Marketing for SMEs: Dan Charles on Building an Event Marketing Pipeline That Runs Year-Round

Event businesses can look busy from the outside while carrying a serious pipeline problem underneath. When the team is flat out delivering events, marketing and follow-up often stop, only for the quiet period to arrive with few new opportunities in progress.

I spoke with Dan Charles, founder of Codarity, about how event businesses can reduce that feast-and-famine cycle. We covered long B2B sales cycles, the limits of referrals, the role of automation and why paid ads work better when the rest of the marketing infrastructure is already in place.

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Introduction

Jeremy: Dan, you have been in marketing for about 15 years and worked your way through a large agency before starting your own. How did that background shape what you do now?

Dan: I came from hospitality, where I was doing 90 to 100-hour weeks, and eventually burnt out. I was also making music and doing audio engineering, then got an entry-level role with a large agency in the UK.

Dan: At first, I was publishing around 100 small-business websites a night. I worked my way up over six or seven years until I was dealing with much larger clients, including some with annual budgets above a million.

Dan: The agency had a huge sales operation but very little project management. At one point I was trying to manage 70 or 80 substantial websites, some with thousands of products and custom requirements, while being interrupted constantly by people who needed answers.

Jeremy: You learn a lot in that environment, including the difference between managing a small campaign and a much larger one. It is never as simple as increasing the budget.

Dan: Exactly. A £1,000-a-month Google Ads campaign and a £50,000-a-month campaign have completely different levels of complexity. Back then, there was no artificial intelligence helping with the planning, so much of it lived in your head and in enormous spreadsheets.

From agency burnout to a specialised business

Jeremy: What happened when you left the agency?

Dan: I started freelancing. Friends and family sent me enough website work to cover the first month and a half, then networking and white-label agency partnerships gave me a more reliable base.

Dan: Part of my approach was a reaction to the churn-and-burn agency model I had experienced. I wanted to treat clients ethically, look after them properly and build relationships that lasted.

Jeremy: White labelling can also be a good way to learn. You get exposure to different clients and agencies while building a more regular income.

Dan: It helped me build a runway. I launched Codarity in 2019 as a broad agency serving clients across mortgages, finance, lead generation and other areas.

Dan: After several years, I realised we were reinventing the wheel for every client. It was difficult to scale while trying to be everything to everyone, so I looked at our strongest and longest-standing relationships. They were event businesses.

Dan: I already understood that sector because I had run events myself, from small local events with 50 or 60 people through to productions with thousands of attendees. Some early events lost money, but I learned, increased the capacity and eventually sold them out consistently.

Why event businesses fall into feast-and-famine cycles

Jeremy: When you spoke with vendors and other event businesses, what problem kept coming up?

Dan: They would have excellent seasons followed by seasons that consumed the profit they had made. A lot of them depended almost entirely on word of mouth.

Jeremy: Referrals can feel like a plan until you need to forecast them. Seasonality makes the problem worse because the team becomes busiest at the same time it needs to keep future work moving.

Dan: During busy periods, event teams are focused on delivery and logistics. They stop working the pipeline, marketing consistently and following up leads. When the season ends, they discover the pipeline has dried up and they are effectively starting again from zero.

Dan: Another ceiling is visibility. An event business may do excellent work and retain clients for years, but still miss major requests for proposals because the buyer never knew to include it on the shortlist.

Jeremy: That is an important distinction. You do not always know which opportunities you missed because you were invisible to the buyer.

Dan: Exactly. The business may have been able to serve that client better than the companies that were shortlisted, but it never got the chance to compete.

The four parts of an evergreen event marketing system

Jeremy: You developed the Evergreen Event Profit System around this problem. What are its main parts?

Dan: It has four pillars: authority, attraction, automation and architecture. Together, they create the infrastructure an event business needs to scale and compound its marketing rather than restarting every quarter.

Dan: Authority is about being trusted before the buyer speaks with you. Attraction is how you reach the right people. Automation keeps the relationship moving, while architecture gives you the tracking and attribution needed to understand what is creating pipeline.

Dan: Businesses do not necessarily need all four at once. One might already be strong at public relations, podcast appearances and other authority-building work, but lack the tracking to see what is producing opportunities. Another may have good proof but no reliable way to reach new buyers.

Jeremy: The parts need to support each other. That also explains why jumping straight into Google Ads management without fixing the surrounding issues can disappoint.

Dan: We often hear that a business tried Google Ads for three months and decided it did not work. The problem is that it treated one channel as a standalone experiment instead of building infrastructure that could improve and compound over time.

Automation matters when the sales cycle lasts nine months

Jeremy: What does automation look like in practice?

