Many of our clients who we organise conferences and events for find us online and we have to prove we up to the job without a face to face meeting.

You can get feel if a conference organiser knows their stuff by the questions we ask and our first-hand experience of similar events we have organised. It is a question of building trust. Take Darwin in California. Planning meetings for a leading international data integration software company. Travelling the world, racking up air miles. He does not have the in-house resources to cope with all the meeting programmes he plans. CL Events organises European conferences for him: securing venues, managing contracts, creating conference websites and building bespoke online conference registration systems, taking conference fees via credit card and BACS payments, managing meeting budgets, handling delegate enquiries and sorting the conference AV.

We’ve yet to personally meet Darwin.  Last year’s conference was in Istanbul, this year’s is in Budapest. Darwin’s in California. We are London based conference organisers. The distance makes no difference. We speak over the phone and meet online, working with his customers’ worldwide.

I am not saying that you don’t need face to face meetings. If I did I would be doing myself out of a job, but you can build effective working relationships remotely.