die in 2008 beim Umsatz zwischen 50 und 60 Million lagen und in 2009 etwas 70 Millionen erreichen werden, wenn es nur beim organischen Wachstum bleibt. In besseren Börsenzeiten wäre damit auch Starcite ein heißer IPO-Kandidat, da er die Latte von einer viertel Milliarde Marktkapitalisierung überschreiten dürfte:
To plan big meetings, firms turn to software to cut costs
By Dave Copeland
Globe Correspondent / March 2, 2009
Email| Print| Single Page| Yahoo! Buzz| ShareThisText size – + Last year, two separate offices of Boston Capital Group started making plans for a meeting at an undisclosed European city. Unbeknownst to each other, the offices had begun negotiating for meeting space with the same hotel.
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When the glitch was discovered, the company was looking at two contracts with a 12,000 euro difference in the rate being quoted. The company finalized the lower offer, but it's a discrepancy that may have never been caught if the company hadn't used StarCite, a Web-based platform that aims to cut costs and eliminate inefficiencies for meeting planners.
"It works for us on three levels," said Corry Leigh, global meetings manager for Boston Capital, which has 3,900 employees spread across 66 offices in 38 countries and for two years has been using StarCite to plan internal meetings and meetings with clients. "It increases efficiency, it lowers costs, and it lowers risk . . . we've seen tangible cost savings."
The average firm spends between 1 and 3 percent of its revenue on meetings - everything from the quick, local client meeting to the big trade show - according to StarCite, based in Philadelphia and founded 10 years ago.
Kevin Young, the company's vice president of marketing, likens what StarCite does for meeting planners to what one-stop travel sites like Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity do for leisure travelers.
"Meeting spending, and finding a way to control it, has always been seen as the last frontier for the travel industry," Young said.
And given the economic recession, more companies than ever are looking to reduce travel expenses. The privately held firm does not disclose revenue figures, but said it had double-digit revenue growth in 2008 and fourth-quarter bookings that were 40 percent higher than in the third quarter.
"Companies still need to meet with clients, but they need to be more efficient in doing so," Young said.
StarCite said it has more than 400 customers, mostly meeting planners like Leigh. Clients are linked through StarCite to 93,000 service providers around the world: hotels, convention centers, and other destinations. Using software developed by the company, a planner can issue requests for proposals and track the progress of contracts. The software also produces itemized reports to show how money budgeted for meetings is being spent.
"When you book travel, its fairly straightforward - you can track costs with a few airlines and a few hotels," Young said. "But meetings are different. You often have different procedures between different departments in the same company, and it's hard to see if they money is being spent well."
Such systems, however, may have shortcomings, particularly when they're used to plan bigger meetings, said Fay Beauchine, president of the events group at Carlson Marketing. The Minneapolis firm has been planning meetings and events for seven decades.
Beauchine said booking meetings through a website eliminates opportunities for meeting planners to negotiate. For bigger events, she said, "You have to pick up the phone."
"Ultimately, this is a people business," Beauchine said. "It boils down to the relationships you have. With the more complex meetings, it's never black and white - a computer can't negotiate, so once you're quoted a price, that's the price you're stuck with."
But according to Boston Capital, StarCite has not only made shopping for meeting space more competitive for the company, it has helped eliminate oversight problems within the company.
"We didn't have procedures in place that were being consistently followed in each of our offices," Leigh said of the firm's meeting planning before it started using StarCite. "We also didn't have a centralized database of service providers we could go to for comparisons."
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