The money pouring into trade shows is a vote of confidence. What it changes on the show floor is still being decided.
Watch this.
It’s move-in day. The hall lights are halfway up. A forklift is beeping somewhere behind a wall of crates, and your crew lead is walking the aisle with a floor plan in one hand and a coffee in the other.
Someone from show management stops by, the same person who’s stopped by for years. The two of you sort out a power drop before the exhibitor’s flight even lands.
That small exchange is how a lot of this industry has worked. People who know each other, solving problems on the floor before they become the exhibitor’s problem.
Now picture that same morning two years from now. Same hall. Same show. A new owner at the top, new policies coming down, and maybe a different name on the badge of the person walking toward you.
If you lead a company that serves exhibitors, you may have caught yourself wondering about some version of that over the past few months.
- Will the people I’ve worked with at this show for years still be there?
- Will decisions about my work get made by someone who’s never walked this floor?
- Will someone who’s never seen my work decide what my rates should be?
- Am I big enough to matter to them anymore? Should I be thinking about selling?
Those questions don’t tend to come up in a meeting. They come up on the drive home.
What the deal headlines tell you, and what they leave out
Informa’s roughly $3 billion acquisition of Clarion Events gives the world’s largest exhibition organizer more than 1,000 brands. It follows private equity buyouts of several other big show organizers.
One estimate in Andrea Doyle’s reporting for Skift Meetings puts trade show acquisitions at about $8.5 billion in six months.
That’s a vote of confidence in this industry, and a big one. Investors are betting that people will keep wanting to meet face to face.
Andrea’s article, “After Informa-Clarion, Who Buys Next?”, looks at where all this goes next, and she was kind enough to include my take. One line in her piece stayed with me. “The financial case for consolidation is easier to see than the operational consequences.”
What I told her was that the big question is what this much growth changes underneath the growth. Put plainly, when a company gets this big, the way it makes decisions, sets prices and works with its partners has to change too.
That’s true for Informa. It’s just as true for every company that serves its shows, including yours.
Why the size of these deals changes the math for your company
Scale exists to create efficiencies. That’s a reasonable goal for a deal this size. Informa has identified about $66 million a year in cost savings tied to Clarion.
Scale can also create distance. Shows aren’t interchangeable. Each one has its own community, its own customers and relationships built over decades. The farther the decisions move from those relationships, the easier it gets to decide by the numbers and lose sight of what the exhibitor actually values.
Size also brings leverage. A company negotiating across a global portfolio comes to venues, suppliers and partners with more weight than it had before. That’s what scale does, whoever owns it.
And there’s one more thing scale changes. A policy set at the top of a company with more than 1,000 brands can reach every one of those shows at once.
What this industry learned the last time the rules changed
Years ago, I co-founded one of the independent companies that set up exhibits on the show floor. Some shows started writing rules that limited who could do that work. On the surface it looked like a fight over one show here or there. If those rules had held, they could have set a precedent that locked independent companies out of shows across the country.
A group of us joined an antitrust suit. That legal challenge created the momentum for industry change at the time.
The battle brought the issue into the open, and exhibitors started to see how important it was to choose who set up their exhibits. The exhibitor’s voice had a great impact on who gets to do that work today.
That voice is a big part of why many of the companies who service exhibitors exist. When I got into this business, exhibits were getting more complex and what the exhibitor needed was getting lost. Companies like ours grew up to fill that gap.
I also watched what happens when a cost lands on the exhibitor and stays there. Material handling costs climbed years ago, and they’ve stayed up. No one announced it as a turning point. It just became the way things were.
The blindside that gets you is the slow one.
Why your exhibitor’s budget is your business right now
The Exhibitor Advocate’s 2025 Annual Survey of Exhibition Rates found that 55% of exhibitors say increased costs outweigh the value of the investment. And 64% say they’re scaling back their overall presence at events. The Exhibitor Advocate’s research also found that three out of four still rate the value of their event program as excellent or good.
Read those together. Exhibitors believe in shows. They’re out of room in the budget.
