Matrix Events

Most trade show companies sell their builds to clients, who then throw them away.

One company decided there had to be a different way.

They were right.

The model is simple in concept and genuinely hard to execute.

Instead of selling trade show builds that end up in a dumpster after the event, they rent everything. It comes back off the floor, goes back on the shelf, and gets rented again. Nothing gets thrown away.

To become a B Corp they had to measure everything. Every material, every process, every output. And they're the only company in the trade show industry that's done it.

What I find compelling about it isn't just the environmental angle. It's that they built a business around a belief and made the financials work inside that constraint. That's a harder thing to do than it sounds.

The events industry has a real sustainability conversation ahead of it. Large-scale productions generate a significant amount of waste, and most of the sector isn't really grappling with that yet.

The companies that start building around it now are going to be in a very different position when procurement teams and CMOs start asking the question seriously. And they will.

Is sustainability something your team actively considers when selecting event partners, or is it still more of a nice-to-have?

If your event agency doesn't know your objective, they're just executing.

And ex*****on without strategy is how you end up with a great-looking event that generates nothing.

I've been on both sides of this dynamic for 22 years, and the difference in outcomes is significant.

When a client comes to us with full context, the business objective, the campaign it's part of, the specific outcome they're trying to drive, we make completely different decisions. Venue, format, agenda design, the countless decisions we make onsite. All of it gets filtered through the actual goal.

When we're just executing a brief, we execute it well. But we're working without the why. And that means when something unexpected happens, when a decision needs to be made quickly onsite, we're guessing at what actually matters to the client.

The clients who treat the agency relationship as a genuine partnership consistently get more from the same budget. Not because we work harder for them, but because the work is pointed in the right direction from the start.

It takes more from the client too. A solid brief, an honest conversation about objectives, and the willingness to have the strategy challenged before the plan is set. That's an investment of time and trust.

But the events that come out the other side feel different. They have a coherence to them. The attendees feel it. The sales team feels it. And the ROI reflects it.

How much strategic context do you typically share with your event agency before the brief goes out?

A one-off event is a tactic.

A multi-city event series is a campaign.

Most field marketers are running the first one and expecting results from the second.

At the highest level of marketing, everything is a campaign. You pick a message, you build around an objective, and you take it to every market that matters. Digital, social, email — none of it is siloed to a single location.

Events are often the exception. A flagship conference here, a customer dinner there, a roadshow that hits three cities if the budget allows. Each one treated as its own thing, measured on its own terms, disconnected from the broader campaign running alongside it.

The shift happens when you start designing your event series the way you design a campaign. Same narrative thread, same objective, same message landing in every market you're already investing in digitally. Now the event isn't a one-off. It's the live layer of something bigger.

That's when the numbers start to make sense to leadership. It's not "we spent $X on an event in Austin." It's "we ran a national campaign and the live component hit six markets."

The budget conversation changes. The attribution conversation changes. And the events themselves get sharper because they have a job to do inside a larger strategy.

The companies doing this well aren't running events. They're running integrated programs that happen to include events.

Are your events connected to a broader campaign narrative, or are they still operating as standalone activations?

The clients who get the most out of us are the ones who tell us why.

Not just the deliverables list. The actual objective sitting behind the event. What it's meant to move, who it's meant to land with, what success looks like six months after everyone goes home.

When we know the why, every decision on the ground aligns with it. When we don't, we can still execute beautifully and end up solving the wrong problem entirely.

This is the bit that gets me up in the morning. Cutting through a noisy market and figuring out what's actually going to land.

Ex*****on without strategy is just expensive logistics.

How much of the strategic context do you share when you brief an event partner?

The box wasn't going to make it to San Francisco. The whole event ran through that one shipment.

So we pivoted. Rebuilt the kit that morning, dumped nine boxes at the airline counter, I flew it out myself. Landed alone, two trolleys to a rental van, straight to the stadium. The client never knew.

The save looks like luck. It isn't. A schedule kept open, a team that can rebuild from zero, vendors who pick up the phone. Hustle is the last 5%. The rest is what you build long before the crisis shows up.

A client should experience the event, not the production of it.

What's the closest call you've had where the client never knew?

The best activation at EO Colorado's 30th Anniversary wasn't built by a production company.

It was built by a member with a 95-year-old tree.

This past weekend, we produced EO Colorado's 30th Anniversary Celebration. One activation stood out above everything else: the "Wall of Presidents."

Created by EO Colorado member Mike Arzt, the installation featured slices from a 95-year-old Colorado tree. Each slice represented one of the 30 presidents who shaped EO Colorado over three decades.

The tree had weathered storms, droughts, floods, and decades of change. Much like the entrepreneurs who have led and grown this chapter.

One attendee told Mike, "I think that will be the part of the night people are talking about for years to come."

That's the power of thoughtful event design. The smallest details create the biggest memories.

Congratulations to EO Colorado on 30 incredible years.