IAM1386 – Founder Creates Easy to Use Technology for Event Planners

Jon Kazarian is the Founder and CEO of Accelevents, a leading virtual & hybrid events platform recently recognized by Inc. 5000 as the top 200 fastest-growing private companies in America. As CEO, Jon is focused on leading the company's vision of helping event planners and marketing professionals transform their events through innovative technology solutions. Jon actively publishes insights on the events landscape and frequently speaks at industry events such as EventMB, Bizbashlive, and INBOUND. Jon chairs the board for the Fall Formal fundraiser benefiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

• CEO Story: The reason Jonathan got into the event space is that his cousin was diagnosed with cancer at the age of seventeen. Later realized he could raise more money if he ran auctions and raffles digitally.
• Business Service: Fundraising space. “Virtual, hybrid, and in-person events management platform” 
• Secret Sauce: Customer experience solution. Customer-first. Real-time feedback loop.
• CEO Hack: Curiosity, always asking why. Fosters learning.
• CEO Nugget: Spending time and if you are spending on the right thing.
• CEO Defined: Somewhere between a coach and the captain of the team. You have to be somebody who can be on the field keep their pants dirty and lead by example. And also, somebody who gets off the field and sees the business as a whole.

Website: www.accelevents.com

LinkedIn: Kazarian

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Transcription

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00:20 -Intro

Learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEO's without listening to a long, long interview. If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is to I Am CEO podcast.

00:47 – Gresham Harkless

Hello hello hello, this is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jonathan Kazarian of Excel events. Jonathan, it's great to have you on the show.

00:56 – Jonathan Kazarian

Thanks for having me.

00:58- Gresham Harkless

Yeah, super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Jonathan so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's working on. Jonathan is the founder and CEO of Excel Events, a leading virtual hybrid and in-person event management platform recognized by Inc. 5000 as a top 200 fastest-growing private company in America. As CEO, John is focused on leading the company's vision of helping event planners and marketing professionals transform their events through innovative technology solutions. As an industry thought leader, John actively publishes insights on the events landscape and frequently speaks at industry events such as event MBS, Biz Bash Live, and Inbound. John also chairs the board for the fall formal fundraising benefit, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. John, super excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:47 – Jonathan Kazarian

Let's do it.

01:48 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:56 – Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah, so you mentioned Dana Farber Cancer Institute, which is actually how I got started. And the reason that I got into the event space was actually that my cousin at the age of 17 was diagnosed with cancer, so wanted to do something for her. Had been hosting a number of smaller events in the past, but ultimately decided that we could raise a ton of money if we rented out the aquarium in Boston and hosted a fundraiser. So we got 840 people to show up for that first event. Ended up raising about 65 grand for Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and going into that event, realized that one way we could raise a lot more money is if we ran the auction, the raffle digitally. So looked around for solutions, couldn't find anything that was either good or affordable, and ultimately decided to build our own. So we did that, and that was the beginning of the company. Certainly, there were a number of years between then and where we are today and a number of different iterations, but that's how we got into the space.

02:54 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate you for sharing that story and everything that happened in your family. And sorry, of course, that that happened, but you to be able to have a strong foundation and everything that you built and a strong why I think is a better way to say it for everything that you've been able to build is absolutely huge.

03:10- Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah. Thank you.

03:12- Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know you touched a little bit on the years that it took to get to where you are now. Could you take us through a little bit more about that and then how you're serving your clients and you're making their impact for them?

03:24 – Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah. So as we got our start in the fundraising space, we were very much focused on donations and auctions, raffles, and other giving campaigns. But one of the things that we started to learn was that organizers wanted easier technology, wanted a single solution to facilitate everything from event registration through payment processing through those fundraising avenues. As we began to go further down that route, we then started to work with more for-profit events, be it festivals, conferences, concerts, trade shows, you name it because we had easy-to-use technology that did what they needed to do. So we really started leaning to that and things were starting to pick up, but we were still quite a small company.

We did about 375k in revenue in 2019, and it was looking like we were going to be able to get to a million in revenue in 2020. We had our first salesperson who had joined us in 2019. Things were definitely on the up, but then obviously in March of 2020, the world shut down. So at that point, we essentially ran out of money with all the canceled events, and the refunded tickets, and realized that we needed to make a pivot to stay alive. And as I mentioned, we had already been leaning much more into the for-profit event space. So working with a lot more conferences, and they have a pretty unique and differentiated set of needs compared to other types of events. So we made this pivot and we moved into the virtual event space, and from there, things just took off.

