Group Travel + Offsites50% of event planner work was manual.
Marco has two products: Instant Offsites, a group hotel booking platform, and Offsites Pro, an end-to-end corporate event planning service.
Offsites Pro generates substantial revenue, but was run manually in spreadsheets, docs, and emails. Event planners spent most of their time performing manual tasks instead of delighting their clients.
Chelsea Labs worked to create an internal and customer-facing Event Design hub to manage vendors, attendees and guests, budgeting and finances, and more.
GOAL
The goal was to give designers their time back. Less time in spreadsheets, more time designing and connecting with clients. Designer capacity was capping growth, so software became the alternative to hiring. On top of that, clients rated their experience with Event Designers high, but with the tools poorly. Marco wanted the client experience to finally match the quality of the service.
Our event designers were spending half their week in spreadsheets and email. They updated budgets, vendors, guest lists, and payments by hand. Chelsea Labs mapped the workflow, identified the biggest bottlenecks, and built the system to automate the repetitive work. This gave the team more time to focus on clients and events.”
Suman Siva
Co-Founder and Co-CEO
50%
of event designers' week went to spreadsheets and email
Optimize2 weeks
from diagnostic start to ranked oppotujnity shortlist.
Optimize8
initiatives ranked by impact and effort
Optimizebusiness map
- SALESbottleneck
Deals were closed using a manually created sheet outside the product. Hotels answered RFPs by email, a median of 60 messages per deal.
- EVENT DESIGN & OPERATONSbottleneck
Most of the manual week lived here. Budget upkeep was the heaviest workstream, and every guest change was re-entered in five documents. Hotel menus were retyped into client documents by hand.
- CUSTOMEROPPORTUNITY
Customers saw internal working files and sent changes as free-form comments, instead of having their own portal.
- FINANCEOPPORTUNITY
Every payment was manually entered multiple times across various systems, and hotel commissions arrived slowly and needed chasing.
- OPTIMIZE WHAT EXISTS
- GROW NEW REVENUE
THE OPPORTUNITY SHORTLIST
- 1
budget engine + client budget view
Full budget, including hotel and vendor fees, automatically computed and checked. The client reads a clean published view instead of the working file.
- 2
vendor request system
Portal that lets event designers source vendors, automatically send and receive quotes, and create a robust vendor database.
- 3
guest roster + Attendee management portal
Portal that streamlines guest registration, including arrival information, activity choices, dietary restrictions, and more, and allows both event team and client to update this information.
- 4
vendor document parser
Documents with key information, such as F&B menus, are often shared as PDFs and have to be manually inputted. Tool to gather and upload relevant information to portal.
the result
diagnostic
Interviews with every function, live walkthroughs of real deals, and thousands of emails and dozens of client surveys read. Hours verified with each person.
roadmap
Every initiative sized in hours and dollars, ranked by impact and effort, with a build order and ship months.
in build
The budget engine already runs on a real Marco budget. Realized hours land as waves ship.
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