Four circlesGreg Hitchen designs an event as four overlapping circles: knowledge, showcase, fun and networking. The sweet spot is where all four intersect, where attendees learn, enjoy themselves, meet people and see what exhibitors can do. He came to the idea about twenty-five years ago from his years as a professional musician and from reading The Experience Economy, and he still thinks of the events his company produces as show business for business people.Source: Adler interview, about 00:32 to 00:34.
People are the hard partGreg Hitchen was running his company's Singapore business within a couple of years of joining, and he says nobody prepared him for it. Managing people, he says, is the hardest thing to learn and remains the joy on the one hand and the heartbreak on the other. His method is to assume that everyone has something to contribute, and that whether you get a lot from them or nothing is a question of respect and of asking good questions.Source: Adler interview, about 00:09 to 00:10 and 00:24 to 00:25.
Purpose over planGreg Hitchen stopped writing five- and ten-year strategic plans about ten or fifteen years ago because life does not cooperate with them. Terrapinn now runs on a statement of purpose, to promote innovation and technology that changes people's lives for the better, and it will not produce defense, gambling or tobacco events. The portfolio that resulted spans vaccines, orphan drugs, digital health, solar and storage, and electric vehicle charging.Source: Adler interview, about 00:05 to 00:06; Trade Show Talk Ep. 66.
Stay in the marketGreg Hitchen says any organizer that pulls out of the Gulf during the war will not be looked on kindly when it tries to return. His own company is holding its position in Saudi Arabia and the UAE even as it loses between 40 and 50 percent of what it earned there, which was about 30 percent of group revenue. The work in the meantime, he says, is a moving feast of rescheduling, reorganizing, rationalizing and improvising.Source: Adler interview, about 00:39 to 00:41; Skift Meetings, 10 March 2026. His figures.
Volume versus earningsBy Greg Hitchen's account, his company was the second-largest conference producer in the world in the mid-1990s and earned almost nothing. It ran roughly 1,500 conferences and 1,000 public training seminars a year through fifteen offices. He fixed it by running about ninety events instead, and he describes the change as a move from high volume and low quality of earnings to low volume and high quality of earnings.Source: Adler interview, about 00:36 to 00:38; Trade Show Talk Ep. 66.
What the crisis taughtThe 1997 Asian financial crisis took Greg Hitchen's company from close to 200 staff in Asia on 30 June 1997 to 16 on 15 March 1998. He says the experience left him dissatisfied with high-volume conferences and determined to build event brands of higher value and recurring income. It took the company years to get there.Source: Adler interview, about 00:38 to 00:39. His figures.
Buy what your platform can fixIn 2018 Greg Hitchen went after a UK solar show that, by his account, was losing about £500,000 a year on £400,000 of revenue, because he thought his company could do better with it. The first show under Terrapinn doubled the revenue, and by his figures the event now turns over about £8 million. It became the seed of about twenty solar shows across Australia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.Source: Adler interview, about 00:02 to 00:03; Business of Events, Jan 2026. His figures.
Score the sellerGreg Hitchen scores every acquisition out of ten and wants an average above seven. An event he bought before he had the scorecard rates about three and a half in retrospect, mostly because of the seller's integrity and the people. He tests integrity by visiting the seller's workplace to see how the boss and the employees deal with each other, and he checks the numbers after that.Source: Trade Show Talk Ep. 66 (scorecard, the 3.5, vibes, workplace visit, numbers afterward).
LifersEvery senior person at Terrapinn is a lifer, says Greg Hitchen, someone who started young and grew into the role. The company does not use headhunters for senior jobs: it fills them from inside or leaves them empty. After several years of middle managers paying well for experienced salespeople who proved average, he has returned to hiring graduates and no longer hires anyone from another events company.Source: Adler interview, about 00:25 to 00:27.
Manage activity, not targetsGreg Hitchen holds that a sales manager cannot manage a target, only the activities that produce it. Activities come from ideas and relationships, and the best salespeople create their own. In his industry, he says, value comes from three sources, which are knowledge and concept, relationships, and how well you grow and mentor people, and almost everything else is filling in forms.Source: Adler interview, about 00:29 to 00:31.
Borrow confidence from peersGreg Hitchen says the biggest strategic bet of his career was converting Terrapinn from a conference business to an exhibitions and large-scale events business, from low value and high volume to high value and low volume. He credits what he learned at the Society of Independent Show Organisers (SISO), where he now sits on the board, with giving him the confidence to do it. Years of conversations with other members, he says, showed him the global possibilities of trade shows and how to execute them.Source: Greg Hitchen, SISO board Q&A on LinkedIn, early October 2026 (screenshot; link to be added).