Co-founder of CloserStill Group, Phil Soar, offers a how-to on flipping an exhibition company for over a billion dollars
At the beginning of 2009, Andy Center and I put £700,000 into the start-up business that became CloserStill. Phil Nelson and Michael Westcott joined us soon afterwards. We had no events, no office, no staff and no money apart from our own investment. Our first launch was The London Vet Show in November 2009.
In May 2026, CloserStill was sold at a valuation of £1.3bn/$1.77bn. That represents a multiplication in value of a modest 1,857 times in 15 years (excluding Covid years). Apart from the UBM sale to Informa, this is the most ever paid for an exhibition company.
So, for anyone looking to pocket a sum of $2bn in 2040, here are 14 simple tips on how to do it.
1. Start with nothing. Illogical as that may seem, it endows freedom. You don’t have to struggle with legacy shows and legacy staff – these can drain your time and energy. The larger the company, the more it becomes an administration vehicle rather than an entrepreneurial vehicle. Starting from nothing, you decide which sectors to launch into, where to do it and (hopefully) hire whom you like. CloserStill has 24 shows in 2026 with a turnover of more than $5m. Of those, 10 were original launches.
2. It helps to find a genius. Phil Nelson was CloserStill’s. Very focused, driving the sales floor, running the re-books, always there. Never fancy, always down to earth. Try to find one.
3. Give your staff shares. If there is a single thing which is surely unique about CloserStill, it is that over most of our life the staff have been given shares – not share options, but real shares. When the current deal concludes, there will be 370 current and past employees who will receive meaningful amounts. When we last had a transaction, in 2018, there were 63 employees who received more than £100,000.
Even though we are projecting £100m profit in 2026, the employees of CloserStill still own 36% of the company. I still think that our shareholding policy has been really special and a source of quiet pleasure for the founders.
I believe that no other UK exhibition company has ever done anything like this (correct me if I am wrong). If there is any way of helping employees believe that they are part of something, it is giving shares openly.
Not all companies can do this. But because Andy and I started the company from scratch, there were no existing shareholders – which meant we could allocate a large block of shares for future employees (on the assumption we would eventually have some employees of course). It is your employees, your show directors, who make the company what it is – never forget that, ever.
4. Choose a silly name. We bought an off-the-shelf company with a meaningless name. Three months later Andy wandered in and told us he had renamed the company CloserStill. Our expressions were pained and bewildered. Apparently Closer and Still were the best-selling albums of some popular music ensemble Andy liked. We raised our eyebrows and moved on. Names don’t matter much.
5. Understand what the trade show business is all about. What are the value drivers? What will a buyer pay for? There are three key points. Slots are critical – don’t launch a giftware show or a vet show in the BDC or Harrogate if you want to be a billionaire because you are unlikely to be able to move it to a larger venue. They won’t give you a slot.
Understand that the rebook system on-site is critical – it’s like a subscription to Vogue. It guarantees next year’s revenue, it discourages potential competitors, it proves resilience. Neglect it and your exhibitors can soon forget your show.
Exploit the fact that the trade show business is price inelastic – there is always room to raise prices intelligently above inflation. Learn to ask “What will the market bear?” Space price and sponsorship is regularly no more than 20% of an exhibitor’s total expenditure at a show. And never price at anything other than an xx9.
Don’t mess around with silly prices – debate every single price. Do you really think that someone who will pay £669 won’t pay £679? Almost every show in the UK underprices its product. If you want to check whether a company is well-run, just go on their websites and check their prices. If they are not xx9 then their management is not paying attention.
6. Pick the sectors you want to work in very carefully. Ideally, pick sectors which are a growing percentage of GDP in the markets in which you operate – CloserStill chose Medical/Health and the top end of IT and we stuck to that. With a turnover approaching £300m, 75% of our business is still basically in IT and Medical/Health. This is easy to say, very hard to do.
