Short YouTube interview segment where Ricardo Molina asks about intentionally limiting event size. Speaker B (a PR veteran) explains they cap events around 150–200 attendees to preserve networking quality, service level, and manage costs; Molina adds that close-knit, well-curated communities often intentionally control size to guarantee sponsor-delegate matchmaking and attendee intimacy.
Do you purposely keep it at a certain level? Is there any, any reason why they don't grow further? Because you obviously. One of the kind of main ideas. Okay, so if you run out one or two previous years, why don't you get a bigger venue? Why don't you kind of expand that and what are your thoughts on that?
So having been in PR for 20 years or so, I've been to a lot of conferences and a lot of events, as you can imagine. And I always like most as well as, you know, good content and learning. It's the meeting people and it's the networking. Now with our Wednesday night party, Thursday conference and Thursday night party, you can get around 150, 200 people pretty easily. And you know, you'll get to meet speakers on the Thursday and bump into people Wednesday and you can, you can kind of get around everyone. And I really like that. I think when things get bigger and bigger, it makes it more difficult and it just gets, it gets, it gets, it gets tricky and then everything's a bit more difficult in terms of quality of service, of, you know, the best lunches and the best venues and prices go up and all these sorts of things. And so we've kind of taken the decision that 150, 200 pushes is kind of our sweet spot. That's our limit. We can sell tickets at that level. Well, it's not particularly difficult to sell them. There's a demand and there's that value of networking and interaction and relationship. And you don't walk into our Wednesday night. You might fly into Singapore or LA or New York or London. You go to the free bar, you go to the party the night before, and you don't walk in there and think, oh my God, there's, there's a thousand people. Where do I start? You know, you walk in and you go, actually, I know some people already. There's some new faces. So that's our approach. I'm sure people may differ in opinion, though.
Well, the interesting trend that we're seeing with communities that are, I'd say, truly loved by the members and communities that, and entrepreneurs that are really placing a lot of importance in their audience, there is a commonality where they want to keep the numbers at a level that they are able to control them. And that control just means able for them to guarantee that their sponsors are meeting the right kind of individuals, that the sponsors are having the right sort of conversations operationally, that they can manage all that interaction, that the delegates and attendees are also able to again, understand and get to create that level of intimacy within the events. Are they organized? Because then that's kind of when people are left the event excited, raving about it, and feeling that they've actually done a lot of business with people.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. I think if I think of some of our suppliers that might do payment processing or monetization solutions or fraud solutions, they. They don't want to talk to 3,000 people. They want to talk to five people who are head of revenue management at Dating Brands. So I think if you, you know, what's that phrase? As your circle shrinks, your net worth grows, or whatever it is, you know, I think a smaller number of quality people benefits everyone, is my opinion.
