Building a successful business can be an exciting, energizing, and deeply rewarding experience. But it often comes with unexpected lessons.
In this episode, Eric shares three pivotal moments that profoundly shaped his entrepreneurial journey. If you’re an entrepreneur building, growing, or scaling a business, these insights will help you understand why you must stop trying to do everything yourself and, instead, start leading and building structured systems that will allow your business to grow.
A Trap
In the early years of building a business, success can feel exciting and validating. However, when the business owner tries to do too much personally without delegating or implementing systems, success can quickly become exhausting. Constant pressure, no real time off, and daily operational issues can turn growth into a trap rather than an advantage.
The Bottleneck
Without structure and delegation, the business owner becomes a bottleneck in the company. The turning point comes when the owner finally realizes that instead of building the business around themselves, they must create a business that can scale, with proper systems, structure, and the right people in place.
A Stressful Situation
One project nearly put Eric’s company out of business when a trusted industry contact claimed to have access to sought-after FIFA World Cup tickets. After Eric’s client wired the money and he transferred the funds, it became clear the tickets likely did not exist. After weeks of intense work, Eric ultimately secured the tickets and delivered the project successfully. That experience exposed just how fragile his business was without proper checks, verification, and systems in place.
Reality Check
A wake-up moment often occurs for business owners when an opportunity arises to sell their business. Many owners believe their company is worth far more than what buyers are actually willing to pay. Passion, creativity, reputation, and great clients feel incredibly valuable to the person who built the business. However, buyers tend to evaluate companies with an entirely different set of criteria.
What Buyers Actually Evaluate
Buyers tend to focus on recurring revenue, systems, leadership, and consider whether the owner is a bottleneck or if they have a trusted team already in place. They also examine client diversification and the overall structure of the business. Those elements determine how sustainable and scalable the business truly is, which ultimately influences its valuation.
Wake-Up Moments
Wake-up moments are essential for business owners to become psychologically open to change. Before experiencing wake-up moments, advice about systems, structure, strategy, or leadership tends to feel abstract to most business owners. After a wake-up moment, however, they usually become far more receptive to rebuilding aspects of their company and ensuring the right systems are in place.
The Cycle Many Business Owners Experience
The entrepreneurial journey often begins with excitement. While building something new, the business grows, clients are happy, and the reputation increases. Over time, however, complications arise, and the business owner becomes overwhelmed. Eventually, they realize that the business model and structure must change for the company to move forward.
Evolving
The next phase of the business requires a stronger structure, clearer strategy, leadership evolution, and delegation. Most importantly, it requires a change in the owner’s mindset. For that to happen, business owners must stop trying to handle everything themselves and start building a structured business that can operate effectively.
Mentors and Coaches
Investing in personal and professional growth helps entrepreneurs to avoid repeating the same patterns and reach the next stage of their journey. Talking to successful and experienced business owners can make an enormous difference. Mentors and coaches help entrepreneurs see what needs to change in their business and how to move forward.
Building a Business
The goal of every entrepreneur should be to move from constantly reacting and solving problems to running a structured company with proper systems and leadership in place. When business owners are no longer the bottleneck, they can finally build a business that is stronger, more valuable, and better positioned for long-term success.
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“The less you are involved in the daily operations of your business, the higher the value of your business.”
Eric Rozenberg
Full transcript of episode 314 of The Business of Meetings podcast, a solo episode with Eric Rozenberg. Lightly edited for readability.
Eric Rozenberg: Hello and welcome to the Business of Meetings podcast. I’m your host, Eric Rozenberg.
Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of helping businesses in the meetings and events industry grow and succeed, and I’m excited to share that experience with you. If you feel alone and overwhelmed, and if you’re looking to take your business to the next level, improve your strategy and sales, and connect with like-minded professionals, you are in the right place. I invite you to visit eventbusinessformula.com and join our community of event business owners dedicated to exponential growth. Now let’s dive into today’s episode.
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Business of Meetings podcast.
