How to Run Profitable Events: Budgeting, Coordinators, and Exhibitor ROI

Summary

Podcast Summary: Special Ops with Emma Rainville

Episode: How to Run Profitable Events: Budgeting, Coordinators, and Exhibitor ROI

Aired: October 14, 2025
Host: Emma Rainville
Guest: Richard Parkin

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Overview

This episode of Special Ops with Emma Rainville dives deep into the operational side of running profitable live events. Emma and her guest, event operations expert Richard Parkin, break down the often-overlooked complexities of budgeting, effective planning, selecting partners, and ensuring exhibitor and sponsor ROI. The discussion is grounded in real-world experience, actionable advice, and light-hearted banter about late-night requests for unicorns and leprechauns.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Realities of Event Operations

• Events are more complicated than they appear.

  • “The thing about events is that they are a lot bigger, a lot more complicated than they seem from the outside.” (Emma, 00:00)
  • Even with detailed planning, unexpected issues inevitably arise (lost speakers, AV mishaps, venue changes).

• Planning is a months-long process.

  • “Eight months of planning for three days.” (Richard, 02:13)

2. The Foundation: Budgeting and Planning

• Start with a realistic, detailed budget—early.

  • “I like to have two things before I start doing anything else, and that’s, I want to have a budget. I want to know how much overall we’re going to spend and how that’s going to break out into categories...” (Emma, 02:42)
  • Common mistake: Creating the budget late, after many costs are already locked in. (03:41)

• Avoid the urge to endlessly over-deliver.

  • “There’s a tendency to over-deliver... but the budgeting means you have something to point to and say, well, no, that’s not going to fix a fifth of the budget.” (Richard, 03:41)

• Expect last-minute fantasy requests.

  • Memorable moment: “Can’t we get a unicorn? But can a leprechaun be riding it and can it be out gold dust while it jumps over a rainbow?” (Emma, 04:02)

3. Event Design: Purpose and Run-of-Show

• Determine event purpose before designing the experience.

  • Is the event for pitching something, delivering on a prior sale, or community-building?
  • “What is the purpose of the event? Are we making money? Are we spending money?” (Emma, 01:12 & 05:17)

• Important: Ticket sales are rarely profit centers.

  • “It’s very difficult to make money on the front end of an event.” (Emma, 05:59; Richard, 06:01)

4. Sponsors & Exhibitor ROI

• Be selective about sponsorships.

  • Filter out sponsors whose reputations or products may reflect poorly on your brand or audience.
  • “Do you want anybody who will give you money or do you want sponsors that are going to be good for your people?" (Emma, 06:58)

• Sponsorship is a stamp of trust.

  • “When you are taking sponsors, on some level, even if you declaim it, giving them a little bit of a stamp of approval.” (Richard, 08:25)

• Sponsor ROI is critical—aim for clear, honest expectations.

  • Calculate ROI from both sides: cost of exhibiting, resources invested, and realistic expected outcomes.
  • “If I don’t think that the person I’m selling that tier to is going to get out of it... that multiple, by the way, the multiple is 2.5 for me. I got to get 2.5 back my investment.” (Emma, 09:04)
  • Negative exhibitor experiences damage reputation and future business:
    “If you lose trust with one person and they go telling 10 people, you’re going to lose trust with at least eight of them.” (Emma, 11:34)

5. Managing Last-Minute Marketing and Operational Madness

• Triage last-minute ideas based on impact and feasibility.
  • “For the stuff that comes out completely unexpected, that’s really going to be where we spend the time deliberating... which of these are going to make the biggest impact?” (Richard, 13:29)
  • Build flexible business systems to handle changes, but prioritize highest-impact elements and stay grounded in what matters for the guests.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On event uncertainty:
  • “Even with the best possible planning in the world, there will be things that go wrong in any kind of event.” (Emma, 00:08 & 02:17)
• On sponsor selection:
  • “Do your due diligence. Don’t just think because they’re here I’m endorsing them. I just don’t know anything bad about them.” (Emma, paraphrasing Perry Belcher, 07:46)
• On managing last-minute requests:
  • “It’s a question of triage, really. Like, most important, all the way down to... very nice to have.” (Richard, 14:17)
• On exhibitor integrity:
  • “I am very honest. I’m not trying to make a dollar, I’m trying to network and I’m trying to have an empire behind me. And so in order to do that, people have to trust you.” (Emma, 11:28)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–02:17 — Introduction to event complexity & need for error-tolerant planning
• 02:29–04:39 — Foundation for successful events: The critical role of budgeting and early planning
• 04:59–06:30 — Designing the event experience: clarity on objectives & avoiding common pitfalls
• 06:30–11:34 — Sponsors and exhibitors: why selectivity and clear expectations matter, and how to calculate real ROI
• 12:48–14:24 — Managing the chaos: triaging last-minute marketing and operational requests

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Final Thoughts & Resources

The episode underscores that successful, profitable events are rooted in rigorous planning, clear objectives, ethical sponsor selection, and nimble on-the-ground operations. Both Emma and Richard stress the importance of reputation and trust as the ultimate currency in event operations.

