(This article is based on audio recordings)
Bella is the founder and CEO of Simba Events
Simba and the FBIF
I think Brother Feng is quite sharp, because at that time (March 2021) when we were discussing the topic of the speech on the phone, I said, "Brother Feng, you can rest assured, I promise to give a very stylish title." Brother Feng agreed, and then he turned around and wrote the title "Conference Company Up and Up, Is There a Ceiling?"
Because whether it is in terms of height, intelligence or education, compared with the colleagues here today, I am a floor. (Laughter)
Simba Events (Shanghai Simba Business Consulting Co., Ltd.) is a conference and new media company focused on serving the food industry. Simba's development began with conferences and currently covers conferences, events, media, consulting and training.
Our company, Shanghai Simba Business Consulting Co., Ltd., was founded in 2013. From a conference company, a business conference company to the present, slowly everyone will see us more as a media platform or consulting company. I don't think it really matters what it is, the key is what kind of meaning we can make of what we have at hand.
We are a business meeting company, which is not the same as a traditional business conference company. Our company's business is highly concentrated, and we only do packaged food and beverage related activities. There is only one forum a year, the FBIF Food and Beverage Innovation Forum, and yes, we only sell one product a year.
In 2014, our company's sales were 1.74 million yuan, and by 2022 this year, we are confident of completing 72 million yuan. A fraction of that revenue comes from businesses outside the FBIF Forums.
FBIF (Food & Beverage Innovation Forum) Historical Sales (Forecast 2022)
Our company is also very small, and the business segment is also very simple. The first column in the figure below is one of our company's main products, which is the conference (referred to as the FBIF). Although it is also done to do exhibitions, in fact, the forum with exhibitions, the first cut is the conference.
Simba business segment
At this FBIF event, there are events - Marking Awards (Global Food Packaging Design Competition) and Wow Food Awards (Innovative Food Awards), which are two events of food and beverage packaging design and product innovation.
The second part of the business is relatively small, that is, the media and community business.
The third part, which is currently too small to mention, is some consulting and salon services. Because the forum is only once a year, then the remaining 360 days, everyone still has appeals for information, activities, and gatherings, so we will also carry out some small and fast, short and fast online or offline small salons.
The last V food, negligible. The business of industry venture capital belongs to the preparatory stage and has not yet officially begun.
Four big challenges the company experienced
Our company has experienced four major challenges since its inception in 2013. How did we think about these questions to what Simba is today?
Challenge One: A Focused Strategy for Nine Dead Lives
The first headline has a bit of horror, "Nine Dead Focused Strategies."
(Laughter).
At the FBIF 2014 venue, a McDonald's guest asked us on the spot, saying that your meeting is doing quite well, but have you ever thought about your meaning, mission and value.
"Meaning", "mission" and "value", these words I recognized (laughter), but the problem is the meaning behind it, I did not understand this deeply at that time. This question was only figured out in 2017.
When Simba was first established, in order to diversify and avoid risks, we, like most conference companies, crossed multiple industries to do conferences. The first project is the petrochemical project, the second is the Cosmetics Forum, and there is the FBIF Food and Beverage Innovation Forum and a functional conference, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). If I spread my energy across four different fields, it means that I don't work on each field for more than three months in a year. With three months of the year, we are not able to find out what exactly is of concern in the industry.
However, for the conference, the content is very, very important. If you don't know a lot about an industry, you don't know what's going on in that industry, how can your (conference) product be the most forward-looking and innovative? So in 2015, we made a very difficult decision to cut down three of them and keep one.
It's easy to talk about this experience now, right? Everyone thinks it's good to cut three and concentrate on making one, and invest more time in an industry. But one of the realities we faced at the time was that cutting these three projects meant that I was probably close to 60% of my income that year. Unless I have the ability to quadruple the income of this FBIF, I will be able to level it. But at that time, the sales of a business conference in the entire industry would fluctuate between 300,000 and 2 million, and more than 1 million yuan in sales was a very, very successful business conference. Before that, I had not done more than 2 million yuan of projects, and the first FBIF sales of the FBIF were only 1.74 million yuan.
This is a very real problem. It's a matter of survival for startups. But logically, we're more accepting: if you're going to do a meaningful and valuable activity, and you're expecting to use your activity to influence people in the industry, then you have to be more focused. This is crucial for startups. We chose to be more focused. Of course, in the first year after the focus, we could not achieve 4 times the FBIF sales.
