Exclusive: Dhruv Davar, CEO of Inextis Events On Completing 10 Years In The Industry

Dhruv Davar, CEO of Inextis Events recently completed a decade in the events industry.  Out of these 10 years two years were about battling covid.

Despite challenges galore, Davar has managed to pivot Inextis to a new highway of success. In a recent interview with BW Applause and Everything Experiential, Dhavar spoke about the journey and more.

Excerpts

After completing a decade in the event industry, when you look back, what all comes to your mind?

Whenever I start thinking about the journey, I remember my first event, GC Vadish, which was a huge event. I didn't have a team for that outdoor event. Massive things were happening and thousands of people were there.  We had a fire backstage and we put that out, and that's how the journey started. And then it just brings me back to the celebration on the day we finished ten years and we had more than 100 people turn up. The journey is all about people. It's all about who I've connected with and what we've been able to build in terms of people both internal and external.

How has the events industry changed in these ten years?

In my view, we are getting more organised and technology is coming in a big way. Clients are looking differently. We are no more taken for granted as far as the corporate world is concerned. All of that is really changing the quality of people that you have and that you hire.

Also, we're giving competition to some industries in which we were not able to compete a few years back. So things are changing in terms of being organised, being structured. Going global on such a big scale and adopting technology has been phenomenal too.

Technology is far superior today, if you look at exhibitions, people needed to travel for exhibitions across the world and there were a lot of costs that corporations incurred, now technology has changed all that.

What are the bigger challenges that you have seen which should be addressed to make the Indian event sector leverage its strength and the numbers?

The industry is not very old in that sense but it needs to make some concated efforts. In the last few years, some very serious efforts are being made in that space. Despite the fact that our MSME status is still pending.

In a country like India, a lack of infrastructure is a huge challenge to host a certain scale of events. Also, there is  need to attract younger talent from better colleges because the pay scales have improved massively.

After Covid-19 and everybody's seeing the industry surviving, you know, we had done an industry report which states that about 20 lakh people are directly and indirectly working in the event sector. Especially weddings have become such a big thing in the last eight to ten years. The government will have no option but to support us sooner or later.

Are we witnessing a substantial increase in experiential spending or are the brands going to get a little bit conservative on the spending?

In fact, they are cutting money from traditional advertising and giving it to us (experiential). I don't think there will be an agency today that’s not been doing good work consistently and would have not beaten their pre-covid numbers by 30 per cent to 50 per cent. For all of us 2022  has been fabulous.

We've all been saying that nothing can replace the in-person experience. As of now, I don't see any downside. I am only seeing an upside right now, especially in the IP space. That's going to be a big boom for us as an industry.

It's a landmark for an event company to complete a decade in business and do well. So what is your vision for Inextis from here?

We are going global soon and we are about to launch an office globally. Inextis has done a lot of corporate events for which we won more than 50 awards. We are also leveraging our technology, which is the other company that I started, Virtual Console.

The 11th year is the most exciting because my calendar is not talking about pitches and projects, but it's talking about launches that are planned, which are new business verticals. So it's a super exciting time.