Green Analytics (GA) provides carbon footprint benchmarking and reporting services for the global business events industry. GA was founded by Ryan Green, a sustainable event specialist with 10+ years of experience, working at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas, one of the largest meeting complexes in the world. Ryan holds a LEED AP designation, a Sustainable Events Professional certification (SEPC) by the Event Industry Council, and was named a Community Hero by Three Square Food Bank.
Ryan holds a unique position in the industry, currently overseeing the national rental inventory and sustainability programs for one of the largest general contractors in the industry during the day and getting questions from clients every week about sustainability and how the contractor can help the events' goals. Due to his position, he is limited in what he can share from the contractor perspective and can only provide internal solutions. He is trying to simultaneously improve the operation and services of the general contractors from the inside, while building Green Analytics and trying to provide a direct solution for event clients from the outside.
Background
The massive B2B events industry has
$300+ Billion of annual economic activity to the US economy. In 2016, there were 1.9 million B2B events held in the US alone (not including sports, or entertainment like concerts) which includes 1.3m corporate meetings, 248k conferences and 9,400 tradeshows, per the attached 2016 EIC Economic Impact to the US Economy report. This equals more than 5,000 business events happening daily throughout the US alone, with analysts reporting the industry has nearly bounced back from pre-COVID levels, with a huge demand for face-to-face events after realizing virtual meetings could not replace the interaction of face-to-face connections.
While the scale of the industry has bounced back, sustainability and climate change have become much more important issues, and organizers around the country are looking for ways to satisfy attendee demands to be green, but are being met with a confusing network of sustainable guidance. The events industry currently uses a system of environmental programs based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that has become overwhelming to organizations. It advises them to address issues across 27 different categories of impact and to look at the event from the experience of an attendee, and to make the
experience sustainable by assessing how they travel to the event, what they eat while in the host city, where they stay, etc. It also advises planners to create a sustainable experience within the event including wellness areas to reduce stress, volunteering activities to give-back to the community, brain foods to boost concentration during the sessions, communication requirements so attendees know how to participate with your green programs, and so much more.
This philosophy has been consolidated into the Event Industry Council (EIC) Sustainable Event Standards which is the leading program for planners who want to be sustainable, only, it is unbelievably complicated and provides few, if any, quantifiable metrics for the events, and a final determination that is not available until the event is over, defeating the purpose. It is simply a check-box to show the event was green, and is clearly not working since the only organizations that implement this program are the few who already take sustainability seriously, and want to do everything they can to be green at their events.
While the 'green event' people communicate that everything is in place and events are going green, since the EIC Sustainable Event Standards were revised and re-released in 2022, there have only been maybe 30-40 events who have achieved certification, out of the nearly four million events (1.9m events annually x 2.5 years) which have occurred since launch.
Problems and SolutionsOne of the fundamental problems with the current state of sustainability and events, is the overwhelming scale of the industry, and what that has done to the guidance. Because events are so ubiquitous, all types of events have been conflated into one definition of an event, regardless if its for business, music, entertainment or sports. For instance, one of the leading green meeting programs is the ISO 20121 Sustainable Event Management System (SEMS) which was designed for the 2012 London Olympics. While it provides guidance on how to integrate sustainability, it was built for a massive, global sporting event that operates on a different scale than a business conference, but this level of detail and coordination is being asked of planners overseeing a business conference, which is completely overwhelming. The scale of the industry and a lack of ability to break down the whole into its pieces resulted in a landscape of green ideas and recommendations that each planner can choose, based on the specifics of the event.
A similar challenge with the current model is the ubiquitous way all stakeholders at an event are treated as one block of people with the organizer being held responsible to solve every issue. For instance, in addition to the comments about addressing attendee impacts above, planners are told they need to design sustainability policies for the thousands of exhibiting companies, prioritize the selection of venues with green certifications, and only select destinations with renewable energy sources, on top of their own operations. All stakeholders who travel to an event are considered one block of people since they are all related to the event, and would not be traveling if not for the event, so subsequently, all activities and emissions from every stakeholder is the responsibility of the organizer, which is insane. This approach has created complete paralysis since it is too much to address.
To solve these problems, one of the core aspects of our methodology was to isolate the event and create a definition on what events to address, and a tiered system of stakeholders to breakup the ownership and responsibility placed on the planners. Where current programs burden them with a litany of things to address and the pressure to act immediately, we are the solution, providing clarity and structure to a confusing process.
Business Model / Idea Our mission is to provide a simplified, universal and turn-key measurement system that can be implemented in any destination, venue or suppliers, which prioritizes the reduction of GHG emissions versus the larger conversation of 'sustainability' and the SDG's. We want to disrupt this dysfunctional and vague methodology to sustainability with a ground-breaking new approach that was just finalized after years of research and development aimed at addressing the key issues holding back mass adoption. With 1.9 million events all needing to address their carbon footprint, the one-on-one consulting model will never work, nor will planners internalizing the workload and sustainable event experts just providing general guidance, which is how we got in the mess we are in.