We ended up closing out 2020 at over 3.2 million in revenue. So essentially ten times our revenue from the prior year. And it was very much driven by making this pivot and being able to understand exactly what our customers need and being able, to deliver a solution for them. There were a lot of aspects that went into the way that we interacted with our customers that just created this very unique and powerful feedback loop that allowed us to iterate so quickly.

05:29 – Gresham Harkless

I appreciate you sharing that and especially a lot of the behind the scenes, because, you know, you hear the term or hear the number 3.2 and that number that you all have been able to hit, but it doesn't, you know, you don't sometimes hear the full story and the full journey of what it took to kind of get there. So I appreciate you sharing that because, at the end of the day, I imagine that a lot of your success was because you already had an easy-to-use software and you were able to focus on, how can I listen to this feedback and iterate related to that, rather than how do I need to build this next thing?

05:56 – Jonathan Kazarian

Exactly. Exactly. And that really stemmed from the way that we built our customer experience team and the culture we built around them in terms of how they interact with their customers. Even from the very beginning of the launch of our company, we had a chat widget on our website and we staffed that basically twenty-four-seven.

I mean, I remember being on the highway and having to pull over just to be able to respond to a customer on Saturday night, because that's the culture we wanted to build. We wanted to be there for our customers. And in doing so, it just created this almost viral loop of feedback to us because they knew we were there, they knew that we were listening to them and then translating that into our product.

So as we continue to build and scale our team, and we took our customer experience team from two folks at the beginning of 2020 to, I believe it was 27 at the end of 2020, every single person carried that same importance as it related to how we interact with our customers. When you're building an event, you're spending three months creating this experience that culminates in 3 hours. You don't have ten minutes to wait for a response when you have a question.

And by being there in real-time, I think our median chat response time right now is 26 seconds. It just makes our customers feel as if we're a part of their team and we work together to figure out what's the best solution for whatever it is they're trying to accomplish and then we figure out, well, how can we do that as a technology provider just to make their life easier? Events are one of the hardest things to produce with one of the greatest senses of urgency. Technology needs to be there to make life easier for folks, not do the opposite.

07:40 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you said that, because I think so many times when you hear about tech companies that have really strong software foundations, sometimes it's using that tech to kind of create a block between being able to kind of reach out and contact somebody. So I love you, obviously, being able to kind of get on the side of the road and be that answer. But I also love even more what that represents as far as that culture that you talked about and how when you're going through an event or even going through COVID as a whole, you want to make sure people. People are there for you. And I think being able to provide that solution in so many different ways definitely hits the home run.

08:16 – Jonathan Kazarian

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, people talk about, like, doing things that don't scale, and they look at chatbots as a solution to starting to implement something that makes you more scalable. The reality is, as an early business, you need to hear everything from your customers and you need to be there for them. And this is one of those things that you just need to hang on to as long as you possibly can. So that that feedback loop is open.

08:40 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And so would you consider that to be what I like to call the secret sauce? It could be for yourself individually, the business, or a combination of both. But do you think it's that customer experience and really like drilling down and keeping your nose to the street, so to speak, to really understand what clients need, do you think that's part of your secret sauce?

08:57 – Jonathan Kazarian

Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. Our customer experience team is our second largest team, only to our engineering team. By having that be such a large team that is so empowered within the organization, that sort of culture propagates throughout every interaction that we have as a company and the way that we're thinking and building for our customers and building our business, our business model around our customers. So, yes, putting customers first in that essentially real-time feedback loop, bringing them into your conversations, into your cycle, is just. It's so incredibly important. I mean, even last week, during our all-hands meeting, we brought one of our customers in to speak for 15 minutes, just about their interaction and experience with our entire entire company. Was there listening to that. It's a virtual meeting that we host, actually on our own platform, but just having those folks in these conversations goes such a long way.

09:52 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:03 – Jonathan Kazarian

I guess it's sort of a habit, but it's perpetual curiosity. It just always asking the why. It doesn't matter what the circumstance is. You could be whatever out of red light and you see something, you're just like, I wonder why that is that way. And building that sort of culture for yourself. And that continuous curiosity leads you to ask these questions in a way that just fosters learning and development and broadens your awareness of everything that's going on in the world. And it then translates into the way that you do things, the way that you operate as a company, as a leader, as a product developer. So if there's one, yeah, if there's one hack, I could suggest it's finding a way to fuel and grow your curiosity as a human.

