Simon on: RefTech Turns 20

As registration and event management system provider RefTech celebrates its 20th anniversary, EN meets founder Simon Clayton to learn more about the origins of the company, creating a bespoke system for IMEX and a run-in with UPS. 

How did you start RefTech?

Reference Technology started out as a company that provided computer networking and web development services. My background is in IT and IT training and I initially started RefTech to pursue this path. For a lot of my life, my father Ken had been a freelance script writer so the idea of running my own business was never alien to me.

How did you become involved in the events industry?

After about five months, Ken then joined me in the business. His background was as an event producer for Rover (back in the day when their events were week-long launches in amazing locations). He knew the events industry and was a well-known figure. A few years later, Ken read that Ray Bloom and Paul Flackett were about to launch a new industry event; he knew them and approached them to see if they needed a website and if so, could we build it for them. They did have a need, but when we met them it transpired that they needed a quite bit more than a standard website!

So IMEX was your first events industry client?

We got on brilliantly with the IMEX team and we listened to their needs, which were unique and very complex so we wrote a bespoke system to manage the hosted buyer management and exhibitor portal along with the appointment system. As we approached the first IMEX in Frankfurt, they needed a badging system and so I offered to write one for them, thinking “how hard can it be?” It was a bit harder than I thought, but I wrote our first badging system in a long weekend and IMEX Frankfurt became our first major badging client.

Has anything gone wrong over the years?

One of my favourite stories is when we sued UPS. We were supplying badges for a big event in Barcelona and we’d prepared two boxes of equipment for a Saturday delivery to arrive a few days before the event, but only one arrived at the venue. After pretty much a whole day on the phone, we discovered that UPS had ‘forgotten’ to put the box on the conveyer belt at the local depot and it was still in the UK. It was a local holiday in Spain and they couldn’t deliver the box to the venue the next day so I drove over to the depot and picked the box up but by then it was 5pm and we’d missed every direct flight to Barcelona. Ken took the box, got the first flight to Alicante (the nearest airport we could get to that evening) and then drove through the night to get the box to the venue for the event. Despite all the small print that says that UPS can never guarantee a delivery, we demonstrated that they had been guilty of gross incompetence and they settled out of court. And we had a very happy client too.

What’s it like to work at RefTech?

I hope it’s great! We are a family-focused company; with lots of married couples, parents and siblings all working for us (which is great until they want to go on holiday together!) We are a Living Wage employer too and regularly hold events for the team to get together and have fun. All of that said, most traditional job interviews are based on whether the interviewer likes the candidate and how similar they are to that person but this is probably the worse way of assessing a person so we also use psychometric testing as part of the interview process to help gauge how good that person would be at the job they’re applying for.

What’s next?

We have two distinct parts of the business; our teams can manage your registration and badging for you, or we can provide you with the tools to enable you to self-manage your events. As our EventReference off-the-shelf management tool gains traction, we will see a shift into a more product focused business, whilst still serving our existing clients of course. IMEX is shifting all of their systems onto EventReference and we see this as the ideal opportunity to tell the world that EventReference is powerful enough for IMEX, but simple enough for your breakfast meeting.

We recently created an event app; after years of watching the industry and seeing how awful event apps were, I had another of my “how hard can it be” moments and created the EventReference App in a weekend. IMEX America will be using our app this year because of its simplicity and functionality – it gives an attendee what they need in an uncomplicated structure and feedback has been great. That is the ultimate accolade for us.

Tell us something we don’t know about you

I’m a geek, I’m a techie and I love gadgets but I’m not a huge fan of event tech; the events industry is about face-to-face contact and there is a real limit on how much you can improve the face to face experience. I’m also learning to fly and play the drums!

Real Life, not Real Time

I thought I’d seen the back of wearable event tech when Google Glasses fell out of favour. When they launched in 2013, our industry fell over itself to say how they would change events for ever. But of course they didn’t because they were a gimmick that didn’t offer any tangible benefit to the way we organise events.

Wearables have a benefit in certain environments; in aviation we have a knee-board, and wearable tech to show route planning – simply because having these things on hand in a cockpit can be a huge benefit when flying a plane!

But wearable tech is now back in the events industry with vendors claiming that it will provide real time data on attendees’ location and even allow the transference of personal data from one attendee to another.

Does anyone remember ‘Bump’? It was an app that allowed you to ‘fist bump’ your phone into another’s phone to exchange personal info and so do away with the business card. Sadly, it went the way of so many new technologies because it was fixing a problem that doesn’t exist. The exchange of business cards is a practice that is convenient and one that we really don’t mind doing.

One of the claims made about wearables is that we are on the cusp of ‘data driven’ events; that wearable tech can track an attendees’ every move as they walk from the main plenary to the catering area and back again. Does anyone remember ExCeL announcing that they were going to install a tracking system through their halls? They announced it with a fanfare, but they are now strangely quiet about it because it just didn’t offer any benefits that organisers were prepared to pay for.

And hasn’t the Cambridge Analytica debacle taught us anything? People don’t like to be tracked at every level. It’s just a little bit creepy, and I haven’t even mentioned the GDPR implications. But what real benefit will it bring to the average event organiser? It is claimed that it will show the ‘sticky’ parts of an event where delegates dwell, and it will show us this in real time – actually whilst the event is taking place.

So that organisers can do what exactly? Will the screen highlight that a delegate is standing alone, so that the organiser can swoop in to introduce them to a colleague? Would the organiser watch and obsess about why delegates are standing to the left and not the right? Will it show the organiser where the most popular places of the event are? (I can tell you this for free – it will be where the food or the booze is…) In reality what live changes could be made to an event on the day because some data has shown that people prefer standing at the bar rather than sitting down?

This ‘real time’ analysis also implies that an organiser would rather watch their delegates’ movements from afar, on a screen in a voyeuristic fashion. Events are live and real, they should be experienced by all first hand, and not through a screen. All the organisers that I know will be submerged in their event, with their delegates and actively in the room.

They are busy running the event, interacting, making sure everything runs smoothly, so why should they step back and view it on a screen in real time when they are already part of it in real life? This technology is creating a barrier rather than enhancing the experience. Why should we view our events in real time when we can experience them far better in real life?