Why the best events feel small

Every event organizer eventually faces the same temptation: get bigger.

More attendees, more sponsors, more revenue, more square footage. The math looks great — until you realize the math being optimized is the wrong math.

Here’s the math we run instead.

The conversation density problem

In a 50-person room, you can have a real conversation with 6–8 people. In a 500-person room, you’ll talk to maybe 12 — and the conversations will be 30 seconds long. The marginal value of each additional attendee, after a certain point, is negative for the people already there.

This is why our golf tournaments stay deliberately small. The Gratitude Invitational caps the field. The BeaUTAHful Invitational is invitation-only and themed. Burning Questions runs in a single restaurant.

Could we double the size and double the revenue? Sure. We’d also halve the relationships. And the relationships are the entire point.

The sponsor return rate as a forcing function

There’s a metric I watch more than headcount: sponsor return rate. The BeaUTAHful Invitational runs at 85% — meaning the vast majority of sponsors come back the following year.

Sponsors come back when the room delivers what was promised. They come back when they had four conversations they couldn’t have had any other way. They don’t come back because the room got bigger. They come back because the room stayed right.

Right-sized is the default we should be designing toward. Bigger is what happens when you’ve forgotten what the event is actually for.

This is a placeholder essay. More writing on the philosophy of small-by-design events lives in Brian’s Substack.