SLIDESHOW: Click here for a look back at 20 years of JD Events
“When life seems easy, danger is just around the corner,” Jerry Garcia sings in the Grateful Dead song “Uncle John’s Band.” Two years ago, those words came to Joel Davis, founder and CEO of JD Events (JDE). “It was January 2020, and my wife and I had just traveled to Cambodia and Thailand for 15 days, the longest vacation we’d ever taken. The future looked extremely bright for JDE at that point,” he said.
Days after he returned home, COVID-19 took over the industry and everything went dark. Davis is no stranger to adversity. He founded his company in January 2002, just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Davis spoke with Trade Fair Manager January 18, 20th On the anniversary of his company’s founding, he spoke about what it’s been like to own a small business for the past two decades. “As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking around, but you’re mostly looking at what could be wrong with the market that you serve, what could be wrong with your business. I never really envisioned the whole world stopping and people not being able to gather,” Davis said.
One thing that hasn’t wavered is his optimism. “I’m very optimistic about the future. The pandemic – a global lockdown, not being able to get together – has been the ultimate test for the trade show industry. It’s shown people how important it is to be face-to-face, how valuable it is to do business in person, and that it’s an incredibly resilient industry.”
Twenty years after JD Events launched, there’s still talk of replacing in-person gatherings with virtual events. Davis doesn’t care.
“Virtual shows have had the opportunity for two years to demonstrate that they can replace or replicate face-to-face shows, and it’s clear to me that they can’t. Exhibitors have been proven not to do well at virtual shows. Virtual can work for some educational events, but it can’t replace meeting buyers and sellers face-to-face, the ability to see, touch, smell, taste products, look people in the eye, and do business in person.”
JD Events was spun off from Imark Communications in January 2002, with a show called ad:tech.
“After 9/11, many trade shows, especially tech shows, were struggling. The dot-com bubble had burst and the economy was at its lowest. Then 9/11 happened and there were fears of more terrorist attacks and talk of war in Afghanistan. There was a lot of worry and pessimism. I proposed to Imark that we spin off ad:tech and I would run the show for a management fee. That’s how JD Events was born with cash and an experienced team in place from day one. I started my new company based on a concept I called the incubator model.”
He had been working on this business plan for months: launch new salons in emerging markets, turn around existing ones and buy salons to renovate and make them profitable before selling them to larger salon organizations.
He was taking a risk. “I took a chance at a difficult time. I had a group of friends and family who were investors, but I was also using most of our savings to start this company. It was a contrarian move in that environment. The fact that it worked and that we proved that an incubation model can be successful, and that we’ve been doing it for 20 years, makes me very proud.”
JD Events started with a team of six and has never had more than 14 full-time employees. “The whole concept of the incubator was designed to always be small, to stay nimble and entrepreneurial so that we could launch and build from scratch,” Davis says. “I always wanted to be in three or four markets at most at a time. I believe in the power of focus, and that’s why our team has never been this big.”
Has Davis seen a lot of change over the past two decades? “I feel like the more things change, the more they stay the same,” he said. “The fundamentals of trade shows haven’t changed: We’re industry gatherings where buyers and sellers meet face-to-face in an environment rich with education and networking. The way we do it has changed because of the emergence of technology. We have new tools to digitally engage with our industries year-round, and we have more data and analytics to sell and market smarter. That didn’t exist 20 years ago. Back then, we basically built an email list, sent out a ton of emails, and crossed our fingers. We’ve gotten smarter, more tech-savvy, more efficient.”
He considers the last two years to be some of his proudest. “We were really moving in the right direction in the winter of 2020, and then suddenly we were faced with an existential crisis and fighting for our lives,” he says. “There were some tough times during that time, I’m not going to lie, but the fact is we have a special team that stuck together through furloughs and pay cuts, and everyone made personal sacrifices. Everyone believed in our company and our brands weathered it all. We were in good markets and those markets remained healthy, and we found a lot of creative ways to engage with our online communities in all sorts of different ways, different in each space based on what our customers needed.” And our initial investors stepped up and helped us raise new capital, which was the oxygen we needed to stay in business until we could start hosting events again in the fall of 2021.”
What does the future hold? “We came out of 2021 on a positive note and are very optimistic about our growth potential in 2022 and beyond. I am fortunate to be surrounded by an incredible and talented team of hard-working trade show professionals who have proven they can overcome any obstacle.”
Contact Joel Davis at (203) 371-6322 or joel@jdevents.com