COVID-19 has dealt a devastating blow to the meetings and incentive travel industry in 2020, forcing us to face an uncomfortable reality of an entire year, if not longer, without any programs on our calendar and no clear indications of when things might return back to normal, or if they ever will. The impact has decimated both buyers and suppliers alike, pushing many to the brink of bankruptcy as they struggle to face the challenge of a ‘lost year’ and what it means for both their balance sheets and long-term survival strategies. Hotel foreclosures, agencies laying off swaths of talented people and the airline and cruise industries up against the ropes. It’s been a tough year that nobody saw coming. But it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. There is an old and likely overused Chinese proverb that says, “out of crisis comes oppor- tunity.” And it’s true, that under close scrutiny, you will recognize that most ‘crisis situations’ are opportunities to make a choice: Stay the course, change your sails or batten down and head straight into the storm. How you decide to react is up to you, because the inconvenient truth is COVID-19 is going to run its course no matter what we as an industry decide to do, so you better have a plan. Any kind of crisis can be positive. It wakes you up. Our company, Moniker, is a relatively small player in the Canadian MICE industry. We have seven full-time employees and have only been around since 2013. This year was shaping up to be a huge year for us—finally surpassing some key client metrics and revenue milestones that we’ve been building towards for years. Unfortunately, as we all know, 2020 had different ideas in store, and what was supposed to be a banner year turned into a big fat ‘zero’ in a span of two weeks around the end of March, as one by one every single cli- ent and program we had on the books cancelled and began to request refunds. “Postpone, don’t cancel!” was the industry plea. Yeah, it didn’t work out that way for us. That big fat zero I mentioned was in the accounts receivable column, and was staring at us rather alarmingly by mid-April, with payroll and operating expenses looming large and no obvious solution in sight. This was our wake-up call. Like many in our industry, we faced a tough decision. With no programs on the calendar and an entire business model based around operating incentive travel and corporate retreats, we had to come up with an alternative revenue plan in Inside one company’s COVID revolution by Sean Hoff, Founder & Managing Partner of Moniker An Open Letter to the Canadian MICE Industry a hurry or face the prospect of salary reduc- tions, drastic cuts and as a last resort—layoffs. Although the obvious pivot was to move online, we were very hesitant to jump on that band- wagon, observing how mediocre we felt a lot of the content in the virtual space was turning out, not to mention how quickly everyone got ‘Zoomed out’ in that first month or two with an endless barrage of webinars and pep-talk town halls. We were reluctant to latch our company’s brand on to that dubious anchor, so we sat it out and observed. As a company, we took a long, hard look at what we were at our core. Are we a travel com- pany? Are we a team of logistical ninjas that people outsource their event planning to? Why do our clients really work with us? We came to the conclusion that we are a “culture company”: our clients turn to us as a one-stop shop for outsourcing the programs or events that help them celebrate successes (incentive travel), develop camaraderie (retreats) or boost engage- ment (meetings). Culture building. And now, as companies moved their people to working from home with a growing sense of isolation, that was going to be more important than ever, only the delivery method was going to need to be different. And better. → 22 | Ignitemag.ca | November 2020