But when you stick to the right thing, it all pays off. Today, I am very proud to say that the FBIF was able to achieve more than 70 million yuan in revenue, in large part from our focused strategy at that time.
Challenge two: Mail failure, FBIF public name born
The second challenge was at the end of 2016, when money was also tight and we had a way of getting to know our customers, which was email communication. Before we did a lot of research, EB was very effective. By the end of 2016, we found that the email was not working, and customers didn't have much feedback when they received the email. It's very, very scary for us, you know? Can't contact your customer, the customer for your means of sales, he doesn't feel it. What are the ways to reach more customers and be able to interact with my customers?
In addition, we found that the demand of industry customers to continuously obtain industry information has not been met. Our FBI forums are only once a year, and for the remaining 300+ days, they still need fresher, forward-looking, innovative information about the industry, but we can't satisfy them.
Then there is the increase in customer stickiness. I believe that friends who have done meetings, everyone has a feeling that before the meeting, your contact with the customer is very dense. After the meeting, there is no contact with the customer, and when the meeting is held next year, go to him again, the customer will say that you only remembered me when you were in the meeting, and usually did not see you interact with me. It was embarrassing.
So in that case, we did the FBIF's public account. At the same time, the company experienced all kinds of situations, it was still quite miserable, the company's most tight funds, only enough to pay a month's salary, I and my husband (who is also a partner, founder) slept on the office floor for a year. I wake up every day, and I'm scared to wake up.
(Laughter.) ）
Our public account was done by a media newcomer and my husband (1.5 people, Mott was still a full-time salesman at that time), and I remember that starting in 2017, we officially sent our first industry tweet on the first day of the Chinese New Year. That would be when we look at the things we do, all of them are devoted. What kind of news to do, what kind of news, what kind of things to send out, whether anyone to watch, whether anyone pays the bill, I don't even have fans, I don't expect to be able to make a profit through the public name.
The FBIF subscription account officially began operations in February 2017 and grew to 350,000 followers by mid-December 2021.
We persevered, and now the industry has more than 350,000 fans. If there is no accident this year, we should have 10 million yuan in revenue in new media. However, this income can not be made very high, to control, otherwise your article is all advertorial.
Left: FBI Media's past performance (2022 forecast); Right: "FBIF Food and Beverage Innovation" subscription account past year fan growth chart
Our public name is not the largest number in the industry, but the marketing department and R&D department of large brands, large customers are paying attention, and everyone feels that the information obtained from here is very deep and relatively high-quality. Of course not every article is like this. Our articles are sometimes scolded, but it doesn't matter, don't be intimidated by this. Yes, keep improving your content, don't send those "we're going to meet on what day", "what exhibitors" or whatever, these are actually not important to everyone, he is more concerned about what is happening in the industry.
(Isn't that a convention ben??!! ）
My husband bragged about writing 100,000+ (reads) articles, and then he hasn't written it yet, at most one is sixty thousand, and he needs to work harder.
Community is a value-added service entirely. We now have more than 1,000 communities, and that's our private domain traffic pool. Mainly for industry customers to provide a more convenient channel, customers can help customers, some professional questions in the community can be answered by professionals.
Challenge 3: "Inadvertently Inserting Willows" iFood Show Innovation Show
Didn't Bella say not to do an exhibition? Why do you have an exhibition now?
Our 2022 FBIF was held in Shanghai, and the exhibition exceeded 30,000 square meters during the same period, which is still very small anyway.
Why do I want to do an exhibition? I don't really want to do this, I don't want to do exhibitions at all, because these construction, design, docking exhibitors, site management planning, etc. are too cumbersome for me. I just want to do meetings.
But the problem is that after you have more customers, after the party A and Party B of this industrial chain have come, Party B naturally wants to show.
Since doing an exhibition is inevitable, let's do it well. So in 2019, I began to do exhibitions. A foreign-funded exhibition peer came to the scene to see the evaluation and said that it was like setting up a stall. When I heard this, I wasn't angry at all. I know it's not good, but I also know that as long as I'm determined to do it, I'm going to find a way to do it better.
Challenge Four: Explore the FoodTalks website
Since 2017, we have found that the quality and quantity of Chinese product innovation in the food and beverage industry have improved very quickly, even if these works are placed together with the best products in the world.
So what can I bring to my industry clients as a media and MICE organizer? This is the fourth proposition that we begin to think about.