10:49 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So what I wanted to ask you now is what I like to call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:04- Jonathan Kazarian

It would be to be hypercritical of what I'm spending time on. And it's almost contradictory to my last statement about being hyper-curious because when you're just super curious about everything, you want to dig in and spend time on things because everything becomes interesting. But the reality is sometimes you have to pump the brakes. You have to know, when do I need to just get something done? When is there something that I need to outsource? When is there something that's 80-20 rural? Right.

Can I get this done so that I can move on to the next thing? Or does spending any more time on this actually move the needle for me and for the business? And, yeah, I mean, if there's one thing that I would have changed about the way I built over the years and one thing I would, I'm still very conscious of going forward is just where I'm spending my time. And am I spending it on the right thing?

11:57 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And, you know, especially the balance. Do you feel like you've had that formula of like, what, you know, what percentage you're going to do, you know, the curiosity versus the? That's really trying to drill down on the curiosity that kind of comes from that.

12:12 – Jonathan Kazarian

I don't know. I don't know that I figured that balance out. It's, it's definitely a challenge. I think it's one of those things where I try to spend my business hours very much focused on getting the things that I need to get done and then spending the evening more on the things that are just continued learning. But yeah, it's a continual balance and I don't think it's anything that I'll ever get perfect, but that's okay.

12:36 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition, of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote CEO's on this show. So, Jonathan, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:46 – Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah, that's, I think, a challenging question. So I played a lot of sports growing up, and I think being a CEO is somewhere between being a coach and a captain of the team. You have to be somebody who can be on the field and get their hands dirty and lead by example, but you also have to be somebody who can take a step back and sort of get off the field and look at the business as a whole

. And just like everything else we talked about, that's another balancing act of being able to do both. Know when you have to jump in and help out, but also know when you have to be able to take a step back and do something in a way that somebody else might not be viewing it and think about the bigger picture and think about further down the road. So I guess to summarize, being a CEO is both being on and off the field, being in a position to be able to lead but also push and coach the team.

13:37 – Gresham Harkless

That makes so much sense. And I'm a big sports guy. You might have heard this guy, I think his name's Tom Brady a few times. He's the ultimate kind of like, you know, player-coach, where you hear that term around a lot where they have so much knowledge and information that they're able to coach, but at the same time, they're so close to it that they're able to make changes and pivots and all those things, you know, throughout the day to day, you know, business life or obviously the game that's going on as well, too.

14:02 – Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah, and there's actually, I don't know, you've seen the documentary on ESPN about Brady, but that is the epitome of what I mean. Yes, it's sports, but I think there's just so much that any CEO can learn from watching that documentary and learning from Tom.

14:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I have not cracked it open yet. I was trying to wait for all of them to go live, and then I wanted to watch them all. So it could be like kind of like the last dance or Christmas, you know, going on for me. But I think to kind of see the behind-the-scenes of, like, what makes people tick, what makes them work, to be able to balance that strategy and being able to kind of see the forest for the trees, but at the same time executing on a regular basis and able to get that, you know, that feedback that you talked about in your business is so huge. To be able to kind of iterate and change, but still evolve with the further times.

14:45 – Jonathan Kazarian

And I would add something which is creating a winning culture, a winning culture where it's the expectation, it's the norm, and everybody is driving each other to set that expectation. That's a huge part of it as well.

14:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, John, I truly appreciate that definition, and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the bike, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find about all the awesome things you team we're working on.

15:15- Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah, definitely. You can find me on both LinkedIn and Twitter. It's my handle is Jake Kazarian on both of those. My name's John Kazarian. You can also check us out excellent events.com. check out our chat. Promise you will be there in real-time with a real person. So ask any questions you want to. And I look forward to hearing from you.

15:33 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And we'll have the links and information that show notes as well, too. Hopefully, John will not be on the side of the road or anything when he's, when anybody's answering, or anybody else on the team. But I truly appreciate you for, of course, taking some time out day and of course, all the awesome things that you're doing. Sometimes we forget that it doesn't have to be either or when it comes to technology, it could be a way to make your life better. So I love that you've been able to kind of do that and remind us of how important that is. And of course, I appreciate you and appreciate the things you do and the time you took today.

16:01 – Jonathan Kazarian

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

16:03 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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