Free resources:

• Event checklist and Coordinator Playbook: Available at specialopspodcast.com (Visionary Vault)

Commentary & engagement:

• Richard personally answers event operations questions in the podcast comments.

Notable moment:

• Emma jokes that there are “9,000 things” not covered that can be found in the downloadable checklists. (14:28)

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The Takeaway

To run a profitable, impactful event:

• Plan early, budget realistically, and be vigilant about last-minute costs.
• Define the event’s purpose and align every decision—from run-of-show to sponsor curation—around it.
• Value trust over quick cash; your reputation is your greatest asset.
• Always triage requests by impact and feasibility.
• Leverage detailed checklists and experienced coordinators to catch the details you’ll inevitably miss.

For more actionable details, download the playbooks at specialopspodcast.com.

Transcript

[A]

The thing about events is that they are a lot bigger, a lot more complicated than they seem from the outside.

[B]

People are showing up, people go on stage, people get off stage. What's the big deal?

[A]

Even with the best possible planning in the world, there will be things that go wrong in any kind of event.

[B]

I want to know how much overall we're going to spend and how that's going to break out into categories, from traffic to selling event tickets, all the way to what time the breaks are going to be. Are we selling something at the event? Is there going to be a pitch? What is the purpose of the event? Are we making money? Are we spending money? Like, what is the purpose? Hi, and welcome to another episode of Special Ops podcast. We give actionable insights to direct response marketers and e commerce sellers. Today we've got Richard Parkin back. You flew over the pond there, love.

[A]

20 hours. 20 hours in planes.

[B]

Damn it.

[A]

It's nice stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Last two times I went to you, though, so.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, no, it's. It's fair.

[B]

So we're in San Diego for Perry Belcher's Event Growth Hacking Live, and we thought that this would be a phenomenal opportunity to speak operationally on what it takes to run an event. And so Richard and I have put together a couple resources for you. He put together an event checklist, all the things that most people forget. And I put together a quick little ebook on how to work with event core coordinators. A lot of people are very confused about what their role is versus the role of the person hiring them. And so I would love to dive in.

[A]

You good? Definitely. Definitely.

[B]

Awesome. So you can grab [e-mail]. if you're not already signed up for our visionary vault, go ahead and sign up. There's tons and tons of resources. Richard's actually put a ton of time. So have I. So, Saka. So is Tiago. Our entire team into Florida, free materials like courses and checklists, and even Ryan Proteat has contributed to that quite a bit. So feel free to jump in there, Richard. Let's just jump right in and let's talk about events.

[A]

Events. I mean, the. The thing about events is that they are a lot bigger, a lot more complicated than they seem from the outside. I think that's very fair to say.

[B]

From the outside, people are showing up. People go on stage, people get off stage. What's the big deal?

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

Eight months of planning.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

For three days.

[A]

Absolutely. And this is necessary because even with the best possible planning in the World. There will be things that go wrong in any kind of event. Not necessarily wrong, not necessarily disasters. There's a lot that can be controlled for, but there is always going to be someone who doesn't show up on time.

[B]

So a speaker who misses his flight, anything like that AV that brought the wrong connector. And everything keeps cutting in and out.

[A]

Things that you will not know until you are there.

[B]

The hotel that changes your boe at the last minute and wants $22,000 because they missed something on the front end. Yes, it was a attrition room blocks. There's a million things. So let's start at the top. The planning phase, which is probably the majority of what we'll talk about today. The planning phase. First and foremost, I like to have two things before I start doing anything else, and that's, I want to have a budget. I want to know how much overall we're going to spend and how that's going to break out into categories. From traffic to selling event tickets, all the way to, you know, how, what, what time the breaks are going to be. And that allows us to know how many speakers we need, what's, what's the overall vibe, et cetera. The biggest mistake and challenge I think we see is that people start planning and create a budget a month before the event, after the majority of the money is spent.