Today I’d like to share with you three personal stories and talk about a wakeup moment, and actually three wakeup moments, that every and any event business owner will face in their life. The first one is the success that feels like a trap. The second one is an event that nearly broke my company. And the third one is what I call the exit reality check.
So, the success that feels like a trap. The first years that I started my business was very successful. My two first clients were Johnson and Johnson Cordis and Café de Colombia Juan Valdez. It was amazing. It was growing. And I was in this ridiculous mindset of, those are my clients, nobody’s doing it better, I’m the one who should be taking care of them. And of course, after a little bit, of two years, I almost went burned out because I was doing too much myself and didn’t delegate enough and didn’t have system in place.
And so the trap, if you want, is that success feels like it’s wonderful. Revenue keeps growing, clients are happy, the small team is busy, and the calendar is full. But the problem is that personally I felt constant pressure. I didn’t have really any time off. I remember I was a party animal before starting my business, and I knew all the doormen of the nightclubs in Brussels by their first name, and one of them asked me one day, “You have a girlfriend, we don’t see you anymore.” Said, “Nope, I start my business.” The point was, I didn’t take enough time off for myself. I don’t have to tell you about the operational issues and extinguishing the fires that I was involved with almost every day. And basically I was the bottleneck of my company because any and every decision had to go through me.
And then one day I was wondering, okay, this is great, success is wonderful, but does it have to be that exhausting? And so that’s when I started really hiring people, getting structure, getting system in place, and instead of building a business around me, I really start building a real business that I could scale. And as I often say, the less you are involved in the daily operations of your business, the higher the value of your business. So that’s the first wakeup moment that I had.
The second wakeup moment was an event that nearly broke the company, and I almost went bankrupt. It was in 1998. I had started my first business for two years, a corporate events agency, and one of my clients, Café de Colombia Juan Valdez. The president asked me to prepare an event where we were going to attend the semi-final and the final of the World Cup in Paris, the FIFA World Cup that year, in Paris. And it was end of April, and the final was on the 12th of July, and the semi-final a few days before, the 8th of July.
And so I got in touch with someone I had met at an industry conference. She was at that time in the international board of an association in our industry, and I trusted her. I called her. She told me that she had the tickets. She gave me an insane price. I came back to my client, and he said, “Listen, I have no choice. It’s not only a marketing thing, but I have VIP coming, people from Colombia coming, people from different major client companies in Europe. I have to buy them.” And so he wired me the money, and I wired the money to the woman who was in the board, who I trusted.
And then I went for the inspection a few days later, and she was not available, which, you know, it’s a big project, a big budget, it’s kind of weird. And the lady that I was doing the inspection with, I find out that she was actually a freelancer. So that started really to feel weird. And at the end of the day, I looked at that person straight in the eye, and talking about her boss I said, “She doesn’t have the ticket, right?” And she said, “I don’t think so.” And all break loose that time, and she’s like, “Oh my god.”
So I went to see my client, and I said, “Listen, I believe she doesn’t have the ticket.” He became pale. And if you remember the first time we met, I reminded him, “You told me that people like me, that were in the student organization that he knew about, when we promise, we deliver.” And I reminded him that, and I said, “I don’t know how, but I will deliver.”
So if I tell you all the details, I think this podcast is going to take two hours. But long story short, spent a month working on that and finally delivered the ticket for the semi-final and final. And also I was able to tell the client that he could invite his client, on the Friday between the semi-final and the final, to the concert of the Three Tenors under the Eiffel Tower. So I had the opportunity to attend that as well, with Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and Pavarotti, absolutely phenomenal.
The point is that this project could have put my company down because of a crook, because of someone who I trusted, and there is so many things in the process that I would never do anymore. It’s the way, not only vetting the client, but also making sure that we have, I see what I’m buying, and more importantly is making sure that everything is checked at every step. I think that the way we survive is more because of airism but definitely not because of systems, and in fairness, when I think about it back then, trusting people is something that I prefer to work that way. I have many other stories like that, that went very well by trusting people, but this one taught me as well that I should have more processes in place, more checks in place, and also look at different ways of wiring money, putting an escrow account, and things like that, which obviously I didn’t know at that time, but that moment really exposed the fragility of my business.
