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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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
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