[A]

Definitely. I think there's a tendency to want to over deliver, which is nice to some extent. But again, this is why planning is just really essential there. Because the budgeting means you have something to point to and say, well, no, that's not going to fix a fifth of the budget. So you have to compromise on this or we can't do this new fantastic thing you've just come up with a week before the event.

[B]

Oh, my favorite is the night before the event. The phone calls I get the night before the event. Can't we get a unicorn? But can a leprechaun be riding it and can it be out gold dust.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

While it jumps over a rainbow?

[A]

Oni and Santiago, that's a.

[B]

Okay, so. All right, so we got our budget. You actually created a template for us that allows us to fill in for the budget. And the reason I think it'd be so nice to share is there are things that come up that most people don't think about.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, the taxation, the, the, the surcharges, just.

[B]

Yeah. And so, yeah, I'd love to do that. And okay, so let's talk about. So we got that budget. Run a show once we have that together then we can start building the event. What are some of the things that you think are the most important elements of making sure is in the planning process early on?

[A]

I think fundamentally just talking about the run of show, I think there really needs to be a external perspective on what you're going to have happen at the event. Like a lot of people, they, they might want to over deliver on day one to have that be set the tone for the rest of the event and to support the pitch on day two or something to that effect.

[B]

Well the majority of the time when we sit with people, here's what it looks like. Hey, yeah, so so and so had them playing golf and they were winning thousand dollars if they got the hole. And that's how I want, that's what I want at my event. And it's like wait a minute, hold on, are we selling something at the event? Is there going to be a pitch? What is the purpose of the event? Is the event to pitch something that you're going to do? Is it to deliver on something you've already pitched? Are we making money? Are we spending money? Like what is the purpose?

[A]

That's a very good way to put it because a lot of the time this really goes into how you determine the budget. Whether you're going to get additional money coming in, whether you're going to believe that you're going to be able to make a profit on the ticket sales, which is very rarely the case.

[B]

Yeah, it's very difficult to make money on the front end of an event.

[A]

Particularly in like direct response or e commerce focused marketing event sense. So again the purpose that makes a lot of sense, just where's the money going to come from at the end of the day if you want to make money and how much can you actually put against it if it's a case where you're delivering on something that you've already taken the money for? Yeah, it's not always one or the other you can pitch again but it's going to depend on the, the exact circumstances.

[B]

So I'd love to chat about just really briefly sponsors and exhibitors. And so a lot of times you'll see people at events just wanting to sell those spots without thinking through what they're going to get for it and are they going to be able to deliver. So talk me through some of that.

[A]

I mean sponsorship. I think the, it's kind of a little bit of a difference here versus I guess other organizational companies in that you've spent a lot of time filtering out sponsors who aren't appropriate. I would like to start with that if that's.

[B]

Oh, yeah, that's really smart, by the way. That's good. So what Richard's talking about is we won't take money from anybody who wants to hand it over. If we know and we're talking specifically about the clients that we work with, we generally don't work with people who just are in it for money anyway, so we don't really have problems outside that. But you need to determine, do you want your sponsors to. Do you want anybody who will give you money or do you want sponsors that are going to be good for your people? We tend to want to. And Perry, the one we're doing the event for here, wants to have good people for his people. So, first and foremost, do you have a bad reputation? Does he know that your product doesn't work? His answer is always no. If someone has a good reputation, he still tells his people that are at the event. Do your due diligence. Don't just think because they're here I'm endorsing them. I just don't know anything bad about them. Yo, we interrupt this pod to tell you like and subscribe. What are you doing? Why haven't you liked. Why haven't you subscribed? Just subscribe. What's the problem? In all seriousness, subscribe so that you get notifications every time we drop new content. Additionally, if you have not signed up for our visionary vault, what the hell? Www.specialopspodcast.com Go sign up. It's free. We never try and sell you and we're putting all kinds of stuff in there to help with the operations of your business because we're passionate about it and we want to share operational excellence with our direct response. E commerce and online selling. Family.

[A]

No, I mean, like, because when you are taking sponsors, you are, on some level, even if you declaim it, giving them a little bit of a stamp of approval, you're connecting yourself to them.

[B]

And you're connecting them to your people, your tribe.

[A]

Absolutely. In a way that isn't going to always going to be obvious for your audience, who obviously are the people that the sponsors want to get in front of, particularly people who have products that make them a lot of money but not necessarily deliver the promises. Yeah, yeah. That's. In terms of sponsorship selection, in terms of how we actually provide for it. It really goes back to this planning stage, I think. Again, just what are we going to give all these people? You spent quite a bit of time building out the Tiers I spent a.

