TL;DR Private equity has been quietly buying up the event production industry, ramping up the consolidation of event production. One company now controls in-house AV at over 2,200 venues worldwide. And the same financial firm owns the event technology platform most planners use every day. If you haven’t noticed your options shrinking, that’s by design. Here’s what’s happening and what smart planners are doing about it.

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When did you last feel like you had a real choice in who produced your event? If it feels like you haven’t, thank the continued consolidation of event production.

If you’ve been in this business more than a few years, you probably remember shopping around. Finding a production partner who knew your program, understood your culture, and showed up on-site with the same faces year after year. 

You had leverage. You had options.

While that world hasn’t disappeared, it is shrinking. And the people engineering that change aren’t event professionals. It’s private equity.

Stage Right, Inc. is an independent event production company. We’ve been doing it for 35 years. That’s why we think our perspective is worth sharing. We’ve watched this consolidation from the inside.

What’s Actually Happening

The event production industry is consolidating quickly. Most planners haven’t had time to absorb what it means.

The clearest example is Encore. What is now the dominant in-house AV provider in the world was assembled through an aggressive, private equity-backed acquisition campaign. 

PSAV, acquired by Blackstone in 2018, proceeded to absorb numerous companies, including Encore Event Technologies from Freeman. That last acquisition eliminated PSAV’s largest North American competitor in a single transaction. PSAV then rebranded the combined company as Encore.

Today, Encore is the in-house AV provider at more than 2,200 venues in 20 countries. Its most recent acquisition, global events agency FIRST, signals even bigger ambitions: moving beyond AV into full creative, strategy, and event management services.

It didn’t stop there. 

On the technology side, Blackstone acquired Cvent, the dominant event management platform used by tens of thousands of planners. It now holds significant stakes in both the technology planners use to manage their events and the production company most likely to be waiting for them at the hotel.

Little wonder why event production is consolidating. The global events market is projected to reach $2.5 trillion by 2035. It’s a prize attracting capital at a blistering pace. 

But this is not organic growth driven by better service. Its financially engineered consolidation designed to generate returns for investors.

The Hotel Venue Problem

As planners, here’s the part that affects your daily work most directly.

When you book a hotel or convention center, there’s often an in-house AV provider already named in your contract. It has an exclusive or preferred relationship the property negotiated before you arrived. 

Here’s the rub: You’re not choosing a vendor. You’re inheriting one. That was a manageable inconvenience when it meant a regional company with a handful of local properties. It’s a fundamentally different situation when the same company holds that position at more than 2,200 venues worldwide… and has pricing data from every one of them. 

That company knows what planners in your market will pay, where they’ll push back, and where they’ll walk away. You don’t have that information. They do. 

So a nearly identical event can carry dramatically different price tags from one city to the next, and what pricing looks like when competition has been engineered out of the room.

What Private Equity Ownership Actually Means for Your Event

Let us be clear. This is no slam against larger companies. They execute well. Like us, the people on-site producing your events do care about your meeting or show.

But the people who own the company are not thinking about your general session. They’re thinking about their ROI.

With many acquisitions come a great amount of debt. A company is this position operates under a kind of financial pressure will not willingly leave money on the table for the benefit of its clients. Every pricing conversation, every staffing decision, every choice about whether to upgrade aging equipment happens in the shadow of that obligation.

When a company is optimizing for investor returns, customization is friction. Standardized packages, standardized labor rates, and standardized approaches improve margins. They also produce events that feel like every other event produced by the same company for every other client.

None of this is a moral failing. It’s simply what private equity ownership structurally produces.

Why Independent Partners Matter More Now

Here’s what independence delivers.

• Flexibility. An independent production company builds solutions around your event, not around its equipment inventory or corporate rate card. 

• Accountability. When you work with an independent, you’re working with decision-makers, not an account manager reading from a script. 

• Creative investment. Independents are where new ideas get tried first, without running a proposal through three layers of corporate approval.

• Competitive leverage. If you’ve never worked with an independent partner, you may not realize how useful that relationship is even for events inside hotel venues. A trusted independent gives you real, current market data on what things should cost. That information is enormously valuable when you’re sitting across from an in-house provider’s sales team.

• Aligned incentives. An independent production company succeeds only when your event succeeds. There is no other revenue stream, no financial engineering to fall back on. When your event is great, we grow. That alignment is structural, not aspirational.

What Smart Planners Are Doing Right Now

The planners navigating consolidation of event production most effectively are doing a few specific things.

They’re always getting competitive bids, even when the venue contract seems to favor the in-house provider. Even if the independent can’t execute the full event inside that venue, the information a competitive quote provides is valuable at the negotiating table.

They’re auditing their vendor mix. If every production partner, technology platform, and event agency in your ecosystem is owned by the same private equity firm, that’s a concentration risk. It may not feel urgent today. But it will the first time something goes wrong and you realize everyone you’d normally call for help reports to the same parent company.

They’re building independent relationships now, while the market still has them. The consolidation trend does not reverse. The window for establishing these partnerships while independents are still abundant and accessible is narrowing.

And they’re asking a question that doesn’t come naturally in vendor conversations but should: Who owns this company, and what does that mean for how they’ll treat my event when their interests and mine diverge?

The Bottom Line

Stay practical.

The event production industry is consolidating at a pace most planners haven’t fully reckoned with. In that environment, your most valuable professional asset is a production partner whose entire business model is built around making your event exceptional. 

Don’t get drawn in by the scale and reach of consolidated players without understanding what that scale costs you. The technology can look impressive. That doesn’t mean the rest of the structure is working in your favor.

We don’t answer to investors. We answer to you.

Interested in talking through your next event with a production partner who’s genuinely independent? We’d love that conversation. Contact us.