It’s not unusual to meet business-event professionals who, confident in their industry knowledge and skills, have launched their own firms. It’s also not unusual to find those same entrepreneurs struggling with the many challenges of running a small business.
After all, being an expert at contracting hotels, budget management, event technologies, logistics coordination, and attendee engagement really doesn’t help when, for example, you must decide whether to file taxes as an S-corp or how to spend your marketing dollars.
One resource that’s assisting a growing number of meetings-industry independents is The TEN Collective, an online community for small-business owners. The group was founded by Sarah Meister, an event-housing expert and owner of SM Event Co., who launched it in 2022 as a Facebook group called The EVENTrepreneur Network. Since then, it has transitioned its name and expanded to include a website, Slack community, and bi-weekly Google Meet calls.
Meister describes the group as “a space where independents can collaborate with one another about the challenges we face as small-business owners whether that's tax issues, finances, hiring contractors versus employees, marketing, or something else.”
The group’s Google Meet calls are focused on both education and networking. “About 60 percent of the time, I bring in an expert, whether that's a CPA, an attorney, or a marketing expert, to speak for half of the call and then we open it up for questions,” Meister says. Other times, it’s more open-ended, “just a community call where we can speak freely with one another about the struggles we’re having.”
Meister also works to arrange small get-togethers or group meals at larger industry events; next up will be Connect Marketplace in Milwaukee in August and IMEX America in Las Vegas in November. At the Connect Spring event in Las Vegas in April, Meister moderated a breakout session where Ronnie Withaeger, a CPA, talked about tax-planning, business structures, and other small-business pain points.
The group started as an alternative to a larger industry Facebook group where discussion of small-business issues wasn’t germane. “It just started very naturally,” Meister says, bringing together other small-business owners who wanted to brainstorm. “It has become a total passion project of mine, and it's something that has evolved. I think there is a real hole in the industry when it comes to small-business owners.”
She’d like to see more education for entrepreneurs at industry events as well as special registration fees for those events that reflect the often-tight budgets of small businesses, in the same way that discounts are typically offered to young professionals.
The group currently has “a couple hundred members,” says Meister, and membership is free. As TEN grew, Meister experimented with a paid membership model but recently dropped the paywall. Instead, she’s looking toward developing a committee structure to spread the workload. To join the group, biz-event professionals are vetted to ensure they’re small-business owners and not just looking to sell services. The only other requirement is that their business is at least 18 months old.
A real strength of the group, says Meister, has been members’ willingness to speak openly and share their ideas. “It’s about collaboration and community over competition. There is more than enough business to go around. So, while technically we're all competitors, there has never once been any competition between anyone, and that is something that I'm so proud of.”
