Building a Venue Benchmarking Platform: From Excel to SaaS

We met Peter Heath, founder of Venue Performance, at Confex, a week before the first UK lockdown.

Peter ran a benchmarking service for UK event venues. Venues sent him their sales and enquiry data. Each one nominated a group of competitors, and Peter sent back anonymised charts showing how they compared. He did all of it by hand in Excel, and it was taking every waking hour he had.

The Challenge

The service only worked because venues trusted Peter with commercially sensitive figures. Nobody would share their numbers if a competitor could work out whose they were.

Peter was the guardian of that privacy. Whatever replaced the spreadsheets had to keep all the insight in the charts and take over that job from him.

Why Alpaka

Alpaka is a scheduling app at its core, and that turned out to be the right starting point. A venue's business is a calendar of events, and every event has a value.

Alpaka also already had user accounts, secure login and the shell of a SaaS platform, so none of that needed building. We wrote the statement of work with Peter over Skype, with lockdown in full swing.

What We Built

A schema for events

The key decision was letting Alpaka events carry extra metadata. Each event in a venue's schedule holds the food and beverage price per head, the room hire, head counts, and the lead time from first enquiry to confirmed sale. Once the schema was right, the benchmarks followed from it.

Venues as users

We added venues as a new persona. A venue describes itself, places itself on a map and picks the competitors it wants to be compared with.

Anonymity built in

A chart only shows if at least five venues in the competitor set have data for the period. Peter used to apply that rule by hand. Now the software applies it to every chart, every time.

Charts and reports

Every data point can be examined in chart and report form inside the product. Venues can compare their sales and events against their competitors, including business already on the books for the months ahead. They can stack KPIs such as revenue per delegate against their comparison set or their own history, and see their market share and where their business mix is falling behind. Filters cover date range, event type, revenue category and delegation size.

RevMet™

As clients used the product, they wanted one number that summed up how a venue was doing. We developed it with Venue Performance and their clients: RevMet™, revenue per available square metre. It measures how much a venue earns from its meeting and event space relative to its size. It does for event space what RevPAR does for hotel rooms. Benchmarking it against similar venues shows commercial managers how hard their space is working and where they stand in the market.

The Timing

Venue Performance launched into an industry with no events and no business. Venues needed to understand what was happening to them and their competitors as circumstances changed week by week. When lockdown eased, the same charts showed each venue how its recovery compared with its competitors'.

The Outcome

Once clients were familiar with the product, the pace of technical change slowed and the flow of data picked up. Large venue groups joined and brought hundreds of venues with them.

Within three years the database held more than 2 million events, each with multiple data points for finance, head counts and lead times. Hundreds of users log in every month to export charts for their owners and directors.

Venues

500+

Events recorded

2M+

To reach 2M events

3 years