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All Rights Reserved. Subscribe Sign In BETA This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here MORE FROM FORBES Nov 30, 2022,08:00am EST Reinventing DEI To Acknowledge The Diversity Of Everyone Nov 30, 2022,06:07am EST Driving Performance And Managing Risk Through Global Stewardship Nov 30, 2022,05:00am EST Partnerships: Three Data-Backed Reasons Two Heads Are Better Than One Nov 29, 2022,04:48pm EST Re-Imagining The Very Concept Of Management Nov 29, 2022,03:45pm EST Four Ways Corporate Philanthropy Can Accelerate A Company’s ESG Journey Nov 29, 2022,03:01pm EST Do Less: Leadership Lessons From The Saddle Nov 29, 2022,01:06pm EST The Culture That Tech Companies Have Worked So Hard To Cultivate Is Lost Amid Layoffs Edit Story Leadership Strategy EVENT PLANNING PLATFORM PLANNED SURVIVES PANDEMIC LOCKDOWNS AND SECURES $18 MILLION A ROUND FUNDING Bruce Rogers Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about innovative, growth-minded CXOs and entrepreneurs. Following New! Follow this author to stay notified about their latest stories. Got it! New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Jul 11, 2022,02:32pm EDT| * Share to Facebook * Share to Twitter * Share to Linkedin In-Person events and conferences have long represented a significant portion of corporate budgets. In fact, the global event industry was worth approximately $890 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $2 trillion by 2028, according to Statista. The size of the market and complexity around planning and executing such events made the industry ripe for digital disruption like what happened to the travel booking and movie and sports ticketing industries. Yet no all-in-one tool existed until Planned. First launched in 2018 by two Montreal-based entrepreneurs, Marc-Antoine Bonin and Emeric Noël, Planned provides a single platform that allows in-person event planners to book everything they need for their events while providing visibility and control to managers. Users can browse and book from a curated portfolio of thousands of venues and vendors across North America. The platform makes it easy for companies to source, compare, and book suppliers like event spaces, caterers and equipment. (l) Planned Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Emeric Noël and (r) Co-Founder and CEO Marc-Antoine ... [+] Bonin. Planned “We wanted to start a business together and we were looking at some ideas that would best fit our skill set and meet a market need. We saw this company in Asia that was doing an ‘Airbnb for open spaces’. That's a cool idea and we didn't see anything like it in North America. So we decided to go that route and build a marketplace,” says Noël. The pair launched the business, started running some ads and recruited Montreal-based venues to the platform. They were getting decent traction for the business and raised some angel investment. But in their effort to grow, they spent time speaking with their customers about what they should do to improve the service. MORE FROMFORBES ADVISOR BEST TRAVEL INSURANCE COMPANIES By Amy Danise Editor BEST COVID-19 TRAVEL INSURANCE PLANS By Amy Danise Editor “We had a lot of planners that were coming from large, Fortune 500 enterprises. They told us about the challenges to the job, the inefficiencies in the process of planning, especially having to find new suppliers and onboard them, working through their procurement procedures. And there was no platform at the time that helped them streamline that process. This is when we had the idea to pivot to building that platform that would really take the whole journey of planning an event from A to Z, from finding venues to managing events through booking and invoicing,” says Bonin. By 2019, the company found its true market fit and began growing the business in earnest, bringing on a product team, while expanding the company to 47 employees at the time. They raised their Seed round and thought they were off to the races. Then Covid-19 hit and the Pandemic-led business shut down put a virtual end to in-person events, grinding their business to a near halt. PLAY Forbes Leadership 01:12 Video Settings Full Screen About Connatix V203644 Social Media Marketing That LeadsTo Conversions 1/1 Skip Ad Continue watching after the ad Visit Advertiser websiteGO TO PAGE It was an existential moment for the business. Should they pivot to virtual events? Or stick to their vision for an in-person event planning platform? The pair decided to stick with the original plan, hunker-down the business, reduce headcount from 47 to 12 and wait for the inevitable return of the in-person event market and went to work to continue to improve their platform. “That was kind of a nerve wracking moment, because we just raised a round, and we had to reimburse $3 million and downsize. So we had $2 million left in the bank account with a burn rate of $550k on the payroll,” says Bonin. Eighteen months later, the in-person event business did indeed return. Sales on the platform increased 400% from Q4 2021 to Q1 2022 and today more than 25,000 vendors and suppliers have Planned profiles to attract business from Planned’s enterprise users. And while the event planning platform is core to the business, many customers use Planned for help with event creative development. “For 82% of our customers, their biggest pain point is ideation. How do I create something cool? With our event data, we know what works and can offer suggestions,” says Noël. The momentum has allowed Planned to attract venture funding to the tune of its $18 million Series A round in June of 2022 led by Drive Capital with participation from Outsiders Fund, THCAP and N49. Both Bonin and Noël grew up in Québec and both had their own entrepreneurial initiatives through their college days before meeting through LinkedIn. Noël founded software development agency Affilio in 2012 before graduating from Université du Québec en Outaouais in 2014. “I founded my first startup at that time. We raised a little bit of money through Kickstarter. I was 20 years old. Managing a business with employees and going to school was an interesting challenge. I learned a lot from that experience. But we didn't have a clear product market fit and ran through the funds. So I decided to reimburse the money and just took that as a learning experience knowing that I would have another shot in the future,” says Noël. After that experience he briefly took a job as Head of Business Intelligence at Robotshop for one year prior to pairing up with Bonin in 2017 to start Planned. Between high school and college, Bonin co-founded À l’affût, a Montreal based company that specialized in sales representation in 2014 prior to graduating from McGill University with a degree in finance in 2018. “My parents convinced me to sell the business so that I could reinvest everything into another project that was called Uvolt, which was a solar powered watch charging phone. Honestly, it was kind of a bad idea. But we got some traction and press coverage and raised some money for it on Kickstarter. This is why I contacted Emmerich through LinkedIn, because of his similar Kickstarter experience,” says Bonin, who later moved on from Uvolt to found Planned with Noël. As for the future? “It’s exciting. It's a huge market and no-one has more than a 1% market share. And we see the opportunity to provide the all-in-one platform to win marketshare and really takeover. We strongly believe that is going to happen so that's what we're shooting for,” concludes Bonin. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Bruce Rogers I am the Managing Director of CXO Research at the Revenue Enablement Institute after spending most of my career at Forbes as Chief Brand Officer, Chief Insights ... Read More * Editorial Standards * Print * Reprints & Permissions Jack Harlow Offers His Best Advice For Aspiring Artists Cookies on Forbes YOUR CHOICES REGARDING COOKIES ON THIS SITE Please choose whether this site may use cookies or related technologies such as web beacons, pixel tags, and Flash objects ("Cookies") as described below. You can learn more about how this site uses cookies and related technologies by reading our privacy policy linked to below. 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