MBiz | Spring 2021

the stage but now the government says we can’t even have five people. So we’re going to set up a stage in their boardroom and still do the catering order,” she says. “The key is flexibility and diversity. You better be able to step outside the service box and work with your client to find a unique solution.” Having the appropriate food and drink at your house while you take in a virtual event can go a long way towards making it all seem normal. Well, normalish. Harder will make sure her team delivers food, such as light snacks, including charcuterie boards and fruit bowls, before the event goes live. “If a client has an event at 3 p.m., our delivery window is 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and with refrigeration, we know how long we have. If it’s a hot meal, we have to double the number of drivers and shorten the delivery window to 40 minutes,” she says. Harder says the MET team will continue to build relationships with its clients during the pandemic with the hope that they will continue when the world returns to normal. “The MET is a 100-year-old building. The best way to experience it is to be inside,” she says. Over the next 12 to 24 months, Borsa believes most large-scale events will be a hybrid of in-person and virtual. “It’s going to take a while for people to feel comfortable going back into a large meeting environment. You have to be sensitive to that,” he says. “We’re going to see hybrids in some way for a minimum of five years. They’ll slowly tail off but they’re not going away any time soon.” ■

Encore Canada has been offering webcasting services for more than a decade but there was never a great deal of demand for it — until March 2020. “Now it’s our No. 1 line of revenue,” says Tom Borsa, Winnipeg-based director of sales and business development at Encore. It’s still not nearly enough to make up for the loss of its traditional business due to the widespread restrictions in Winnipeg and other cities but Encore is making the best of a bad situation. In fact, Borsa says there are a number of advantages that virtual events have over in-person ones. For starters, you can cast a much wider net. “For a normal in-person meeting, the people you have in attendance are those who could get to it or who could afford to get to it. (With virtual), you’re living in a world without borders. You can bring in people on an international level as opposed to a local or regional level,” he said. “You can also get participation by people that you couldn’t have in an in-

person environment due to cost. This new affordability enables you to have a higher level of talent.” You can host an event for as little as a few thousand dollars all the way up to six figures. The bells and whistles can include building stages in multiple cities to enable keynote speakers across the country to address your group, and those speeches can be broadcast to a custom-built website with targeted branding and marketing. “It’s a very high level of production. It’s not at an Oscars level but it’s better than the Emmys,” Borsa says. The ever-changing restrictions from the province have forced the team at the Metropolitan Entertainment Centre to be nimble like never before. Janet Harder, general manager at the MET, a venue which can accommodate 1,000 guests, has one regular corporate client whose event had to be changed a number of times this year due to provincial restrictions. “We had five people who were going to use

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