Conferences and Meetups: A Waste of Time or Worthwhile Investment?

Entrepreneurs never seem to have enough time. Whether its finding new customers, recruiting a strong team, building a successful culture or being the external face for the company, a founder's time is at an utter premium.

There are a lot of guides across the web about time management for entrepreneurs, and one of the places they usually focus on for gains in efficiency is events. Meetups, events and conferences can be a great place for founders and entrepreneurs to spread the word about their company, recruit and find new clients, but they can also be a colossal waste of time if not managed correctly.

Axial, a professional network that facilitates deals and exits between entrepreneurs and investors, has created a tool to help solve this problem. The tool is an ROI calculator for events and conferences, and can be found here.

It starts by focusing on the costs of attending an event. Obvious costs like fees, airfare, and hotel are covered first, followed by the cost per hour of every employee there. It also takes into account the opportunity cost of attending the event, and time spent preparing.

From there the user sets their individual success metrics- whether that be sales made, industry contacts or experts who could help solve a specific problem a firm is facing. The calculator itself provides four examples to try out- coming from the angle of an investment banker, a service provider, a company and a financial sponsor (all funding/ M&A themed, of course).

With the costs and benefits both laid out, its then simple to see the net gain of attending an event, and then compare it to the net gain of other alternatives.

Jaime Raczka, Director of Marketing and Business development at Axial, stated in an interview that the company plans to continue releasing actionable tools such as these for both entrepreneurs and investors. So keep an eye out for more releases like these in the near future.

The event ROI calculator is not the first tool Axial has released either, they have also put out a discounted cash flow template that allows entrepreneurs and investors to value a business in roughly 20 minutes.

Through better assessing the cost/benefit breakdown of attending an event, this tool could help entrepreneurs analyze their time spent at these events more effectively, which will be welcome news to founders everywhere. While this tool may not be the 'end all, be all' to determining whether or not it's worthwhile attending an event, it certainly helps clarify the costs and benefits of attendance.

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