By Brooks Crankshaw, Managing Director, Forbes Partners
For decades, the meetings and events industry has been built on relationships. Founders cultivated trust with corporate clients and delivered conferences, sales kickoffs, incentive trips, and product launches that rarely looked the same twice. The result today is a sector of roughly 12,000 independent operators in the United States, with very few national platforms.¹ That fragmentation is now drawing serious capital.
In the past 18 months, private equity firms and well-capitalized strategics have moved aggressively into corporate event production, experiential agencies, and destination management companies. The playbook is familiar to anyone who watched commercial HVAC, landscaping, or roofing consolidate in earlier cycles. Acquire strong local and regional operators, knit them into a national footprint, and build something the founders could not build alone.
Why Investors Are Paying Attention
Business events generated an estimated $1.8 trillion in global GDP in 2025, which would rank the sector as the world’s sixteenth-largest economy if it stood on its own.² Demand for live, in-person engagement has held up better than many predicted after the pandemic. Annual user conferences, sales meetings, board offsites, and incentive trips get budgeted and renewed year after year. For investors, that creates a quasi-recurring revenue profile in a business that historically traded on creative reputation alone.
What Buyers Are Evaluating
- Share of revenue from repeat enterprise clients versus one-off projects. This measures how much of the top line comes from clients that engage the agency year after year on recurring programs, rather than from one-time RFP wins. Repeat enterprise revenue signals embedded relationships and switching costs, giving buyers more forecasting confidence and supporting higher multiples than transactional, project-based revenue.
- Average client tenure and renewal rates on annual programs. Tenure captures how long flagship corporate accounts such as sales kickoffs, user conferences, and incentive trips have stayed on the books, and renewal rates show how reliably those programs re-up each cycle. Long tenure and high renewals are direct evidence that the agency is producing real ROI for clients, which de-risks the buyer’s underwriting and supports more aggressive post-close growth assumptions.
- Diversification across destinations, end markets, and program types. Buyers look at whether revenue is spread across multiple cities and venues, several industry verticals such as technology, financial services, and life sciences, and a mix of program formats rather than concentrated in one geography or sector. Diversification reduces exposure to single-client or single-market shocks such as a sector downturn or a destination falling out of favor, and it gives the platform more avenues for organic growth.
- Management depth and a transferable client book beyond the founder. This examines whether senior producers, account leads, and operating executives can run programs and hold client relationships without the founder personally being in the room. Founder-dependent agencies carry meaningful key-person risk, which buyers typically price in through lower multiples and longer earnouts; a credible bench accelerates closing and improves headline value.
- Quality of financial reporting, project margins, and operating systems. Buyers expect monthly financials produced on time, margin tracking at the individual program level, and a defensible technology stack for budgeting, staffing, and client billing. Clean reporting and disciplined project economics shorten diligence, reduce quality-of-earnings adjustments, and demonstrate the business can be scaled or integrated without rebuilding the back office.
Two agencies with similar revenue can receive very different valuations. Recurring corporate accounts and contracted annual programs command meaningfully higher multiples than discretionary or single-event work.
Recent Transactions
H.I.G. Capital, 360 Destination Group and CSI DMC. In March 2025, H.I.G. backed the merger of two leading destination management companies, creating Cohera, a combined platform spanning 46 destinations with roughly $200 million in projected revenue.³
The Riverside Company, Impact XM and Jack Morton Worldwide. In January 2026, Riverside-owned Impact XM acquired Jack Morton from Omnicom, forming a 20-office global experiential business covering corporate events, conferences, sponsorships, and trade shows.⁴
Platinum Equity, Czarnowski Collective. Also in January 2026, Platinum acquired one of the country’s largest privately held exhibit and event marketing firms, with explicit plans to pursue add-on acquisitions.⁵
What This Means for Owners and Investors
Founders in this industry often underestimate how much the buyer universe has shifted. A well-run agency with sticky enterprise clients and a management team beyond the founder is exactly what today’s capital is looking for. Companies that engage early in the cycle tend to negotiate from a stronger position than those who wait until the easy roll-up targets have been taken.
For investors, the message is similar. The headline deals are happening at the platform level, but the durable value creation comes from the next layer of independent operators that those platforms now need to absorb. Knowing which of those operators is positioned to sell well, and on what terms, is the work of the moment.
Brooks Crankshaw is a Managing Director at Forbes Partners in Denver, Colorado. He advises owners of business services and middle-market companies on selling their business, raising capital, or growing through acquisition. Brooks can be reached at Brooks.Crankshaw@Forbes-Partners.com.
Footnotes
1. Business Research Insights, Meeting and Events Market Report, 2025.
2. Skift Meetings, “Private Equity Has Discovered the Events Industry,” May 19, 2026.
3. PR Newswire, “H.I.G. Capital Makes a Strategic Investment in 360 Destination Group and CSI DMC,” March 2025.
4. Event Marketer, “Impact XM and Jack Morton Merge,” January 2026.
5. Platinum Equity press release, “Platinum Equity Acquires Czarnowski Collective,” January 2026.