Most organizations calculate the cost of an event by looking at what they spent. The more important number is what they lost. Here is how to see it clearly.
I want to talk about the event that went fine.
Not a disaster. Not a scandal. Nobody walked out. The venue was good, the food was decent, the slides were polished. By most measures, it ran smoothly.
And yet, three weeks later, nothing had changed.
The sales team came back from the kickoff and fell right back into the same patterns. The leadership offsite produced a summary document that nobody referenced again. The annual conference generated some social posts and then disappeared from memory.
That is what a flat event costs. Not the budget line. The outcome that never materialized.
The math organizations are not running
Most event budgets get evaluated one way: did we stay within what we planned to spend?
That is the wrong question.
The right question is what were we trying to accomplish, and did we accomplish it?
A sales kickoff exists to align a team, build momentum, and send people into the quarter with clarity and conviction. If that does not happen, the cost of the event is not just the venue and catering. It is the revenue that a motivated, aligned sales team would have generated and did not.
A leadership offsite exists to get senior people on the same page, work through real tension, and leave with a shared direction. If people leave politely nodding but privately skeptical, the cost is the weeks of misalignment that follow, the decisions made without real consensus, and the time spent managing friction that the offsite was supposed to resolve.
These costs are real. They just never show up on an invoice.
Why flat events happen
In my experience, flat events rarely happen because the content was bad or the venue was wrong.
They happen because nobody was responsible for the room.
Content gets planned. Speakers get booked. The agenda gets built. But the actual experience of being in that room, how energy moves through the day, how ideas connect across sessions, how people feel at 3pm versus 9am, that part gets left to chance, or worse, flat out ignored.
When you leave the room to chance, you get whatever the room gives you. Sometimes that is fine but fine doesn’t move the needle. And you wonder why people say “events don’t work”.
What changes when the room is held intentionally
When I work with a corporate team on an event, my job is not to make it run smoothly. Smoothly is a low bar. My job is to make sure the room actually does what it was designed to do.
That means understanding the goals before anything else. And please remember, events don’t have goals. People have goals. Hence, we have to design for both your goals AND their goals but asking questions like:
What does success look like at 9am and 5pm? What do we need people to feel? What should they leave understanding, and be ready to do?
Everything builds from that.
It means managing energy and pacing across the full day, not just the opening hour. It means creating the conditions for honest conversation rather than performed agreement. It means connecting ideas across sessions so the program builds instead of just accumulates.
When that work is done well, the event delivers, which is WAY better than “fine”.
And the return on that investment is not a feeling. It is a team that leaves aligned. A leadership group that made real decisions. A room full of people who know what comes next and are ready to move.
The number worth calculating
Before your next major event, try this.
Add up what you are spending. Venue, production, travel, catering, time. Then ask what the value of a successful outcome would be. A motivated sales team entering Q1. A leadership group aligned on strategy. A company culture that feels connected to its direction.
Now ask what you have built into the program to make sure that outcome actually happens.
If the answer is a well-designed agenda and some good speakers, that might not be enough. The agenda is the container. Someone still has to hold what is inside it.
That is the conversation I have with most of my clients before we start. Not what do you want to spend, but what do you need this experience to accomplish?
Imagine how you can make your money work for you to create lasting change versus a forgettable experience.
Let's talk about your next event