At Thanksgiving every year our family goes around the dinner table and talks about how our year was and what they are most thankful for this year. We suffered a tremendous family loss this year and celebrated a family recovery, but I am very protective of our private lives so I will leave those details out of this story.
Privately though, I asked myself that same question in regards to business.... how is the year going so far and what I am thankful for. I must confess this year has been quite challenging in many aspects and I would like to share one of those with you today.
As many of our industry friends know, for years I have longed to have a wedding show that was fun, interactive, and engaging, not just for the guests but also for the vendors. We exhibited at several wedding shows with different producers throughout the years, but the Prime Time Party & Event Rental Open House was the closest that we had ever experienced to my vision.
At the end of 2023 I sought to make that dream a reality. I started talking to a local company that has done wedding shows in this area for many years. This is a very small company with no employees and no inventory, but we had worked with them in the past and many of their clients were also our industry friends. We drew up a contract for a partnership where we would be responsible for overhauling every aspect of wedding show while receiving a portion of the proceeds. This partnership would end with a payout before we assumed ownership of the wedding show. The negotiations continued through the Winter wedding shows of 2023-2024, but we were confident we could come to a contract agreement, so we worked together using many of our newly created systems, equipment, and manpower at those shows.
At this point you may be asking why? Why would you pay for the creation of everything needed to run a wedding show, but not start your own?
The main reason was the vendors and the local event industry. I believed it would be easier on the vendors to evolve an established show rather than make them choose between us. It would also give me a base of vendors to start with as we wanted to take the shows a different direction and we could do that slowly as we tried new ideas, new interactive activities, and new locations.
Spoiler alert, it all fell apart.
After the winter shows, we refocused our efforts to get the agreement signed. I truly believed we both agreed on the spirit of the contract, but when lawyers got involved the revisions that were submitted made me question everything. After receiving one of their revisions, we requested a clarification regarding the transfer of ownership after the passive payout period. They disagreed with the clarification changing not only the spirit of the agreement, but significantly changing the financial investment to obtain ownership.
This disagreement led to the dissolution of our partnership and the permanent separation of our two companies.
I have repeated the line “We couldn’t come to an agreement, and we separated due to creative differences” many times in the past few months. This is a boiling down of the outcome, but the truth is much more painful. During our time with that company we worked on the many software systems, refreshed the website, providing AV equipment & manpower for several shows, and much. I’m not overstating when I say that I poured my heart and soul into making the partnership work and in the end I feel betrayed. I would expect they feel the same way which brings me to why I am writing this blog.
We sent emails, spoke to vendors, promoted shows, and re-wrote public facing information like blogs and webpages while working under the assumption we would be purchasing the show. Also, systems like vendor booth registration, customer ticketing, show CRM and more were paid for, designed, and programmed by us.
Lastly, we brainstormed ideas together on what to do for future shows and show trends. All of this means you may see crossovers like a similarly worded / designed webpage page or a booking / ticketing systems that you may recognize as coming from the other company but now integrated into our new website. This is why I wanted to share everything, to clarify what happened and why we are starting our own wedding show, The Buckeye Wedding Expo.
A special thanks to all my family, industry friends, and work family at Legacy Event Group who made many sacrifices for me during this transition. Thank you for continuing to sacrifice, believe in Legacy Event Group, and believe in my dream.
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