Dan: It can include a customer relationship management system, nurture sequences, artificial intelligence, lead scoring, filters and funnels. The aim is to keep building and progressing the pipeline while the team is busy delivering events.

Dan: No one clicks one ad and immediately decides to spend $250,000 on a conference. These decisions can take months, involve several stakeholders and move through a buying committee.

Dan: Some of the largest deals we see clients win began nine to 12 months earlier. Consistent follow-up keeps the business visible throughout that period rather than relying on the buyer to remember it at the right moment.

Jeremy: This is also why early campaign performance cannot always be judged only by immediate sales. The ads, follow-up and tracking need to reflect the real buying timeline.

Dan: Yes. Automation gives the team time back while making sure leads are not forgotten during operational crunch periods.

Jeremy: The same principle applies to the page people reach after clicking an ad. A focused landing page and properly configured tracking help turn interest into a measurable next step instead of leaving buyers to wander through a general website.

Small reach can still produce the right leads

Jeremy: You mentioned that your LinkedIn posts do not always receive much engagement, yet they still generate enquiries.

Dan: Yes. A post might receive only 150 impressions, then someone contacts me to say they saw it, liked it and want to talk.

Jeremy: I had a similar experience with someone who said she saw me all the time through LinkedIn, podcast clips and other content, even though we had not spoken for a while. That repeated visibility works.

Dan: For this type of business, it is not about getting hundreds of leads. The aim is to stay visible to a smaller number of right-fit buyers and give them enough evidence to trust you when the timing is right.

Jeremy: That is more useful than chasing engagement for its own sake. What matters is whether the activity contributes to real conversations and pipeline.

Why in-person events still have a distinct role

Jeremy: One of your posts said that nobody builds what the events industry builds. What did you mean by that?

Dan: No other industry brings people into a room to collaborate, communicate, socialise and share ideas in quite the same way. Events create real experiences and communities.

Dan: I think that becomes even more important as artificial intelligence makes online content easier to produce and harder to trust. People will continue to value experiences where they are physically present with each other.

Dan: Events also bring people together at a time when many people, especially younger generations, are experiencing loneliness and less social connection. That is one of the reasons I care about the sector.

What COVID taught Dan about client relationships

Jeremy: Codarity launched in 2019, just before COVID. How badly did it affect the business?

Dan: We lost about 60 per cent of our clients. We had clients in events, travel and other sectors that were heavily affected, and some event businesses had to cut 40 or 50 per cent of their staff.

Dan: We helped event clients move towards virtual and hybrid events because that was one of the few things they could do to keep operating. Some of those clients are still with us today.

Dan: I would not claim that we alone saved those businesses, but helping them make that pivot had a meaningful impact. It also reinforced the value of caring about the client’s outcome instead of treating the relationship as a short transaction.

Jeremy: That relationship mindset matters because this is ongoing work. There is little value in signing someone who is not a good fit when both sides may need to work together for years.

Diagnose the whole system before buying more traffic

Jeremy: What types of event companies does Codarity work best with now?

Dan: We generally work with established event businesses that have completed much of the groundwork but reached a plateau. Some have three, four or five agencies handling different channels, yet nothing joins up and each provider blames another when results slow down.

Dan: We begin with a detailed, paid assessment. It is not a basic audit or a tool-generated list of red flags. It is a diagnosis of the growth infrastructure and a 12-month roadmap showing what should be addressed and how it could be executed.

Dan: We might identify 20 possible issues but find that only five are constraining throughput. Simply spending more on ads is not always the answer.

Jeremy: I see the same issue in paid media. Ads often sit near the end of the process, after the offer, message, landing experience, tracking and sales follow-up have been considered. Our own online advertising results show why the work around the campaign can matter as much as the media buying itself.

Dan: Businesses often make random attempts at marketing, trying outbound for one quarter or moving to the next idea before the first one has been applied consistently. A channel can work, but not when the wider process is fragmented or abandoned too quickly.

Key takeaways for SME owners

• Do not wait for the quiet period to restart marketing. Keep future demand moving while the team is busy delivering current work.
• Build beyond referrals. Strong word of mouth is valuable, but it cannot be increased on demand or forecast reliably.
• Match follow-up to the real buying cycle. For high-value B2B work, the gap between first contact and a signed agreement may be nine to 12 months.
• Fix the system before increasing the media budget. Visibility, follow-up, landing pages, tracking and sales processes all affect what paid traffic can produce.
• Judge marketing by pipeline quality, not surface-level engagement. A small audience of relevant buyers can be more useful than large reach with no commercial intent.

Learn more at Codarity or connect with Dan Charles on LinkedIn.

This conversation was recorded for Marketing for SMEs with Jeremy Yang. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your preferred podcast app.