The ‘New’ Outsourcing for Meetings: On-Demand and Task-Specific

Meeting planners have been seeing more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn and hearing from colleagues who left in-house jobs to start their own firms. 

Outsourcing is rising, and some experts say the trend is here to stay. For many companies, the biggest need is for help with specific tasks and for short periods.

“There has been a significant increase in what we call variable or on-demand planner contracting tied to third-party planning organizations,” said Todd Taranto, president of Cadre, a placement firm for event industry freelancers.

“The planner employee base was forever changed after Covid,“ he continued. “Companies rebuilt to 80% full-time employees and added 20% variable labor to scale up or down as needed.” 

As the remaining unemployed planners hung up their own shingles as independents, that model became the norm, allowing risk-averse companies to add “just in time” or “on demand” help on an event-by-event basis.

In the past 18-24 months, Taranto has seen companies hiring contractors for jobs as small as 2 to 4 weeks for site inspections or hotel contracting, alongside the more standard 3- to 9-month gigs for a single event.

Fewer Veteran Planners  

Research from Financial & Insurance Conference Professionals (FICP) shows that the financial and insurance sectors consistently rely on outsourcing for task-based projects. The Winter 2023 Edition of the FICP Pulse Survey revealed that half of member meeting professionals use contractors to supplement their internal meetings and events team(s) either regularly (29%) or on an ad hoc/very limited basis (23%). The most commonly outsourced tasks are sourcing, registration, and gifting.

The association is also losing its more experienced members. “Like most other industries, several long-time FICP members with 20+ years of experience have recently exited the industry for a variety of reasons – among them, entering into their own ventures as independent contractors or starting their own consulting firms,” said Steve Bova, Executive Director. 

“FICP saw this trend coming several years ago and has heavily focused on what we call our rising professionals – those with 10 or fewer years of industry experience – over the past few years. This focused effort is an acknowledgment that rising professionals are the industry leaders of the future and will have the opportunity to learn, grow and demonstrate their value within their companies.”

Bova said there are pros and cons to outsourcing what used to be full-time positions. “Companies need to assess what they would be gaining and what they would be sacrificing. In some instances, you can capture specific expertise, but you almost always lose a certain amount of control when someone is not in-house. Each situation is different. There is always a loss of corporate knowledge when someone leaves — and particularly someone who has been with the company for 20 or 30 years.”

An Extension of a Team

After 24 years as a financial event specialist with a top Fortune 100 company, Carlin Putman is one of those planners. After leaving her job, she pivoted to her own company, Page-One Meetings and Events, which she had previously started as an LLC to do charity work. She now finds herself contracting for fellow FICP members.  

The ideal contracting scenario is when the outsourced meeting planner functions less like a taskmaster and more like a part of the team, said Jen Squeglia, who started her company, RLC Events, in 2007 after working on staff for Fidelity and John Hancock. “When you contract steadily, you know the culture, the systems and the team, so you seamlessly come and go from the projects.”

Though concerns about an impending recession have eased a bit, hiring contract meeting planners will continue, said Taranto. “Now we are seeing the beginning of clients downsizing their full-time staffs again. Basically, companies are using on-demand planning resources as much to deal with their growth as to be prepared for a possible contraction in the future.”