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Corporate events don’t exactly conjure up feelings of joy — dry pastries, boring presentations, and pressure to look interested while lap-scrolling on your phone.
But in recent years, as businesses came out of the pandemic eager to push in-person gatherings, company expos have morphed into elaborate affairs with complex pyrotechnics and high-end catering.
Behind many of them is a Blackstone-owned company called Encore, which has through M&A and organic growth quietly taken over a huge swath of the corporate events market in recent years. Six years after Blackstone merged it into another portfolio company, it’s getting ready to go public.
There’s a straight line between Encore’s fortunes and the strength of the economy; marketing budgets are the first things to be cut when profits get squeezed, and Dreamforce-style balloon displays and high-end musical acts (like hiring Nelly) can age badly — or end up as anecdotes in press stories when companies struggle.
CEO Ben Erwin told Semafor that other than a few minor speedbumps earlier in the year, around Liberation Day, that demand from customers remains unflappable. This was Encore’s biggest year ever, beating out 2019, Erwin said. Its results are a sort of proxy for the economy, and suggest that bad vibes are clouding strong underlying performance and business confidence.
“You’ve seen this explosion in medium to large events — these 100- or 1,000- person events — such that the market has never been larger,” he said in an interview.
Erwin acknowledged the company is getting ready for a public offering.
“We have a wonderful owner in Blackstone,” Erwin said. “But there’s advantages to being a public company: our team members being able to more directly share in the success of our business, and having a public company currency certainly helps when you’re thinking about acquisitions.”
Erwin declined to share specific valuation with Semafor, but Encore has a enterprise value of more than $5 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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Encore doesn’t own or operate the venues, but provides staff, build-out services, and technology. Thanks to relationships with hundreds of hotels across the US, it is by far the largest player in the space.
One legacy of the pandemic: companies are convening across America, not just in New York or Washington. Covid meant “you had more event organizers go for places like Las Vegas or Phoenix or Dallas,” where they have stayed, Erwin said.
As to whether AI will replace in-person gathering, Erwin is a firm no.
“You’re going to see continued innovation, which will lead to new companies, new growth, and new ways for human talent to be deployed,” he said. “All of that is going to create the need for events to bring people together.”