So that’s the second wakeup moment for me, was that event that almost put my company belly up, and thank God ended up very well. But that was the wakeup call to start putting more system in place.
And the third wakeup moment is really what I call the exit reality check. I had the opportunity, the first time, to sell my business, and it’s the classic one, but the people who are selling their business believe that the value of their business is much higher than what it is. And now if you start looking at the different methods of evaluation, all the structure, you understand a little bit better what it is, which is why, when somebody is buying a business from somebody who’s selling the business but is really aware of it, things go faster. But in general, people selling their business, like I was, believe that the value is much higher than what it actually is.
For me, the creativity that we have, the passion that we have, the client that we have, the reputation that we have, is very important. Well, yeah, it’s nice. But the way buyers are evaluating is, they look at recurrent revenue. They look at systems. They look at the leadership depth. Are you the bottleneck, or do you have a team in place? What about your client diversification, which, on that note, I was well. But those are the different aspects, and of course the methodology and the evaluation is different. But at the end of the day, the wakeup call is to realize that although your business has a certain value, it might not be worth as much as you think it is. And definitely as much as I think it was.
Now, don’t get me wrong, was very happy to sell. It was a great valuation, but it was definitely less than what I would have expected in the first place. So that can be sometimes shocking. But also you need to know about this, because it’s also a motivation to put all the system in place and to making sure that you are putting your business, in the right system, the right structure, to be sold.
So those three wakeup moments for me was really: a success at the beginning that almost feels like a trap. The second one, the second wakeup call, is when I realized that I could have lost my business on that one project. And the third one is the exit reality check.
Why does that matter? Because when you have those type of wakeup call moments, that’s only then that you create some sort of psychological openness to change. Before those wakeup calls, usually when somebody would give me advice about systems, about structure, about leadership, about strategy, yeah, I mean, I understand it, but it’s feeling more abstract than anything else. But after those moments, trust me, I was far more receptive to the idea that I needed to rebuild part of the company, or build part of the company, and definitely put the system in place.
And that is something that for me is really important for every business owner, because if you look at it, the cycle is always the same. You start with a lot of excitement. You’re building something new. Then you grow. The clients are happy. You have a reputation that is increasing. It’s wonderful. And then you get overwhelmed, because there’s more and more project, there’s complexity, and definitely the overwhelming part is something that we are all one day in our business life experiencing. And then you realize that, and you realize that you need to change your business model, and you need to change the way you are structured. And that’s exactly where I come in, and where Event Business Formula comes in, is when you realize that, that’s when we can help the founder the best. And that’s also when founders begin to understand that the next phase of their journey will require structure, will require strategy, will require leadership evolution, will require delegation, and most importantly, will require a completely change in the mindset, head, so that they’re stopping all the time and getting some structure.
So that’s what we do, bringing people and founders from overwhelmed to event entrepreneurs. And I would just say, whether it’s with us, with other people, invest in yourself, you will never regret it. Talk to people who have done it before, that’s the most important. I have also mentors and coaches, and I want to work with people that have successfully done it before. And as Einstein used to say, insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. So whatever you’ve done in the past brought you to where you are today, wonderful. If you want to go to the next level, you really need to start thinking about those wakeup call moments, or even before they arrived, and making sure that you’re changing the way you work, that you’re not the bottleneck anymore, and you are really having a business and not just a job.
I hope it was helpful, and I look forward to meeting you in the future, and the next episode also hopefully will bring some value to you. Bye-bye.
Thank you for tuning in to the Business of Meetings podcast. I hope you found today’s episode valuable. If you enjoyed the show, the most important thing you can do is leave a review and share it with your colleagues. It really helps spread the word. I truly appreciate your support. And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level, don’t forget to visit eventbusinessformula.com to learn more about how we are helping event business owners like you. Thanks again for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
