New Service Contractor Launches

Three industry veterans who previously worked for Champion Exposition Services – Chris Valentine, Nate Derby and Chris Young – have formed T3 Expo, a new general service contracting company.

According to T3 Expo officials, the new company is an on-demand provider of “innovative event and tradeshow solutions and products nationwide.”

Valentine added, “Similar to what Amazon did for the retail industry, Virgin (Atlantic Airlines) and JetBlue (Airways) with air travel and Apple (with) music, the time is right for changing the way contractors do business. The traditional general service contractor model has focused on warehouses and large investments in inventory with deep, yet narrow, product lines.”

Now, he added, T3 Expo will break that mold by operating as a “highly efficient design, production and distribution hub that leverages the latest technology to deliver results.”

One way T3 Expo plans to work hand-in-hand with its clients, Derby said, is to offer pricing models tailored to their needs. “The end goal is to provide a pricing structure that will add value to your event,” he added.

Valentine previously worked for Champion for 15 years as CFO and chief information officer; Derby began his career at the Ritz-Carlton and started at Champion in 1998, overseeing events for clients such as Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft and Adobe; and Young, who worked on design at Champion, has created and implemented several industry design standards, including 3-D modeling.

“We strongly believe in, and T3 Expo is committed to, building a culture of adaptive innovation,” Young said. “We will deliver better end results and will work more efficiently by listening to our customers and developing solutions based upon their feedback. We have founded T3 Expo as an effective and malleable alternative for today's event managers.”

According to T3 Expo officials, they plan to offer several things that will set them apart from their competition, such as pricing.

“Our objective-based pricing approach will allow show managers to decide whether they would like to lower exhibition rates, lower show management rates, increase revenue or improve branding or overall decor,” Derby said.

He added these options will be packaged into four solutions and priced accordingly.

“This will allow for a greater amount of flexibility in our approach to producing events and, ultimately, better ROI for our customers,” Derby said.

Other approaches the company said it plans to take include a customer-driven supply chain, as opposed to fashioning products from existing inventory, and a commitment furthering innovation in the industry, such as digital signage and e-commerce solutions.