World Explorer: Mark Shashoua

Mark Shashoua's family is a kaleidoscope of nationalities — an Egyptian father, American mother and a wife who's from Venezuela, but half Spanish as well — so it's no wonder he now leads a company with operations scattered around the world.

Shashoua was hooked by the tradeshow business from the moment he joined his father and uncle's company, Intl. Trade & Exhibitions, in the early '90s. He worked his way up to CEO by the end of the decade; then, he and the rest of his family sold their shares in the company. He teamed up again with his father to form U.K.-based Expomedia in 2000.

With the new company, Shashoua ventured into venue management in places where the exhibition industry barely existed: Warsaw, Poland; Zagreb, Croatia; and Belgrade, Serbia. Expomedia would set up shop and form local partnerships. The next natural step was to start launching exhibitions.

At the same time, Expomedia also branched off into conferences — mainly in Russia, Poland and India — and, after a slew of acquisitions and tremendous growth, this year will see approximately 380 conferences under its Informedia banner.

As if that weren't enough, Expomedia also has a hand in the publishing world with a shareholder interest in Mash Media, which publishes exhibition industry news, primarily in Europe.

Shashoua spoke to TSW Associate Editor Rachel Wimberly about the company's growth and plans for the future.

Q uestion: How did you get started at Intl. Trade & Exhibitions?

Answer: I was just a salesperson, a grunt. I was the first person to come in. Well, one of the first. I did everything from selling space to building stands to organizing shows and, as the years went on, grew within the company.

The company started with literally us three, and then by the time we sold the business there were about 350 people.

Q: When did you and your family sell ITE?

A: The company went public, and then we sold the balance of our share in 1999. I was made managing director in 1996 and chief executive in 1997. Then we went public, and I stayed on until 1999. My father and uncle retired. I stayed on for a year and then sold the balance of my shares.

Q: How did Expomedia come to be?

A: Expomedia we started after we sold ITE, which we did largely because my uncle wanted to retire and my father was bored. We were offered an extremely good price for it, and I felt I didn't want to take over my father's company. I felt the industry was changing dramatically.

I thought of the concept of what we were doing with cloning exhibitions across Russia. ... Through the late '90s all the really big organizers realized that. We can clone exhibitions everywhere we've got the real brands: in Europe, or America, or wherever. We thought the industry was changing; we felt the barriers to entry were going down. We (my father and I) wanted a new challenge, so we started Expomedia.

Q: What was the first thing you tackled with Expomedia?

A: We thought that the best way, because the industry was changing, was actually just to be involved in venues, to create a chain of international state-of-the-art centers across east and central Europe and Asia. It's very different in America than it is in Europe. In Europe, and (especially) eastern Europe, most of the venues also organize their own shows. So, the relationship between an organizer and a venue is always quite difficult here in Europe.

We felt if we could create a chain of international centers that were run more like a hotel than a monopoly, then this would be something very exciting for the industry. (We would) offer all the things that we wanted as organizers, such as long-term contracts, theme protection and price protection. Where you get one contract — whether it's in Poland or Russia or India — it's the same set of standards across each one.

Q: So was the idea to build the venues and then create shows to fill them?

A: The original idea was just to build the venues and, at the same time, offer services to the organizers looking to bring their shows into that market, one of which would be to provide local exhibition services. Most international organizers need a local partner to help them with either sales or logistics or so on.

Q: And you would be that local partner?

A: Yes, we would set up various local services that would be run alongside our venues. That's how the exhibition side was born, Expomedia Events. It's just evolved as the years have gone on. We started with the venues, then we expanded quickly to the exhibition side, which then expanded.

Because of that whole concept of local partnership, we then met a group called Informa. Informa was looking to break into Poland, Russia and India with the conference business. We became their local partner, and that's how the third business started, ... the conference side called Informedia.

Q: Are most of Expomedia Events shows partnerships then?

A: A number of them are. We have partnerships (in shows) with Montgomery Intl., the Daily Mail (and General Trust) and emap. There's a whole host of different partners.

Expomedia Events has grown to actually getting involved with our own brands because we didn't want to be limited to solely partnerships with international organizers. What we've been doing for the past 18 months is looking for brands that we believe can be cloned into different countries.

Q: Would Homebuyer Events in the United Kingdom be an example of that?

A: That's a great example. It's a show that started in London and is now in five different cities in England. Its core clients are international (60 percent), which means they're coming from Germany, from Bulgaria, from America, from wherever, looking to sell their properties to the U.K. market.

Now, that concept and those clients want to go to different countries. For example, there isn't a Homebuyer in Germany. We have a growing exhibition company in Germany, and that show will be cloned next year in Germany. From Germany, we will clone it into five cities in the next couple of years. It will be wholly owned by us, and that's why we're buying — because we don't want to be reliant on just partnerships.

Q: How do you identify untapped industries in these countries?

A: Our main markets are Russia, India, Poland, Germany and the U.K. The reason, for example, we chose the U.K. is because England tends to be slightly more (involved in) international shows than other places. Also, we buy shows here to clone abroad.

Q: As far as the venues themselves go, what markets are you in?

A: Warsaw, (Cologne) Germany, New Delhi, and last year, because we decided not to pursue venues as much as exhibitions and conferences, we've done license agreements on the other venues (Belgrade and Zagreb). The people we've trained have effectively bought the venues back from us, but they're allowed to use all of our branding.

Q: How many conferences does Informedia have?

A: We're hopefully going to do about 380 this year, which is a huge growth since we started. We started in 2003, when I think we literally had a handful. That's when the partnership with Informa started, so we've grown from 10 to 380-odd. It's a very exciting business; we've only scraped the surface.

Q: What are the most in-demand sectors?

A: We tend to stick to the same ones: real estate, telecommunications, retail, finance, legal, transport (and) energy. Those are the key sectors.

Q: And you're expecting more acquisitions and growth in the conference division?

A: Definitely. That's actually the fastest growing part of our business. Nobody said in the '90s, "I'm going to start building the biggest conference company in Russia." It's actually a very immature market for conferences.

That's why, ... when the idea came up to do conferences, we actually jumped at it. I always thought it was a great industry, but we didn't know enough about it. So we took a partner like Informa, one of the best conference organizers in the world, who taught us how to do it.

Q: You also have a publishing unit?

A: We have a shareholding in Mash Media, which does exhibition news predominately for the U.K. They have one main international title, Exhibition World. We invested in them originally, and still do, because we think it's a good business and we had a lot of venues. We were a small company, and we wanted to increase our exposure to the market and have closer access to the industry itself.

Q: Are there any conflict of interests?

A: I wish ... we have absolutely no editorial involvement whatsoever. I keep laughing with the main guy because I tell him, "We used to get more press from you before we bought you."

Q: With so many different things going on, how do you stay organized?

A: We've got lots of different hats, but we've tried lots of different things here ... and I think we've settled on the key ones going forward. Not many people get a get a chance to try to be involved with venues, exhibitions, conferences and even put their hand in publishing.