by Doug Emslie, Cuil Bay founder, originally published March 9, 2026 on Tradeshow Executive
The exhibition industry celebrates consolidation but underinvests in the founders who make it possible.
In a recent article for Business of Events, Steve Monnington posed a deceptively simple question: With exhibition M&A accelerating and private equity firms pursuing aggressive buy-and-build strategies, at what point does consolidation create a shortage of businesses to acquire?
It is the kind of question that feels hypothetical until you look at the numbers. In 2025, 49 of 73 transactions, or 67%, involved founder-led businesses. So two thirds of deal activity still depends on entrepreneurs that statistic should reframe the entire conversation.
While the industry understandably celebrates consolidation — large platform strategies, scale economics, multiple expansion — far less attention is paid to the reality: the overwhelming majority of what is being acquired was created by individuals who took early-stage risk, often with limited infrastructure and minimal financial support. Consolidation is not creation it is consumption.
As Steve Monnington rightly points out, large organisers have historically expanded in two primary ways: acquiring founder-built businesses or geo-cloning formats that founders originally proved viable. Genuine organic launches within major groups remain rare. Risk-taking, in practical terms, has been outsourced.
This creates a structural dependency that the industry rarely acknowledges. If the pipeline of capable founders slows whether through capital constraints, lack of support or simple fatigue, the M&A machine does not stall because buyers disappear, it stalls because supply does. That is not a philosophical concern, it is supply-chain logic.
When I restarted again after the Tarsus sale to Informa in 2023, my focus was on supporting event entrepreneurs and much of the immediate activity involved established businesses navigating post-pandemic rebuilding. But what quickly became apparent was a deeper issue in the founder community: talented founders with clear theses and market conviction, but no coherent ecosystem around them. Not simply a shortage of funding, but a shortage of structure and support.
In technology, founders operate within a defined infrastructure: accelerators, venture capital, experienced operators, peer networks and repeatable scaling frameworks. In exhibitions, we still romanticise the bootstrapped entrepreneurs in their sheds. We expect entrepreneurs to absorb disproportionate risk, improvise operational systems and only once stability and certain minimum scale is achieved become attractive acquisition targets. We depend on founders to generate the industry’s future while offering them very little systemic support.
Having acquired a founder’s business, we then insist they stay with the business, often for several years. Whilst integration and transition are essential to de-risk an acquisition, we expect a new intake of entrepreneurs to create the next events for us to acquire rather than supporting those who have done it before by giving them their freedom to do what they are good at. Founders don’t thrive in corporate environments and by keeping them bound up in the larger business we add to the demand and supply conundrum
To be clear, exhibitions are not software businesses. The economics differ, the margin profiles differ and valuation methodologies should reflect operational reality rather than Silicon Valley aspiration. Importing tech-style multiples into event businesses without tech-style scalability is misguided. But dismissing the ecosystem model because “we are not tech” is equally shortsighted. The lesson from technology is not valuation inflation it is deliberate founder infrastructure and support.
That thinking underpins the development of the Event Venture Group in the United States and Manta Media globally. These are not simply funding vehicles, they are attempts to formalise support around early and growth-stage entrepreneurs combining meaningful minority capital with operational mentoring, governance discipline and shared services to reduce execution risk.
There is also a harder truth embedded within this conversation. Investors will not commit time, networks and expertise without meaningful alignment. Serious minority positions are not opportunistic as the founder needs money; they are what ensure engagement. Equally, founders who resist support in the name of independence often underestimate the demands of sustainable scale. Getting the correct balance and alignment whilst tricky is fundamental to success and while not easy we are beginning to see some positive patterns with some of the transactions done to date.
Geography adds another layer. The U.K. continues to produce extraordinary creative talent in events. The U.S. continues to offer deeper capital pools and a more mature venture mindset. We are in the early stages of creating the growth infrastructure and collaboration and competition will follow if we are successful.
The real risk facing exhibitions is not that consolidation will stop. It is that we will mistake consolidation for growth. Buying businesses that entrepreneurs have built is not the same as ensuring the next generation of businesses exists. If we fail to invest deliberately in founders, to professionalise support, to align capital early, to create partial liquidity opportunities rather than the normal binary sell-or-struggle outcomes we risk slowly recycling a finite pool of assets. Multiples may hold, portfolios may grow but the underlying engine that drives our industry will weaken.
Which brings us back to the headline question. Who is building the future while we are buying the past? If 67% of transactions are still founder-led, then the answer is clear: The future is being built by entrepreneurs operating in an ecosystem that remains underdeveloped and underprioritised. The exhibition industry’s long-term health will not be determined solely by how effectively it consolidates it will be determined by how deliberately it cultivates the next generation. Consolidation is visible, it is measurable and makes headlines. Entrepreneurial renewal is quieter, harder and more complex. But without it there is nothing left to buy and that is a risk no amount of financial engineering can offset.