[B]

Lot of time when I, when I did it too. I took it from Shockwave, spent a lot of money on exhibiting at different conferences. And so I thought about for the dollar amount that we spend for the booth, to decorate the booth, to fly the employees out, to put the employees up, the dinners we're going to have. So if all of that costs X, what's the multiple of X I need to get for a return on investment? And I'm also looking at like, if I've got you and Tiago for a week in San Diego to go to a three day event to stand at a booth, what did that cost my business and resources? And what do I need to inject back into it to make that worth it? So I think about that as a multiple and that's how I price the tiers. And if I don't think that the person I'm selling that tier to is going to get out of it, that multiple, by the way, the multiple is 2.5 for me. I got to get 2.5 back my investment. Monetarily, there are places we've gone that I knew we wouldn't sell anything. It was about getting our name out there because it was a longer term play. So understand that, understand that. But I'm going to actually have a conversation too. Go high level is at our event. When they came on to sponsor, we talked about their sponsorship tier, we talked about their dollar amount and we talked about what they had to get out of it. And they were very upfront with what they wanted to get at it. And I felt very comfortable that they were going to get way more, definitely. So that made total sense to me. Right. So understanding that, because here's what will happen if you sell sponsorships and your sponsors or exhibitors and your exhibitors don't get out of it what they put in or what they expected. Sometimes they may pay for something like just to be in front of people and that's okay too. But if they're not getting their expectations met, they're. They all, we all not only. I don't care if they don't come back. That's not the big problem. The big problem is, number one, my integrity. Because I probably told them that they were going to get it. Number two, it's going to be my reputation in the industry. And so I'm known as a lot of things, but I'm also very much known as someone who is going to be very direct and straight. And so if I tell you this is a good event, for you to come to. This is a good event for you to come to. I am very honest. I'm not trying to make a dollar, I'm trying to network and I'm trying to have an empire behind me. And so in order to do that, people have to trust you. And so I don't want to lose trust because if you lose trust with one person and they go telling 10 people, you're going to lose trust with at least eight of them. Definitely two aren't going to care, the other eight will. So that's my whole thing. All right. Just to kind of round us out. So that's the exhibitors and then for you, you do a lot of the last part of it, which is insert marketing madness here. And so we have marketers that are building all these things and then of course we booked the hotel a year in advance. We talk to them every week, every, every week about the event and the week before the event they go, you know, it would be awesome. And they just spew. I like to, I envision it as venom, but it's marketing genius that we have to go and plug in. And you're very capable of organizing all of those things. So the last minute details in the fabric, how do you weigh through what to. Because it's up to you what we implement, what we don't and how do you organize it all so it doesn't get lost.

[A]

Sure. I mean I, I think again this really does come back to the planning. Like a lot of the stuff we know, we don't necessarily know what form it's going to take, but we know we're going to need the page that goes from the pitch. For instance, we know that that's going to need some level of special care, something that differentiates itself from the last time we did it or the last time we've done anything for that particular client. So we know that needs to be done. So we build out the, the basic blocks for it in advance. Like the automations are probably going to be fairly standard. Like we need to take their payments, we need to tag them as people who've brought here so that we can actually just have that list of people to deliver the bonuses to or whatever the case may be, but we know that's going to be necessary. So we build out the systems that support it in advance. For the stuff that comes out completely unexpected, that's really going to be where we spend the time deliberating like what which of these are going to make the biggest impact. Is it really going to be useful for. Useful for guests? Or is it really just a hey, this sounds lovely on paper, but two people will actually care about it and they'll forget about it within the week. That's. Yeah, we probably will not do that or probably will try and change that into something that's actually usable. Yeah, it's a question of triage, really. Like, most important, all the way down to. Very nice to have. Yeah.

[B]

Awesome. Any last minute thoughts on events?

[A]

I think that's going to be fantastic.

[B]

Awesome. So if you enjoyed this podcast, please like and subscribe. If you have questions, go ahead and hit the comments. Richard actually monitors our comments personally, so if you have a question for him, go ahead and throw it in the comments. And don't forget to go to our Visionary Vault where Richard has put an event checklist. There's 9,000 things. 9,000 things we didn't talk about today. That's all in the checklist. It's not really 9,000 things, but it's 9,000 things. It's in the checklist for you in the Visionary Vault, as well as how to work with event coordinators. That's going to be in the visionary [e-mail] ops podcast. Richard, awesome.

[A]

Fantastic.

[B]

I'm so glad to have you back.