What private equity can teach us about the future of meetings and events
There are moments in every career that change the way you see the world. For me, one of those moments came during my time in the wealth management industry.
My career has never followed a straight line, but every chapter taught me something different about leadership, growth and creating value. Wealth management taught me something else entirely. It taught me to think in terms of capital.
Capital has no sentiment. It doesn’t reward effort, creativity or even market leadership on its own. It asks a far simpler question: Where will value be created next?
From there, the questions naturally arise. We stop asking who’s winning today and start asking who’s building for tomorrow. Where will the next wave of value creation come from? Which business models have the greatest potential to scale? Where is the market underestimating opportunity?
That’s why private equity’s growing interest in the meetings and events industry has captured my attention. Not because of the deals themselves, but because of what they suggest about where our industry is headed.
Following the Flow of Capital
Every investment is a vote of confidence in the future. Private equity doesn’t invest in businesses because they’re successful today. It invests because it believes they can become significantly more valuable tomorrow. The best investors don’t chase returns. They identify the next curve and invest ahead of it. That has become increasingly challenging.
With roughly half as many publicly traded companies as there were at the peak of the 1990s, and public market returns increasingly concentrated in a handful of technology companies, investors are searching for the next source of value creation.
Whether you realize it or not, this affects all of us. The capital being invested on behalf of pensions, endowments and retirement accounts is searching for the next generation of value creation. That’s your 401(k) someday. Understanding where this money is flowing gives us a glimpse into where industries and opportunities are heading next.
But here is where it gets a little more interesting: McKinsey and others argue that the next chapter of private equity success won’t be won through financial engineering and strategy selection alone. It will be won by building fundamentally better businesses.
This is our opportunity. Private equity isn’t investing because meetings are trendy. It’s investing because it sees an industry with enduring demand, trusted relationships, exceptional talent and significant opportunity to build more scalable businesses. Viewed through that lens, meetings and events begin to look remarkably attractive.
Our industry is resilient, deeply relationship-driven and embedded in almost every sector of the economy. It can also be highly fragmented. We have exceptional creative talent, trusted client relationships and decades of institutional knowledge, yet many businesses still rely on bespoke processes, inconsistent systems, limited data and operating models that don’t scale as effectively as the work itself.
I don’t see those characteristics as weaknesses. They are unrealized potential, our future superpower. This is our opportunity to build businesses where creativity can reach further, move faster and create even greater impact.
Seeing Our Industry Through a Different Lens
For years we’ve all described ourselves as being in the meetings and events business. I wonder if that’s ever been entirely true.
Organizations don’t invest in experiences because they enjoy bringing people together. They invest because experiences do something remarkably difficult to replicate elsewhere. They align people around purpose, accelerate learning, strengthen culture, deepen customer loyalty, inspire confidence and build trust.
The meeting isn’t the product. It’s the catalyst.
The value isn’t found in the event itself. It’s found in what happens afterward: stronger relationships, better decisions, greater commitment and organizations moving forward with greater clarity and confidence.
That’s what our industry creates. Amazing, right?
And perhaps that’s what sophisticated investors recognize so clearly. They’re not investing in venues or production schedules. They’re investing in businesses that help organizations create one of their most valuable assets: trust.
In a world increasingly shaped by AI and digital interaction, trust may become one of the few competitive advantages that cannot be automated. The human trust that comes from being together.
The New Value Equation
I am passionate about ROI and ROO and continue to believe both matter. But our conversation is evolving. The question is no longer simply how we measure an event. It’s how we understand the value an experience creates. Every meaningful experience sets something in motion: It creates trust. Trust strengthens relationships. Relationships influence behavior. Behavior shapes business outcomes.
Read More: Meetings MBA: Return on Feeling
That’s the value chain our industry has always influenced, even if we haven’t always described it that way. Tomorrow’s leaders won’t win because they produce better events. They’ll win because they understand how experiences move people, move organizations and ultimately move business.
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Joelle Morgan is chief experience officer at Bishop-McCann, where she leads the evolution of the company’s experience design strategy and strengthens the connection between creative vision, strategic thinking, and flawless execution.
This article appears in the September/October 2026 issue. You can subscribe to the magazine here.
