that they would never use that brand again. We now have a hotel company that can never host that group again – it’s in the organization’s bylaws.

What meeting trends are you observing?
Meeting attrition in 2009-10 has gotten the attention of the organizers. We booked 6,000 meetings in 2010 and we’ll probably book 7,000 in 2011 but our revenue is going to be flat. We’re up 11-12% in the number of meetings but the size of the meetings is smaller.

I believe that there is pent-up demand and meetings are coming back. 2009 was a terrible year. 2010 was better and 2011 is better still, but we are seeing much more conservative numbers. We are not seeing it in the pickup, it’s in the booking which is not a bad thing. For someone to book 100 rooms and pick up 104 rooms is better than booking 100 rooms and picking up 75. People are trending towards a conservative approach.

Any closing thoughts?
Nowadays, with all the tools that we have and the volume we book, I would never go to market to buy space for a meeting without a meeting planning company. We’re renting new office space for ConferenceDirect in Los Angeles. As much as I know about LA, I would never consider driving up and down Wilshire Boulevard looking for space – I don’t know what I don’t know. My
core job is to run a meeting planning company, it’s not to find the best lease for commercial property.

The core job for most of the organizations we work for is either technology or certification for professionals, education or networking – it’s not planning meetings. If someone is out there by themselves, twisting in the wind, they are leaving money on the table and spending a lot of unnecessary time identifying hotels. Gone are the days that a meeting planner who books one annual convention per year is going out to lunch every week with a different city to look at 52 cities for the meeting. My message to those people who are not now using an intermediary is to reconsider that strategy. 

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