A lot of foreign innovation information is easy to spread to the country, but the innovation information that occurs in the Chinese market is difficult to spread to foreign countries, like Nongfu Spring, which is already the world's third largest bottled water production company, but you search in English on Google, and it is difficult to search for very detailed detailed information about its innovation.
For the traditional food and beverage industry, there is no real global media, and it can present the industry innovation information that occurs in all corners of the world on the media platform without prejudice and more objectively to promote and promote global innovation.
So, it's an opportunity for us.
Our idea of the media is to build such an unbiased, more objective observation of what is happening in this industry, and then to help more people to do a good job of innovation.
It's about leveraging our media value and making that information flow more quickly. We want our media to be a gathering place and distribution place for innovative information in the global industry.
But WeChat can not reach this step, we must build a website, build a tool, service industry website. This piece is also an investment at present, there are not too many fans, but it does not matter, we are still a stage of laying the foundation, in the future our English version of the information, or in the longer term in the future, our multilingual information will be presented on it.
Keep raising your ceiling
As a conference company, you should actually think more about the value and meaning of your existence. Talking about the company's ceiling, in fact, don't think too much about how much revenue can be made this year and next year. After you solve problems and create value for your customers, it will naturally come.
So I don't care if my ceiling is high or not. Frankly speaking, when our company was first founded, if there was a ceiling, it might have been so high (bending down and pointing to the upper).
(Laughter)
Now we can do these things deeper and deeper, bigger and bigger. The ceiling is just the result, and what really affects that outcome is the four walls that support the ceiling, and your ability to help your clients solve one problem after another is the bricks and stones you build the wall. We can't just pursue results, have an altruistic intention, then your ceiling will continue to rise as you continue to solve industry problems.
That's how I think about the ceiling today. Thank you.
Bella: I have five minutes left, do you have any questions you'd like to ask? Whatever the problem.
Question 1: Your company started with a chemical conference. I've been in the chemical department for many years, and I know that chemical conferences are hard to do. How did a little girl in your twenties suddenly enter this height?
Bella: The first session of our China Petrochemical Industry Forum was held in Xiamen, and I don't remember the exact number of participants, but there were more than 150 people anyway, such as Sinopec, Yangzi Petrochemical, Shanghai Petrochemical, Dow, etc.
How?
What we do best is doing desktop research. This is a skill that must be practiced before entering the industry to do sales. Fortunately, the company's four founders are all top sales sales. How to go to the customer, it is not so difficult for us.
Share a little story.
We went and invited a vice president of Sinopec to attack the company for two months. It was difficult to find him on the phone, so we had to email him and find that we could receive his read receipt every morning at seven o'clock. For more than a month we couldn't find him at all, and then we thought he must be in the office at seven o'clock, otherwise how could we have received his receipt? We started calling over there at seven o'clock on time. Yes, he was found in the end.
So, my colleagues and I are the kind of stupid officers.
Curating content, this is relatively simple. As long as the learning ability is still good, you concentrate on reading and collecting information for several months, and you may not be able to answer many technical questions, but you know who does a good job and who can talk about this topic.
Knowing this level, you can start planning the agenda.
Two minutes left.
Problem two: We all know to try not to work in the same company as our partners as possible. You and your husband both work for Simba, how do you solve the contradictions in life and work?
Bella: I think that's a particularly cute question.
Don't tell you that when my husband and I first started our business, we often quarreled. I'm a Capricorn, he's a Leo, he's a little bit of social intimidation, he's a little bit of machismo. But I'm the one who learns fast, and I'm relatively more communicative than he is.
I think the best way is for everyone to have a clear division of labor and the voting mechanism to be implemented. The decision-maker of a certain matter is his words, and you should respect him and cooperate with him well. In case his decisions go wrong, don't blame him, because it's a mechanism for the company. You should share the consequences with him.
The year I slept on the floor with him, he had a startup project. We invested 1.2 million in it, and we lost not a dime. But after this incident, I was very happy. I am very happy that he finally stopped working on other projects and can return to our main business with peace of mind.
I don't think for female entrepreneurs, there is no fear of starting a business with your husband. The key is that you respect the company's decision-making mechanisms. For the things of life, you don't think too much, he doesn't want to wash the dishes, then don't wash, buy a dishwasher. If I could, I could take on a little more.
I spoke very smoothly today, which was also awakened after countless quarrels.
(Xu Feng, as the host, interjected at this point, saying, "Yes, let him go home and kneel durian.") ）
(Laughter erupted.) ）