The industry needs a solution that can be scaled up rapidly and provide service for thousands of events at once, which is only possible with a digital solution and online platform that allows individual planning teams to upload documentation for us to organize, catalog, analyze and report on behalf of the client. Current service providers only provide verification of analysis that has already been done by a client or an experiential third-party consulting firm that lumps all stakeholders and spaces as one, resulting in a report with massive consumption metrics and zero breakdown of what caused the emissions.
The Green Analytics methodology targets the three largest sources of Carbon Emissions which are responsible for 75% of total US carbon emissions, and uses verifiable data from first-party sources including event design drawings, invoices, receipts, rental agreements and other documentation that can provide cost or material specification data for equipment within a designated event. Our reporting will become the backbone of sustainable event reporting and future reduction programs for decades to come, with the intent to become the preeminent environmental analytics firm, and future consulting firm, in the events industry by 2030.
We provide a clear framework and methodology that changes what planners address from the large focus on all aspects of 'sustainability' covering every stakeholder and every aspect of the event, to a targeted approach focusing on the Carbon Footprint of each stakeholder individually . We have taken proven guidance, strategies and best-practices from some of the world's leading environmental programs including LEED, CDP, GRI and the EPA, as well as the definition of a 'Business Event' from the Event Industry Council (EIC) to build a structured approach and provide clarity to this confusing, and ever expanding landscape of sustainability guidance. Our framework is 100% built and is designed to classifies items, movements and other event elements as sustainable and unsustainable to establish a positive A-F rating or 'grade' for the event, which is an industry first. Similar to a health department rating, its a simple way for organizers to communicate the sustainability of their event to potential stakeholders, which has never happened before.
The fundamental goal of Green Analytics is to reverse the current reputation of an 'event' since current programs simply tell clients the raw data: "You consumed X watts of energy, Y gallons of water and Z pounds of waste'. There is no context, no breakdown of spaces or stakeholders, and only negativity about the event, leading consultant to come to one conclusion - lowering the size or scale of your events is the only way to lower the related environmental impacts. Its a completely negative picture and only makes events look wasteful or harmful to the environment, and this is an important industry that needs to stay strong for the economies of the host destinations. Demonizing events as harmful is the opposite of what organizers want, and is exactly what 'sustainable event' guidance says about events, and this needs to change immediately. Our reporting provides a positive framework for an event, so planners can show the good they do, and the positive economic and social impacts events have on their host communities, and how the events are not as wasteful as they seem, which is far more than raw data of the amount of waste generated, energy or water consumed, or GHG emissions.
On its face, GA is a data management and analytics company that provides planners with an off-site, turn-key service that can provide data analysis and environmental reporting for an event, in any destination, without overhauling their events. On the back end, GA systems will begin cataloging every supplier including their products, services, specifications and pricing to build the AI engine which will be able to produce reports faster, as the clientele and the volume of data increases. Since the events industry is comprised of a handful of major suppliers including decorators, contractors, and suppliers like catering companies, we will get data from the same suppliers repeatedly. We need high volume smart scanners or the digital equivalent, data analysts to ensure all information on client invoices are captured, a massive digital storage system that can pull files for verification, and programmers to oversee the analytics/reporting engine to produce these reports.
Most tradeshows occur for multiple days at a time, and they are hosted in every major city in the country. Assuming the 9,400 tradeshows per the EIC, if each tradeshow lasted three days, there are a minimum of 75 tradeshows going on every day on average throughout the US, each specializing in a different industry or market, and each with thousands of stakeholders representing every aspect of their respective industry. There is no way to be everywhere at once or ever address these individually without a larger data processing and analytics engine. The only way to address all these events simultaneously is a massive data collection system, analytics hub and AI engine to produce turn-key instant reporting, which was never possible before now, and there is a multi-billion dollar special event market that is mired in complications, and we can be the solution.
Benefits to Primary Client (Event Organizers)
Event organizers are incredibly busy with tasks like design, content development, permitting, marketing, insurance, security and dozens of other things that are more important to the execution. They need a clear structure that is easy to understand and easy to implement, not some super-green environmentalists pushing them to implement every possible sustainable idea during a simple two or three day conference. Our program and methodology will be a leap-forward for planners who are under pressure to act, but don't know where to start. It is designed to alleviate the pressure and programming placed on the primary organizers and the venues (a win-win for everyone), by taking on the data management and reporting for the industry at large. We become the depository for
Pricing Model DistinctionWith the existing service structure, all responsibility is placed on the event organizer including designing plans to address the environmental impacts from all attendees, exhibitors, the venue and the suppliers. Because of this model, 'green consultants' want tens of thousands of dollars to conduct a multiple month long process to identify and mitigate all these undefined areas of an event. It is an exhausting and costly process with few measurable results that most planners just don't do. To address this issue, encourage adoption and reduce costs, GA has developed a tiered engagement system that isolates each stakeholder group and charges each one individually versus charging the organizer for the collective program. This distributed vs centralized cost has an incentive structure built-in, with a 50% discount for all organizer spaces in exchange for mandating exhibitor participation, and another 50% discount to mandate attendee participation.
