TSW's Global Leaders: No Risk, No Reward

These days there aren't a lot of companies brave enough to buy shows, launch new ones and expand into uncharted territories – all at the same time. Most have chosen to wait out the economic roller-coaster ride on the sidelines and hope for better times to come.

But then there's the Tarsus Group – led by Managing Director Doug Emslie – which appears to be utterly fearless.

In the past year alone, the Tarsus Group acquired a 50-percent interest in a company with a portfolio of 27 shows in Central and Western China; launched an edition of its Smart Label Summit event in Barcelona, Spain; and acquired a company with eight events in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, among them the Dubai Airshow.

There have been other bold moves, like entries into emerging markets, such as India, despite the great challenges.

Tarsus Group also had the foresight to get into the fast-growing anti-aging market just as a worldwide generation of baby boomers, many of them flush with cash, have begun to, well, age.

Emslie summed up the company's credo thus: “Strengthen the business by expanding to fast-growing, emerging markets.”

Emslie recently spoke with Tradeshow Week Senior Editor Rachel Wimberly about how the company grew from just one show to a portfolio with more than 80 – and counting.

Question: How did you get started with Tarsus?

Answer: I started off in the exhibition industry here in the U.K. working for Blenheim, the biggest independent exhibition industry in the world at the time, 15 years ago. We got taken over by United Business Media in 1996, and, as part of that takeover, the chairman (Neville Buch) left.

Once his non-competes were finished, he set up a new tradeshow company called Tarsus (Group), and I joined him as the first employee.

Q: What was your plan?

A: We started off with a brand new company, a total start-up situation of what we call on the London Stock Exchange a shell company. We bought as our first acquisition, Labelexpo. At that point in time, the business was turning over about $7 million, and we had about 40 people running three Labelexpos: one in Chicago for the Americas, one in Brussels for Europe and one in Singapore for the Asian market.

Today, the business has grown from those 40 employees to 350. Our revenues are now about $90 million, and we are running about 80 different events in 19 different countries, servicing 13 different sectors. The business has grown quite dramatically from those early, humble beginnings.

Q: Back then, in 1998, did you have an overall strategy in mind?

A: Having come from Blenheim, we wanted to do something different. We didn't want to go and do Blenheim II. Blenheim at the end had 350 different tradeshows. It was purely a tradeshow company. We were in 50 different market sectors in 23 countries, so the objective when we started Tarsus was to do something that was smaller … that was tradeshows, but was also doing other media properties in the sectors that we chose.

We would have the publication, we would have the conferencing and we would get into then the emerging and fast-growing Internet side of media. The idea was we would have less sectors, but we would have more in the media menu to offer our customers.

Q: Can you give me an example of how that has worked out?

A: What we've done with Labelexpo is we've taken off from those three properties, and (now) there are 10 events around the world. We have the leading magazine that we've taken all around the world in English, and now we have it in Chinese.

Obviously, we have an online property and a conferencing element to it and really developed it into what Business Week has called “the only true global brand in the exhibition industry.”

Q: Tarsus seems to have a knack for identifying trends. How, for example, did you figure out that anti-aging would become a phenomenon?

A: It was purely opportunistic. I was in Chicago and one of my friends, who subsequently came on board and joined Tarsus, suggested we look at the anti-aging sector and introduced me to Dr. (Robert) Goldman, who was one of the owners of the business.

By pure luck, the following day (Dr. Goldman) happened to be in London. We met up for coffee for half an hour. Four hours later, we (still) were sitting and talking about the industry. I went to meet him again on a Saturday, because I was really fascinated by what was going on in the industry, and by (that) Monday morning we had agreed on the terms of the deal.

It was one of those situations in life where suddenly something came out of the blue. I got really engaged with it, and, within the space of 72 hours, we had agreed to buy the business.

Q: How does Tarsus choose what shows it will launch and where it will launch them?

A: Our strategy is to develop products, which we believe are going to grow fast, but are also capable of being replicated in other geographies around the world. Whether it's a particular show or whether it's a particular geography we're looking for ... where there's going to be growth and change.

In anti-aging, we grasped very quickly in terms of the baby boomers the desire for people to actually do something about how long they were going to be on this planet and the thirst for knowledge within that sector, (and) not just within the American market, which was the most developed. We saw quite clearly that this was a product that was very immature in the rest of the world.

As a result, this year we will have the first European division and the first Middle Eastern edition.

Q: How do you identify the emerging markets you will take a chance on?

A: I like the emerging markets. They're fast-growing, they're dynamic, they're changing fast and the great thing about, for example China, is that actually the infrastructure is there.

Therefore, the opportunities are slightly different than somewhere like India, where the infrastructure is not there. India is one-tenth the size of China in terms of the exhibition market but, in terms of economy, it's not, so there's a mismatch there. As soon as the Indians build the infrastructure, that will be a fantastic market because it will grow fast.

Q: So you eventually will be expanding into India? Anywhere else?

A: Absolutely. (India's) one where our plans are quite well developed. Whereas, you take the Middle East ... (it's) a very interesting market. You've got in the next couple of years a massive addition in terms of the infrastructure coming in Dubai and Abu Dhabi (U.A.E), which will take what is a very difficult market at this moment in time, because there's not very much free space, to a market that will have actually a lot more space and, therefore, a lot more opportunity.

The other attraction of the Middle East, compared to some of the other emerging markets, is pricing. Our customers are happy to pay to get good service of an equivalent amount of that which you'd pay in America or in Europe. Whereas, if you go to somewhere like India, the price that you can charge customers is a lot lower, but the costs are actually equivalent to what you would be paying in the developed markets. Therefore, your ability to make a sensible return is much diminished.

Q: Most people would not think of Western China when they think about the exhibition industry in that country. Why did Tarsus?

A: We saw an opportunity to move into a market where no one, in terms of international organizers, had gone. We're the first into Central and Western China. We think that's an interesting market because the developed exhibition market in China is really in three areas. It's in Beijing; it's in Shanghai; it's in Guangzhou ...

The exciting opportunities I believe are going to come in the medium term in Central and Western China because of the government policy to encourage manufacturers to move inland, because of the inflationary pressures that they are currently experiencing on the cost of labor. The cost of employing people in the major cities is going up quite dramatically. In Central and Western China, there's still a surplus of labor coming off the land, which need jobs.

Q: If you could predict it, what market sector would be poised for success next?

A: Markets depend on the geography. If you're looking at something in the emerging markets, the old industrial sectors are still actually very exciting, because, lo and behold, that's where they're manufacturing.

As a result of that, places like China and India are going to be quite interesting markets. With all this expansion and all the resulting pollution, there's a whole lot of environmental issues. I think that that's going to be an exciting sector in emerging markets.

Looking at Western markets, I think the medical market is a very interesting one. People are living longer, and they've got more money, and they're more focused on prevention and detection of things that are going to kill them.