Business matchmaking: a successful event

A successful event is not the one with the most people. It is the one that delivered what it promised, finished on time and made the participant want to buy a ticket for the next edition before leaving the room. Three things produce that outcome, and none of them is luck.

Step 1: start with a partner, not with a rented venue

At the first edition, fixed cost is the enemy. Instead of renting a hall, look for a space that gains from your event.

A restaurant at a quiet hour lends the space and takes the food and drink. A coworking space lends the room and gains visitors who might become clients. A business association lends its premises and delivers value to its members. In every case, the partner is not a supplier: they share in the result.

Put it on one page: what time the space is available, how many tables, who handles the sound, who charges for what and what happens if the attendance is lower than expected. It is worth reading monetise your space with business matchmaking.

Step 2: key guests before general guests

Every event has two lists. The first is short and defines the value of the ticket: the buyers, the decision makers, the companies the others want to meet. The second is long and pays the bill.

Start with the first. Look in your region for whoever is responsible for purchasing, supply or contracting services. Ask how the company looks for suppliers today and what it intends to contract in the coming months. If the answer fits what your participants sell, you have an anchor. Put the demand in writing and use it as a sales argument.

Only then open general registration. The reverse order, filling the room first and looking for a buyer later, is the most common reason a second edition does not sell. Go deeper in anchor companies and in curating participants.

Step 3: the design of the room, done with numbers

Before printing an invitation, close the arithmetic. At a table with S seats, each person talks to S minus 1 people per round. With R rounds, they meet R × (S minus 1) people.

Example: 50 participants, tables of 5 seats. That is 10 tables and 4 new people per round. Over 8 rounds, each participant meets 32 of the other 49 people. With 3 minutes of speaking, each round takes 15 minutes of presentation plus 2 minutes for the change: 17 minutes. Eight rounds give 2 hours and 16 minutes of the format.

Add 40 minutes of registration and opening, 20 minutes of break and 15 for the close, and the event takes a little over 3 and a half hours. That is the time that goes on the invitation, and it has to be right before the promotion, not after. The full reasoning is in how many rounds fit in your event.

What goes wrong on the day

• Starting late. Every 10 minutes of delay costs half a round. Start on time

even with the room half full.

• Not explaining the format. Two minutes of explanation at the start save

twenty of confusion during the changes.

• Leaving the speaking time loose. Without a clock, there is always someone

who speaks too long. The sense of unfairness is what most appears in the feedback.

• Having no plan for absences. Confirmations that do not show up are the

rule, not the exception. Without a recalculation, you are left with a table where one person sits alone.

• Closing without a call to the next edition. The best moment to sell the

next event is while the room is still full.

What the software solves and what stays with you

What is strategic stays with you: who comes, the price, the theme, the mood of the room. The software takes care of what is repetitive checking and prone to error.

In Rodada de Sucesso, you enter participants, tables and seats and the planner shows the configuration that room supports, with measured alternatives. The schedule is generated with zero repetition as a hard rule, also avoiding colleagues from the same company at the same table.

During the event, the operation controls the speaking time, the interval between speakers and the table change, with start and pause, forward and back, jump to a specific round, automatic advance and keyboard shortcuts. The audible alerts are configurable by file for the start, 15 seconds remaining, the change, the break and the close, and they can be voice recordings. The second screen projects the round, the clock and the instruction, and shows the table map during the break.

The operational intelligence sweep warns about absences, an absent anchor, a table with one person only and meetings that should not happen, with a suggestion. And the state is saved periodically, so a computer crash does not lose the event.

How to know whether it worked

Do not trust the end-of-day feeling. Measure:

• actual attendance against registrations;
• conversations planned against held and missed;
• table utilisation;
• how many people each participant met;
• the assessment sent to participants after the event.

Those numbers are what you show the sponsor and the partner in order to close the next edition. And they are what turns a successful event into a series of successful events. Continue with what to do after the event and how to turn feedback into improvements.