When an exhibitor’s budget gets squeezed, they cut back on what they buy from companies like yours. A smaller exhibit. Fewer labor hours. Fewer services around the booth. So when your exhibitors’ budgets shrink, your revenue shrinks with them, no matter who owns the show.
The opening this creates for the companies closest to the exhibitor
In a company with more than 1,000 brands, many of the calls on pricing, policies and partners can end up with people who don’t work any one show day to day. That makes the people standing next to the exhibitor on the floor more valuable.
You hear what the exhibitor is worried about before anyone else does. You see where costs are landing, where a new requirement confuses people and where the show experience starts to break down.
A new owner learning this many shows needs what you know. The question is whether what you see reaches the room where decisions get made, or stays on the floor.
When the company you’re dealing with gets much bigger, one company speaking alone is easy to miss. That’s what industry associations are for, the ones that represent exhibit houses, labor management companies and the other types of companies that serve exhibitors. When those show rules came down years ago, we pulled the right people together, and we were stronger in numbers.
If your company isn’t active in the association for your part of the business, this is a good time to start. If it is, bring them what you’re hearing on the floor.
Three ways to look through the windshield before the changes reach your floor
Those questions on the drive home are worth taking seriously. Every number on your desk is already history. It tells you how last season went and nothing about what this wave of deals will do to the next one.
That’s what the windshield is for. You look at what’s coming toward you while there’s still time to steer.
You don’t need to predict what every new show owner will do. You need to look through the windshield in three directions.
- Look far ahead. Where is this heading? Andrea’s Skift Meetings story points to smaller organizers, suppliers and event technology companies as possible next deals. Are you a likely buyer, a likely target, or about to compete against a company that just got bought?
- Look at what’s already impacting your company and customers. What’s changed in the past year at your biggest shows, how pricing conversations go, or how new requirements show up in the exhibitor service manual?
- Look at what’s right in front of you. How much of your revenue now comes from shows that share one owner? If one policy changed across all of them, what would it do to your year?
Five moves that make your company stronger whichever way this goes
- Know more than one person at every show. When ownership changes, people move. If your relationship at a show runs through one contact, it can leave with them. Get to know the show manager, the operations team and the general service contractor’s people on the floor.
- Introduce yourself to the new people early. When a show’s team changes, reach out in the first few weeks and offer what you know about its exhibitors and what move-in day looks like from your side. The first people a new owner hears from often become the ones they call.
- Write down what you see. When a cost shifts, a new requirement confuses an exhibitor or a policy changes with little notice, note the show, the date and what it cost. When you bring that to your association or to show management, you’ll have specifics they can act on.
- Help your exhibitors get more from a tighter budget. They’re making hard calls on what to cut. Ask what they need the show to produce, then help them find the version that gets there for less. The partners who help an exhibitor justify the show are the ones that exhibitor keeps.
- Build a company that has options. Whether you plan to grow, partner with someone or sell your business, the same work gets you ready. This month, pull last year’s revenue by show owner and see how much of it depends on any one of them. If one owner’s decisions could swing your year, start widening your customer base now, while the timing is still yours.
Listen to this
Before you head back to the floor
Take two minutes. Write down the one thing about all of this that worries you most for your company. Don’t try to solve it yet. Just name it.
Then ask yourself who you’ve talked to about it. If the answer is no one, start there. Call one peer who serves the same shows and compare notes. Make it a topic at your next industry association meeting.
The money has made its decision. Live events are worth betting on. What those bets build on the show floor over the next few years is still being decided, and it’ll be shaped by whoever speaks up while it’s happening.
The exhibitor’s voice changed this industry once. The exhibitors who count on you now will be better served if your voice is in the room while the industry as a whole navigates the change new owners will be bringing to the shows.
I leave you with this one final question to think about. When the show gets a new owner, who speaks for the floor?
Pat Alacqua has built his own companies. He’s the author of the Amazon best-selling book Obstacles to Opportunity: Transforming Business Challenges into Triumphs. Pat helps founders, CEOs, and leadership teams fix what growth breaks. He can be reached at Pat@PatAlacqua.com.
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