Program Pricing Example and Free Option for Clients
Services range from $500 - $5,000 for a Carbon Footprint analysis for a single event space for a seminar, conference, sales meeting, convention, reception or any other individually operated space at an event, which is the same pricing for the organizer and an exhibiting company at the event.
As an example - If an organizer has seven event spaces ranging in size (five at the $500 range and two large functions at $5,000 each), this would result in a total program cost for the organizer of $12,500. If one of the larger spaces is a tradeshow with 100 booths, each exhibitor is treated like an individual client and is billed independently at (for example) the minimum rate of $500/assessment even though each booth could be as high as $5k/booth. This equals $50k in data analytics and reporting services for the event, and a discount of 50% for the organizer, which is our minimum target for an event.
Further, most of the emissions of an event are caused by the attendees, and each attendee will pay a $30 carbon footprint assessment fee upfront to the event when they book their tickets, ensuring payment for our services. As part of their ticket, they are given a QR code for a licensed app where a combination of data-trackers and manual entries will provide the Carbon Footprint for each individual attendee automatically from our AI system, or with minimal input from GA analysts. To qualify for the remaining 50% discount, the event must have a minimum of 2,500 participating attendees, equaling $75,000 in revenue.
At minimum, GA could earn $125k in exchange for discounting $12,500 in services and providing 100% free analysis and reporting for the spaces controlled by the organizers.
Target Market & Revenue ProjectionsOut target market is the tradeshow industry, which includes 9,400+ events in 2016, out of the 1.9 million B2B events. This number is deceiving, because each of these tradeshows is comprised of hundreds, if not thousands, of exhibiting companies and tens of thousands of attendees. With a 1% target for 2026, the goal is to provide services to 94 events by EOY, or an average of two events each week. Each of these events will have a target participation of 100 exhibitors and 2,500 attendees to hit the requirement to offset the organizer fees, with a potential minimum revenue of $125,000/event ($50k exhibitors & $75k attendees) with the distributed cost structure ensuring no single stakeholders gets hit with a huge program fee, reducing objections and frustration to increase adoption. At $125k/event and a target of 94 tradeshows, the initial revenue projection is $11,750,000 for 1% of the tradeshow market in 2026.
2026 - $11.75m
2027 - $23.50m
2028 - $35.25m
2029 - $47.00m
2030 - $58.75m
These calculations do not include any of the larger segments of the B2B events industry including the 1.3 million business meetings, or 238,000+ conferences that do not have a tradeshow. Additionally, calculations for exhibitors are set at the lowest service option of $500 and a low threshold to achieve the free option at only 100 exhibitors per event. In reality, there will be hundreds, if not thousands of exhibitors at each event, with each potentially paying multiple times the example in our financial calculations. These calculations are also set at the lowest threshold for organizers to receive the attendee discount at 2,500 people, when this number could be tens or hundreds of thousands of people at major events. Lastly, these revenue estimates do not include other ancillary services like our pre-assessment visual inspection, the standard consulting services once the benchmarking assessment is complete, or venue and supplier data management services. Target Audience
GA has designed our revenue model to piggyback off the current registration fees paid by exhibitors and attendees, guaranteeing payment upfront when stakeholders join the event. Of the $325 billion in economic activity, 14.2% goes to registration fees ($46B) and 15.9% is attributed to tradeshows, which is a total TAM of $7.3 billion annually. Our initial 1% available market is $73 million in 2026 for event registration fees paid to organizers, however, unlike a typical TAM model that suggests your potential revenue comes from taking market share from an existing service provider, our fees are added to the existing service fees charged by the organizers to event stakeholders, with most of the revenue coming from corporate marketing budgets without much concern for the ticket price for their staff to attend an important industry tradeshow, especially a $30 carbon footprint assessment fee compared to the several hundred dollar ticket price to attend an industry tradeshow.
Target investment of $500k by end of Q2 2024. The remainder of 2024 will be used to market services, hire sales team, find initial partners to beta test data collection software and AI engine. In 2025, all revenue will be fully reinvested into operations with the goal to contract 1% of the tradeshow market for 2026 assessments and build client base (94 events). Goal to sign multi-year contracts based on five-year reduction plan and 2030 goals.
With a 10% share of the 25% profit distribution, investors should receive initial returns at the end of Q1 2026 of $73k. Investment should be fully returned by Q3 2027, with the 10 year projected returns totaling $16.1 million, or 32x the initial investment.