7. People – the inevitable cliché. Never forget that everyone is the hero of their own lives. Employ good people – of course. But employing good people is not actually the key. The key is what you do with them afterwards. Everyone wants to belong, to be part of something successful. Almost everyone will become more than you expect if they feel they are part of something worthwhile. We think this is the reason CloserStill has won so many awards in the last 12 years.
8. Revenue not costs. I have sat in many budget meetings. The story is always the same – 95% of the time is spent going-over every cost line, no matter how small, and no more than 5% talking about revenues. The latter usually consists of: “Put up prices at inflation? Agreed?”
I have lost count of the number of times a new CEO from outside the industry decided that their prime mission is cost-cutting – going to the NEC, Melville or GES, or LiveBuzz and shaving costs everywhere they can. As if this is the route to glory. It isn’t.
The trade show business is an ecosystem. The venues, suppliers and organisers depend on each other. They all need to make sufficient returns to keep the machine turning. They are your friends, not your enemies. This is not to say that arguing with Excel about a 10% rack rate rise is wrong. And there are one or two things which do deserve debate – Wi-Fi charges at some venues for exhibitors have become absurd, for example.
But if the venues go broke, where will we run our shows? If our suppliers go broke, then who will build our stands? Costs should be seen as a percentage of revenue – falling as a show gets bigger – not as some absolute which needs to be cut. CloserStill got where it is by concentrating on revenues – by saying, for many years, that the costs could go up 5% as long as the revenues went up at 5+5%. Cutting costs, I promise you, will not be the route to your $2bn.
9. Don’t do anything silly. I don’t know where to start on this point – so let’s leave it at UBM, Interiors, EcoBuild and IFSEC.
10. Fight to avoid the BPUs – the Business Prevention Units. All growing companies fall prey eventually to the BPU disease. Don’t get an HR department until it is utterly unavoidable (such as when a PE company with their own internal rules demands it). Outsource HR record-keeping and dispute resolution to an external operator.
And don’t have “pricing units” or all those “awareness of heaven-knows-what-units” and divisions which insist on plastering the name of the parent company on all the shows. Your exhibitors know their event as “The XXX Show” – they don’t give a damn who owns it.
11. Chase the winners, abandon the losers. It’s easy to spend time and money trying to resuscitate a declining show and leaving the winners alone, because they don’t need help. This is nonsense. It is far easier to generate an extra £200,000 revenue from a £10m show than a struggling £1m show.
It’s blindingly obvious yet so easy to ignore. Closer had its failures – we tried solar for a time, we looked at bio-generation as a food and energy source, we looked at African and Asian food events. We cut them pretty quickly. If you have a portfolio of events, never worry about culling the least successful ones and redeploying your people. Chase your winners, always.
12. Don’t wander round the world planting flags. From about 2014 to 2019 private equity firms were constantly nagging us “Why aren’t you in China?” It was the mood of the times but we didn’t go there. The theme moved to the Gulf. And we are not there either. Not because they cannot be excellent markets, but because we were a small company with limited resources and we had to focus.
Money wasn’t the problem; the problem was people and time. We had no inside knowledge of the markets, and we had no spare capacity or spare people to send over there for two years. If you are an Informa or RX you can perhaps find people inside your business. We didn’t have those luxuries. We entered the French and German markets by employing French and German people in the UK and running those markets from London.
We did exactly the same (to begin with) in the USA. Since then, apart from the odd show we acquired with UKI, we have moved only into Spain and Singapore. Thus, we focus intently on just six markets – UK, USA, France, Germany, Spain, Singapore. We focus on a small number of verticals, and a small number of countries and markets.
13. 90% of what passes for brilliance is really about standing back and catching the mood – the ebb and flow of the world, seeing the big picture and ignoring the background noise. Don’t ever think you are some sort of Einstein – you are (almost certainly) not.
14. Don’t paint silly company mottos on the walls.
Source: www.exhibitionworld.co.uk
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