Editor’s Note: Diversifying Your Business
By Bruce Tepper, CITE
Though a brighter economic scene certainly awaits us at some point, everyone reading this must continue to generate revenue, even in these difficult times. In that vein, this issue is focused on diversifying your approach to the market – looking for new opportunities wherever they may be.
Since this is an interactive newsletter, we encourage readers to share ideas you have for finding new prospects or expanding business with existing ones without waiting for market conditions to make that task easier.
Obviously this is not the first economic downturn in (most of) our adult lives. It reminds me of a conversation I had shortly after 9-11 with the late Aldo Marsili of Millennium Hotels. We discussed the devastating impact of 9-11 on tourism in New York and responses from the travel and tourism industry. Aldo said that (surprisingly to me), Millennium was doing OK and would get through those very difficult times, however not as the result of their traditional customer base: commercial (including meetings & incentives) and leisure travelers.
The destruction of the World Trade Center created a shortage of office space in Manhattan. Millennium Hotels and Resorts responded by removing the beds from a number of rooms and converting those rooms into “offices.” As he put it, “in the end, it’s just real estate and very little was required to convert it to another use.”
In our MICE Incentive Travel Exchange Newsletter last spring, I interviewed Rich Venezio of Forum Events in New York (http://mice.incentivetravelexchange.com/?paged=3 for the audio interview and http://mice.incentivetravelexchange.com/?p=328#more-328 for Rich’s article expanding on the interview). Two of Rich’s largest clients were Bear Stearns and AIG. He literally reinvented his business by broadening his market base from the traditional financial service companies he’d worked with into an entirely new market segment.
For some updated perspectives on diversifying your business, take a few moments to listen to my interview with Steven J. O’Malley, Sr. VP & General Manager of Maxvantage (The Maritz/American Express Alliance) on action strategies for meeting/incentive companies. He offers some excellent ideas for reinforcing industry and customer relationships.
In “Lessons from the Lodging Industry,” Jennifer Brock of Prince Hotels Hawaii shares some techniques that have implications for meeting/incentive planners as well as suppliers. As she points out, it’s worth revisiting what fits your business and what doesn’t and then be ready to move forward with opportunities that might have been ignored in the past.
Madelyn Marusa of Allied/PRA Destination Management looks at the issue from a DMC perspective in “Refocusing Your Business…” and offers some ideas for action steps that apply to meeting/incentive planners as much as they do to a DMC. Her very thoughtful article will have you looking at your entire business model to do what’s necessary in today’s environment.
In my article, “Generating Revenue When They’re not Traveling,” you’ll find some comments on client relationships and potential revenue streams you may not be pursuing these days and may be well worth your time and effort to integrate into your business.
For a hotel, it is just real estate. For a meeting/incentive planner or DMC, it’s consultation and customized design. How about your business? Are you looking at market segments you’ve ignored in the past as unprofitable and/or uninteresting but now worthy of your time and attention? Are you partnering or working with other organizations to perhaps cross-sell products and services to each others’ customers?
Innovation is needed more today than any time in the recent past. I hope you’ll benefit from what our contributors have to offer in this issue and be willing to share any good ideas you may have. A healthy meeting/incentive industry benefits everyone!
